It is now necessary to turn to what took place in Congress upon the recommendations of the President’s annual message. There were but two courses that Congress could pursue in this most extraordinary emergency. It must either preserve the Union by peaceful measures, or it must provide the President and his successor with the military force requisite to secure the execution of the laws and the supremacy of the Constitution. It was plain that in this, as in all similar cases of threatened revolt against the authority of a regular and long established government, mere inaction would be a fatal policy. After the State of South Carolina should have adopted an ordinance of secession, it would be too late to accomplish anything by merely arguing against the constitutional doctrine on which the asserted right of secession depended. That right was firmly held by multitudes of men in other States, and unless the Government of the United States should, by conciliatory measures, effectually disarm the disposition to exercise it, or effectually prepare to enforce the authority of the Constitution after secession had taken place, it was morally certain that the next two or three months would witness the formation of a Southern Confederacy of formidable strength. To the Executive Department it appropriately belonged to suggest the measures of conciliation needful for one of the alternatives of a sound and safe policy, and to execute the laws by all the means with which the Executive was then or might thereafter be clothed by the legislature. But the Executive could not in the smallest degree increase the means which existing laws had placed in his hands.
There was all the more reason for prompt action upon the President’s pacific recommendations, in the fact that the Government of the United States was wholly unprepared for a civil war. The nature of such a war, the character of the issue on which it would have to be waged, and the natural repugnance of the people of both sections to have such a calamity befall the country, all tended to enhance the duty of preventing it by timely concessions which would in no way impair the authority of the Constitution. It is true that potentially the Government had great resources in its war making power, its taxing power, and its control over the militia of the States. But inasmuch as a sudden resort to its ultimate powers, and to their plenary exercise was at this moment fraught with the greatest peril, there can be no question that the duty of conciliation stood first in the rank of moral and patriotic duties incumbent upon the representatives of the States and the people in the two houses of Congress. Next in the relative rank of these duties, to be performed, however, simultaneously with the first of them, stood the obligation to strengthen the hands of the Executive for the execution of the laws and the preservation of the public property in South Carolina, which was manifestly about to assume the attitude of an independent and foreign State. Whether either of these great duties was performed by the Congress, to which President Buchanan addressed his annual message and his subsequent appeals; what were the causes which produced a failure to meet the exigency; on whom rests the responsibility for that failure, and what were the consequences which it entailed, must now be considered. Mr. Buchanan has said that this Congress, beyond question, had it in its power to preserve the peace of the country and the integrity of the Union, and that it failed in this duty.[[102]] Is this a righteous judgment, which history ought to affirm?
In the Senate, after the reading of the President’s message, so much as related to the present agitated and distracted condition of the country and the grievances between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States, was referred to a select committee of thirteen members. The composition of this committee was most remarkable. It consisted of five Republicans: Senators Seward, Collamer, Wade, Doolittle, and Grimes, all of them from non-slaveholding States, and all prominent adherents of that “Chicago platform” on which Mr. Lincoln had been elected; five members from slaveholding States, Senators Powell, Hunter, Crittenden, Toombs, and Davis, and three “Northern Democrats,” Senators Douglas, Bigler, and Bright. It was understood that the three last named Senators were placed upon the committee to act as mediators between the Northern and the Southern sections which the ten other members represented. Under ordinary circumstances, a committee would have shaped its report by the decisions of a majority of its members, if they could not be unanimous. But at the first meeting of this committee, on the 21st of December, the day after that on which South Carolina passed her ordinance of secession, an extraordinary resolution was adopted, that no proposition should be reported as the decision of the committee, unless sustained by a majority of each of the classes comprising the committee, and it was defined that the Senators of the Republican party were to constitute one class, and Senators of the other parties were to constitute the other class. Thus, while there were eight members of the committee who might, by concurring in any proposition, ordinarily determine the action of the body, it could not become the decision of that body unless it was supported by the votes of a separate majority of the five Republican members. It was said that the reason for this restriction was that no report would be adopted by the Senate, unless it had been concurred in by at least a majority of the five Republican Senators. Valid or invalid as this reason may have been, the restriction is a remarkable proof of the sectional attitude of the Northern Senators, of the responsibility which they assumed, and of the willingness of the majority of the Southern Senators to have the Republican members of the committee exercise such a power and bear such a responsibility. The sequel will show how a committee thus composed and thus tied down was likely to act.
