Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs, Vol. 1

by George S. Boutwell

XXIV THE PEACE CONVENTION OF 1861

In the month of January, 1861, the State of Virginia invited the States to send delegates to a congress or convention to be held in the city of Washington. The call implied that the Union was a confederation of States as distinguished from an independent and supreme and sovereign government, set up and maintained by the people of the whole country, except as the States were made the servants of the nation for certain specified purposes. There was hesitation on the part of Massachusetts, and some of the States of the North declined to respond to the call. After delay, Governor Andrew appointed John Z. Goodrich, Charles Allen, George S. Boutwell, T. P. Chandler, F. B. Crowninshield, J. M. Forbes, and Richard P. Waters as commissioners to the convention.

The meeting was held on the 6th of February in Willard's Hall, in the city of Washington. The door upon the street was closed, and the delegates were admitted from Willard's Hotel through a side door, cut for the purpose. The entrance was guarded by a messenger, and only members were admitted. There were no reporters, but Mr. Chittenden, of Vermont, made notes from which he prepared a volume that was published, but not until several years after the congress had ceased to exist. A few of the members furnished him with reports of their speeches, but not always in the language used at the time of delivery. My memory of what was said by Mr. Chase and Mr. Frelinghuysen did not correspond with the Chittenden Report. As the Convention had been in session several days when the Massachusetts delegation appeared, we were assigned to seats that were remote from the chair.

The convention was composed of three classes of men. Secessionists, led by John Tyler, the president of the convention, Seddon of Virginia, and Davis and Ruffin of North Carolina; border State men from Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Kentucky, who had faith in differing degrees that the Union might be saved, and war averted; and radical men who had no faith that anything could be done by which the Union could be saved, except through war. Soon after my arrival in Washington, I called on a Sunday upon Mr. Seddon. We had a free conversation. He said:

"It is of no use for us to attempt to deceive each other. You have one form of civilization, and we have another. You think yours is the best for you, and we think that ours is the best for us. But our culture is exhausting, and we must have new lands. One part of your people say that Congress shall exclude slavery from the territories, and another set of men say that it will be excluded by natural laws. Under either theory, somebody must go, and if we can't go with our slaves, we must go without them and our country will be given up to the negroes."

With the system of slavery, and in the absence of knowledge of the value of manufactured fertilizers, this was not an unreasonable view. Looking forward a hundred years and assuming the continued existence of slavery, there was no conclusive solution of the problem presented by Mr. Seddon. But he did not seem to consider that he was warring against nature as well as against the Union in his attempt to extend the area of slavery. His efforts, had they been successful, could only have postponed the crisis for a period not definite, but surely not of long duration. When the Confederacy was formed, Mr. Seddon became Secretary of War, and when the war was over, I recognized his friendship by securing the removal of his disabilities under the Fourteenth Amendment. Of the Secessionists, Mr. Seddon was the leading man upon the floor of the convention. It was manifest that he did not wish to secure the return of the seceded States. On one point he was anxious, and he did not attempt to disguise his purpose. He sought to secure from the convention, or if not from the convention, from the delegates from the Republican States, an assurance that in no event should there be war. One of the errors, indeed, the greatest error, was the failure of the Northern delegates to assert that in no event should the Union be dissolved except through the success of the South in arms. As far as I remember, this was not asserted by any one except myself.

Many expressed their fear of war and urged the convention to agree to some plan of settlement as the only means of averting war. Mr. Stockton, of New Jersey, went so far as to assert that in case of war the North would raise a regiment to aid the South as often as one was raised to assail it. Mr. Chase's remarks on the floor of the convention indicated a disposition to allow the South to go without resistance on our part, and in a conversation that I had with him as we walked one evening on Pennsylvania Avenue, toward Georgetown, he said:

"The thing to be done is to let the South go."

The interest of the convention centred upon the Committee of Thirteen, of which Mr. Guthrie was chairman. While the Committee of Thirteen was considering what should be done, Mr. John Z. Goodrich said that he had called upon Mr. Seward, and that Mr. Seward expressed a wish to see me. I had not the personal acquaintance of Mr. Seward, and Mr. Goodrich offered to take me to Mr. Seward's house. We called in the evening. His conversation and bearing were different from the conversation and bearing of most of the public men of the time. He spoke as though the subject of conversation was the chance of a client and the means of bringing him safely out of his perils. He spoke of the speech he had made in the Senate and said:

"My speech occupies the mind of the South for the present: then the proceedings of the Peace Congress will attract attention, and by and by we shall have the President's inaugural which will probably have a good influence."