Not only is it manifest that the Crittenden proposition was reasonable and proper in itself, but there is high authority for saying that it ought to have been embraced by every Republican Senator. While it was pending before the Committee of Thirteen, General Duff Green, a prominent citizen of Mississippi, visited Mr. Lincoln, the President-elect, at his home in Springfield, Illinois. Mr. Green took with him a copy of Mr. Crittenden’s resolutions, and asked Mr. Lincoln’s opinion of them. The substance of what Mr. Lincoln said was reported on the 28th of December to President Buchanan, in the following note:
[GENERAL DUFF GREEN TO PRESIDENT BUCHANAN.]
Springfield, Ill., December 28, 1860.
Dear Sir:—
I have had a long and interesting conversation with Mr. Lincoln. I brought with me a copy of the resolutions submitted by Mr. Crittenden, which he read over several times, and said that he believed that the adoption of the line proposed would quiet, for the present, the agitation of the slavery question, but believed it would be renewed by the seizure and attempted annexation of Mexico. He said that the real question at issue between the North and the South was slavery “propagandism,” and that upon that issue the Republican party was opposed to the South, and that he was with his own party; that he had been elected by that party, and intended to sustain his party in good faith; but added, that the question on the amendments to the Constitution and the questions submitted by Mr. Crittenden belonged to the people and States in legislatures or conventions, and that he would be inclined not only to acquiesce, but to give full force and effect to their will thus expressed. Seeing that he was embarrassed by his sense of duty to his party, I suggested that he might so frame a letter to me as to refer the measures for the preservation of the Union to the action of the people in the several States, and he promised to prepare a letter, giving me his views, by 9 a.m. to-morrow. If his letter be satisfactory, its purport will be communicated to you by telegraph.
Yours truly,
Duff Green.
I know of no evidence that Mr. Lincoln prepared the letter which he promised. No account of it appears to have reached Mr. Buchanan by telegraph or otherwise. It is probable that Mr. Lincoln, feeling more strongly the embarrassment arising from his party relations, reconsidered his determination, and excused himself to General Green. But what his opinion was is sufficiently proved by the note which General Green dispatched from Springfield, and which must have reached Mr. Buchanan at about the time when the committee of thirteen made their report to the Senate that they were unable to agree upon any general plan of adjustment of the sectional difficulties. This report was made on the 31st of December.
The last ten days of the year were thus suffered to elapse without anything being done to arrest the rising tide of secession in the seven cotton States. Most of these States had suspended or delayed their action until it could be known whether there was to be any concession made by the Republican party as represented in Congress. They now rapidly accomplished their secession measures. The conventions of Florida on the 7th of January, Mississippi on the 9th, Alabama on the 11th, Georgia on the 19th, Louisiana on the 25th, and Texas on the 5th of February, adopted ordinances of secession by great majorities. These ordinances were followed by a general seizure of the public property of the United States within the limits of those States, after the example of South Carolina.
Among the discouraging influences which now operated with a double mischief to counteract the efforts of those who aimed to confine secession to the State of South Carolina, must be mentioned the course of one of the most prominent papers of the North. No journal had exercised a greater power in promoting the election of Mr. Lincoln upon the “Chicago platform” than the New York Tribune. It was universally and justly regarded as a representative of a large section of the Republican party. Its founder and chief editor, Horace Greeley, was a man of singular mould. Beginning life as a journeyman printer, he learned in the practice of type-setting the compass and power of the English language. In the course of a long experience as a public writer, he acquired a style of much energy, and of singular directness. But, without a regular education and the mental discipline which it gives, he never learned to take a comprehensive and statesmanlike view of public questions. His impulses, feelings, and sympathies were on the side of humanity and the progress of mankind. But these generous and noble qualities were unbalanced by a sense of the restraints which the fundamental political conditions of the American Union imposed upon philanthropic action. He was, therefore, almost incapable of appreciating the moral foundations on which the Union was laid by the Constitution of the United States. He felt deeply the inherent wrong of African slavery, but he could not see, or did not care to see, that the Union of slaveholding and non-slaveholding States under one system of government for national purposes was caused by public necessities that justified its original formation, and that continued to make its preservation the highest of civil obligations. He did not, like many of the anti-slavery agitators, renounce the whole of the Constitution. But while he was willing that the North should enjoy its benefits, he was ever ready to assail those provisions, however deeply they were embedded in the basis of the Union, which recognized and to a qualified extent upheld the slavery existing under the local law of certain States. When, therefore, the long political conflict between the two sections of the country culminated in a condition of things which presented the alternatives of a peaceful separation of the slave and the free States, or a denial of the doctrine of secession and the consequences claimed for it, Mr. Greeley threw his personal weight, and the weight of his widely circulated journal, against the authority of the General Government to enforce in any way the obligations of the Constitution. He did not much concern himself with the distinction between coercing a State by force of arms from adopting an ordinance of secession, and coercing individuals after secession to obey the laws of the United States. From the period immediately before the election of Mr. Lincoln, after his election, and for a time after his inauguration, Mr. Greeley opposed all coercion of every kind. He maintained that the right of secession was the same as the right of revolution; and after the cotton States had formed their confederacy and adopted a provisional constitution, he tendered the aid of his journal to forward their views. He thus, on the one hand, joined his influence to the cry of the professed abolitionists who renounced the Constitution entirely, and on the other hand, contributed his powerful pen in encouraging the secessionists to persevere in separating their States from the Union.