On the 22d, Mr. Crittenden, of Kentucky, a Senator whose name will be forever venerated for the patriotic part which he took throughout the proceedings of this Congress, submitted to the committee a “Joint Resolution,” which he had already offered in the Senate, and which became known as “the Crittenden Compromise.” It proposed certain amendments of the Constitution which would reconcile the conflicting claims of the North and the South, by yielding to the South the right to take slaves into the Territories south of the parallel of 36° 30´, and excluding slavery from all the Territories north of that line: with the further provision that when any Territory north or south of that line, within such boundaries as Congress might prescribe, should contain a population requisite for a member of Congress, it should be admitted into the Union as a State with or without slavery, as the State constitution adopted by the people might provide. When it is considered that the people of the slaveholding States claimed that the Supreme Court of the United States had already decided that slaves might be taken as property into any Territory and be there held as property, under a constitutional right resulting from the common ownership of the Territories by the States composing the Union, the “Crittenden Compromise,” if accepted, would be a sacrifice by the South with which the North might well be content. Whatever were the technical reasons which could be alleged to show that the Supreme Court had not made a determination of this question that was binding as a judicial decision, it was nevertheless true that a majority of the judges had affirmed in their several opinions the claim of every Southern slaveholder to carry his slaves into the Territories of the United States and to hold them there as property, until the formation of a State constitution. President Buchanan always regarded the case of “Dred Scott” as a judicial decision of this constitutional question. But whether it was so or not, the claim had long been asserted and was still asserted by the people of the Southern States; and if it was still open as a judicial question, as the Republican party contended, and if it could be resisted as a political claim by one section of the Union, it was equally open to the other section to treat it as a political controversy, which required to be disposed of by mutual concession between the slaveholding and the non-slaveholding States. The Republican party, confined exclusively to the non-slaveholding States, had, by their political platform in the late Presidential election, treated the action of the Supreme Court as a nullity, and had affirmed as a cardinal doctrine of their political creed that slavery should forever be excluded, by positive law, from all the Territories of the United States. The circumstances under which the Democratic party came into the political field in that election did not show that this party universally took the opposite side; but the votes of the Southern States in the election show most clearly that the people of those States still asserted the claim which they held to have been affirmed by the highest judicial tribunal in the country.
If, therefore, the Crittenden Compromise should be accepted by the South, it could not be denied that the South would sacrifice a claim which her people were practically unanimous in asserting as a right. On the other hand, what would the North lose by that compromise? It would lose nothing but an abstraction; for there was no Territory south of 36° 30´ but New Mexico, and into that Territory slave labor could never be profitably introduced, on account of the nature of the country.[[103]] While, therefore, the North would by this compromise yield nothing but a useless abstract concession to the South, and would gain, in fact, all the vast territory north of the compromise line as free territory forever, the Republican party would undoubtedly have to sacrifice the dogma of the “Chicago platform.” Whether that dogma ought to have been held paramount to every other consideration, is a question on which posterity will have to pass.
It was not yet too late to make this peace-offering to the South. Mr. Crittenden’s proposition was offered to the committee before any of the Government forts in the Southern States had been seized, when no State excepting South Carolina had “seceded,” and when no convention of the six other cotton States had assembled. Well might Mr. Buchanan say that the moment was propitious. Well might the patriotic Crittenden say, in addressing his colleagues on the committee: “The sacrifice to be made for its preservation (the Union) is comparatively worthless. Peace and harmony and union in a great nation were never purchased at so cheap a rate as we now have it in our power to do. It is a scruple only, a scruple of as little value as a barleycorn, that stands between us and peace, and reconciliation, and union; and we stand here pausing and hesitating about that little atom which is to be sacrificed.”
But this admirable and unselfish statesman was then to learn that there are states of men’s minds and characters when, fixed by the antecedents and committals of party, eloquence does not convince, facts are powerless; when the “barleycorn” becomes a great and important object; when mole hills become mountains, and when fear of constituents dominates over all other fears. Yet it cannot be doubted that there was really very little reason to fear that the constituencies of Northern Senators would hold them to a strict account for voting in favor of the Crittenden Compromise. Public feeling almost everywhere hailed it as the promise of peace and of the perpetuity of the Union. Nevertheless, all the five Republican members of the committee voted against it. This secured its rejection, under the resolution that had been adopted by the committee. But the singular fact is to be added that two Senators from the cotton States, Messrs. Davis, of Mississippi, and Toombs, of Georgia, also voted in the same way.
