The History of the Confederate War, Its Causes and Its Conduct, Volume 1 (of 2) / A Narrative and Critical History

by George Cary Eggleston

3. That Congress should not in any way forbid the traffic in slaves from one slave state to another.

4. That the United States should be liable for the value of any fugitive slave whose recapture should be prevented by force or by intimidation and that the county in which the force or intimidation had been used should be liable to the United States for the mulct.

There were other details which need not here be considered in view of the general absurdity of the proposal. Not even Andrew Johnson's plan, already set forth, embodied more conspicuous elements of impossibility. The Northern States would never have consented to these constitutional provisions. The Southern States would never have been satisfied with them, because they carried with them no effectual provision for their own enforcement. It was folly and futility, from beginning to end, but at any rate it was patriotic folly and country-loving futility. It represented the dominant desire of the people to find some basis of reconciliation upon which the crumbling foundations of the Union might be rebuilt and securely buttressed.

The proposal—absurd and impossible as it was—was strongly supported both in Congress and in the country. Mr. Pugh of Ohio expressed in the Senate the opinion that it would command the support of nearly every state in the Union, and he pointed out the fact that no other proposal ever submitted to Congress had been supported by the petitions of so great a multitude of citizens. The conservative newspaper press passionately urged its adoption, declaring it to be a measure which would completely disarm the disunion sentiment on both sides, and suggesting to Mr. Seward that one word from him in its behalf would make a final end of the fearful threat of war which overshadowed the country.

But all these urgings were founded upon neglect to consider the all-controlling fact that the conflict between slavery and anti-slavery had become actually irrepressible, with the added element of what Charles Sumner called a "sacred animosity."

There was an active, aggressive, anti-slavery minority at the North whose members cared not one pin-point's worth for the Union except in so far as they hoped to use its power for the abolition of slavery in any way and upon any terms that might be available. They had already declared their hostility to the Constitution, and the insertion of Mr. Crittenden's amendments into that document would have served only to intensify their hatred of it and to stimulate their purpose to be rid of it. On the other hand there was an active and ceaselessly aggressive pro-slavery party at the South whose members were resolutely bent upon the destruction of the Union in order that a new Republic might be founded with African slavery as its corner stone.

Between these two radical parties there could be no peace and no neutral ground upon which to negotiate a peace. Each held the Union in contempt—the one because the Constitution protected slavery, the other because it did not adequately protect that institution. Each was ready to sacrifice the Union if by such sacrifice it might achieve its cherished purposes. The one had decried the Union and its Constitution as "a league with death and a covenant with hell" but now clung to it as a power that might be conveniently used for the accomplishment of cherished purposes. The other had despaired of its hope of using the Federal power further for its own ends. The Southern extremists wished to destroy the Union in order that its power might not be used for the extirpation of slavery; the Northern extremists, who had formerly been equally willing to "let the Union slide," were now eager for its preservation in order that its tremendous potentialities of force and compulsion might be employed in behalf of that extirpation of slavery for which alone they cared.

Neither of these extreme parties in the least degree sympathized with any effort to preserve the Union for its own sake by measures of compromise and reconciliation. The Northern radicals wanted the South to secede in order that military force might be employed for the compulsory abolition of slavery. The Southern radicals wanted the Union dissolved in order that slavery might be no further interfered with.

Neither at the North nor at the South were the radicals even yet in a majority. But in both sections they held a sort of balance of power and in both they were in effect dominant.

Under such conditions, with a conflict so truly and hopelessly irrepressible confronting the country, what conceivable hope was there of a peaceful adjustment by means of Mr. Crittenden's resolutions, or by any other means that patriotic ingenuity might devise?