Twenty Years of Congress, Vol. 1 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

While the Secession leaders were engaged in their schemes for the disruption of the National Government and the formation of a new confederacy, Congress was employing every effort to arrest the Disunion tendency by making new concessions, and offering new guaranties to the offended power of the South. If the wild precipitation of the Southern leaders must be condemned, the compromising course of the majority in each branch of Congress will not escape censure,—censure for misjudgment, not for wrong intention. The anxiety in both Senate and House to do something which should allay the excitement in the slave-holding section served only to develop and increase its exasperation and its resolution. A man is never so aggressively bold as when he finds his opponent afraid of him; and the efforts, however well meant, of the National Congress in the winter of 1860-61 undoubtedly impressed the South with a still further conviction of the timidity of the North, and with a certainty that the new confederacy would be able to organize without resistance, and to dissolve the Union without war.

COMMITTEES OF CONCILIATION.

Congress had no sooner convened in December, 1860, and received the message of Mr. Buchanan, with its elaborate argument that the National Government possessed no power to coerce a State, than in each branch special committees of conciliation were appointed. They were not so termed in the resolutions of the Senate and House, but their mission was solely one of conciliation. They were charged with the duty of giving extraordinary assurances that Slavery was not to be disturbed, and of devising measures which might persuade Southern men against the rashness on which they seemed bent. In the Senate they raised a committee of thirteen, representing the number of the original States of the Union. In the House the committee was composed of thirty-three members, representing the number of States then existing. In the Senate, Mr. Powell of Kentucky was chairman of the committee of thirteen, which was composed of seven Democrats, five Republicans, and the venerable Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky, who belonged to neither party. It contained the most eminent men in the Senate of all shades of political opinion. In the House, Thomas Corwin was made chairman, with a majority of Republicans of the more conservative type, a minority of Democrats, and Mr. Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, who held a position similar to that occupied by Mr. Crittenden in the Senate.

The Senate committee promptly disagreed, and before the close of December reported to the Senate their inability to come to any conclusion. The committee of thirty-three was more fortunate, or perhaps unfortunate, in being able to arrive at a series of conclusions which tended only to lower the tone of Northern opinion without in the least degree appeasing the wrath of the South. The record of that committee is one which cannot be reviewed with pride or satisfaction by any citizen of a State that was loyal to the Union. Every form of compromise which could be suggested, every concession of Northern prejudice and every surrender of Northern pride, was urged upon the committee. The measures proposed to the committee by members of the House were very numerous, and those suggested by the members of the committee themselves seemed designed to meet every complaint made by the most extreme Southern agitators. The propositions submitted would in the aggregate fill a large volume, but a selection from the mass will indicate the spirit which had taken possession of Congress.

Mr. Corwin of Ohio wished a declaration from Congress that it was "highly inexpedient to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia unless with the consent of the States of Maryland and Virginia." Mr. Winter Davis suggested the Congress should request the States to revise their statutes with a view to repeal all personal-liberty bills, and further that the Fugitive-slave Law be so amended as to secure trial by jury to the fugitive slave, not in the free State where he was arrested, but in the slave State to which he might be taken. Mr. Morrill of Vermont offered a resolution declaring that all accessions of foreign territory shall hereafter be made by treaty stipulation, and that no treaty shall be ratified until it had received the legislative assent of two-thirds of all the States of the Union, and that neither Congress nor any Territorial Legislature shall pass any law establishing or prohibiting slavery in any Territory thus acquired until it shall have sufficient population to entitle it to admission to the Union. Mr. Houston of Alabama urged the restitution of the Missouri line of 36° 30´. There was in the judgment of many Southern men a better opportunity to effect an adjustment on this line of partition than upon any other basis that had been suggested. But the plea carried with it a national guaranty and protection of slavery on the southern side of the line, and its effect would inevitably have been in a few years to divide the Republic from ocean to ocean. Mr. Taylor of Louisiana wanted the Constitution so amended that the rights of the slave-holder in the Territories could be guarantied, and further amended so that no person, "unless he was of the Caucasian race and of pure and unmixed blood," should ever be allowed to vote for any officer of the National Government.

PROPOSITIONS OF COMPROMISE.

Mr. Charles Francis Adams proposed that the Constitution of the United States be so amended that no subsequent amendment thereto, "having for its object any interference with slavery, shall originate with any State that does not recognize that relation within its own limits, or shall be valid without the assent of every one of the States composing the Union." No Southern man, during the long agitation of the slavery questions extending from 1820 to 1860, had ever submitted so extreme a proposition as that of Mr. Adams. The most precious muniment of personal liberty never had such deep embedment in the organic law of the Republic as Mr. Adams now proposed for the protection of slavery. The well-grounded jealousy and fear of the smaller States had originally secured a provision that their right to equal representation in the Senate should never be taken from them even by an amendment of the Constitution. Mr. Adams now proposed to give an equal safeguard and protection to the institution of slavery. Yet the proposition was opposed by only three members of the committee of thirty-three,—Mason W. Tappan of New Hampshire, Cadwallader C. Washburn of Wisconsin, and William Kellogg of Illinois.

After a consideration of the whole subject, the majority of the committee made a report embodying nearly every objectionable proposition which had been submitted. The report included a resolution asking the States to repeal all their personal-liberty bills, in order that the recapture and return of fugitive slaves should in no degree be obstructed. It included an amendment to the Constitution as proposed by Mr. Adams. It offered to admit New Mexico, which then embraced Arizona, immediately, with its slave-code as adopted by the Territorial Legislature,—thus confirming and assuring its permanent character as a slave State. It proposed to amend the Fugitive-slave Law by providing that the right to freedom of an alleged fugitive should be tried in the slave State from which he was accused of fleeing, rather than in the free State where he was seized. It proposed, according to the demand of Mr. Toombs, that a law should be enacted in which all offenses against slave property by persons fleeing to other States should be tried where the offense was committed, making the slave-code, in effect, the test of the criminality of the act,—an act which, in its essential character, might frequently be one of charity and good will.

These propositions had the precise effect which, in cooler moments, their authors would have anticipated. They humiliated the North without appeasing or satisfying the South. Five Southern members made a minority report in which still further concessions were demanded. They submitted what was known as the Crittenden Compromise, demanding six amendments to the Constitution for the avowed purpose of placing slavery under the guardianship and protection of the National Government, and, after the example of Mr. Adams's proposed amendment, intrenching the institution where agitation could not disturb it, where legislation could not affect it, where amendments to the Constitution would be powerless to touch it.

—The first amendment proposed that in "all the territory of the United States south of the old Missouri line, either now held or to be hereafter acquired, the slavery of the African race is recognized as existing, not to be interfered with by Congress, but to be protected as property by all the departments of the Territorial Government during its continuance."