Readers will look in vain through Mr. Jefferson Davis’s recent work for a satisfactory explanation of this vote. But an explanation may perhaps be found in his whole course from the beginning of the session to his withdrawal from the Senate in the month of January, 1861, after the State of Mississippi had seceded. No impartial person can, it seems to me, read Mr. Davis’s own account of his public conduct at this crisis, without reaching the conclusion that whatever aid he may at any time have been disposed to render in the pacification of the country was at all times neutralized by his attitude in regard to the right of secession. From first to last he insisted that South Carolina, after she had adopted an ordinance of secession, should be regarded by the Government of the United States as an independent power. He was active in promoting the objects for which her commissioners came to Washington in the last week of December. He demanded that the troops of the United States should be withdrawn from the forts in Charleston harbor; that those forts should be surrendered to the paramount sovereignty of a State now become a foreign nation; and he scouted and ridiculed the idea that the Federal Executive could employ a military force in executing the laws of the United States within the dominion of a State which had withdrawn the powers that she had formerly deposited with the General Government. There was something singularly preposterous in this demand that a great government, which had subsisted for more than seventy years, and had always executed its laws against all combinations of an insurrectionary character, whether created by individuals or by State authority, should now “thaw and resolve itself into a dew,” before the all-consuming energy of a State ordinance; should accept the secession theory of the Constitution as the unquestionable law of the land, at the peril of encountering a civil war. How could measures of conciliation and concession be of any value, though tendered by the Federal Government, if that Government was in the same breath to admit that it had no constitutional power to enforce its authority if the offer of conciliation and concession should be rejected? Yet Mr. Davis’s ground of quarrel with President Buchanan was that he would not admit the right of secession. He could not either persuade or drive the President into that admission; and surely there can be no stronger proof of the integrity, fidelity and firmness of the President than this one fact affords.
Mr. Davis takes credit to himself and other Southern Senators for having intervened to prevent the authorities of South Carolina from making any attack upon the forts, so that a civil war might not be precipitated while measures for the settlement of the sectional difficulties were pending. No one need deny that those Senators are entitled to all the credit that justly belongs to such efforts. But why were those efforts made, and by what were they all along accompanied? They were made in order that there might be no bloodshed brought about, which would cause the other cotton States to recoil from the support of South Carolina in her assertion of the right of secession; and they were always accompanied by the demand that the Federal Government should permit the peaceable secession of any State, even to the extent of refraining from enforcing its laws and from holding its property within the dominions of any State that should choose to secede. This idea of peaceable secession, and all that it comprehended, was founded on the wild expectation that the two classes of States, slaveholding and non-slaveholding, after an experimental trial of separate confederacies, would find some system of union, some basis of reconstruction, other than the basis of the Constitution of the United States. Whatever claims of statesmanship may belong to those who entertained this chimerical project, they could hardly press it upon others as a reason for treating the Constitution of the United States as a system of government confessedly destitute of any authority or power to execute its own laws or to retain its own existence. But this is just what Mr. Davis denounced President Buchanan for not admitting; and he therefore, to the extent of his influence, counteracted the President’s great object of isolating the State of South Carolina by measures that would quiet the agitation in other slaveholding States, and at the same time would prepare the necessary means for executing the laws of the United States within the limits of that one State, in case she should adopt an ordinance of secession.
On the other hand, the Republican Senators on the Committee of Thirteen who voted against the Crittenden Compromise had no such policy to actuate them as that which governed Mr. Davis. They had no reason for refusing their aid to the President that could be founded on any difference of opinion as to the constitutional duty of the Executive. They knew that he was asking for means to uphold the authority of the Constitution in South Carolina, at the same time that he was urging measures which would prevent other States from joining her in the secession movement. What explanation of their conduct is possible and will leave to them the acquittal of patriotic purposes, I am not aware. But the fact is, that at no time during the session did a single Republican Senator, in any form whatever, give his vote or his influence for the Crittenden Compromise, or for any other measure that would strengthen the hands of the President either in maintaining peace or in executing the laws of the United States. Whether the spirit of party led them to refuse all aid to an outgoing President; whether they did not believe that there would be any necessity for a resort to arms; whether they did not choose, from sectional animosity, to abate anything from the “Chicago platform;” whatever was the governing motive for their inaction, it never can be said that they were not seasonably warned by the President that a policy of inaction would be fatal. That policy not only crippled him, but it crippled his successor. When Mr. Lincoln came into office, seven States had already seceded, and not a single law had been put upon the statute book which would enable the Executive to meet such a condition of the Union.