[14] There were no appropriations for these purposes prior to 1822.
[15] This sum was contained in bills which were passed over the President's veto and included the first appropriation for the St. Clair Flats.
CHAPTER XI.
THE OUTBREAK OF THE REBELLION—NO COMPROMISE OF CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.
The news of the election of Abraham Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States—through strictly constitutional methods, by a large majority of the electoral vote and by a plurality of over half a million in the popular vote—was received with cheering and expressions of joy in many of the Southern cities. The men who exulted there were those who believed that with this pretext sectional passion could be kindled into instant rebellion, and they at once set about the work of consummating disunion before the close of the term of the traitorous and imbecile administration of James Buchanan. On Nov. 12, 1860, South Carolina ordered the election of a convention to take the formal step of secession, and the other cotton States promptly followed its example. Congress met on the 3d of December, and listened to a message from President Buchanan, in which he said: "After much serious reflection I have arrived at the conclusion that no power to coerce into submission a State which is attempting to withdraw, or has actually withdrawn, from the confederacy, has been delegated to Congress or to any other department of the Federal government. It is manifest upon an inspection of the constitution that this is not among the specific and enumerated powers granted to Congress; and it is equally apparent that its exercise is not 'necessary and proper for carrying into execution' any one of these powers." On December 20 South Carolina adopted its ordinance of secession. Mississippi did likewise on Jan. 9, 1861, Florida on January 10, Alabama on January 11, Georgia on January 18, Louisiana on January 26, and Texas on February 1. On Feb. 4, 1861, a convention of delegates from the seceding States met in the city of Montgomery and proceeded to form and organize the "Southern Confederacy." These events were attended by popular demonstrations throughout the South, in which the Union was denounced with unstinted bitterness and its power defied with the utmost audacity, and by the active drilling of the local militia and the organization of large bodies of armed men. More than all this, the officers of the United States in that section abandoned their positions, and sub-treasuries, post-offices, large sums of money, arsenals, arms, ammunition, fortifications, and vessels of the United States were seized in all the leading cities of the South, and used to prepare for war upon the power from which they had been stolen. The value of the government property thus confiscated by the rebels before the nation fired a shot was not less than $30,000,000. On Jan. 5, 1861, the United States steamer Star of the West was fired upon in the harbor of Charleston and driven out to sea, and within that month a bloodless siege of Fort McRae at Pensacola compelled its surrender to rebel forces by a United States garrison. Amid these events the traitors in Buchanan's Cabinet boldly resigned their portfolios, and Southern Congressmen with insolent words left their seats at the capitol "to join their States." The President himself was fitly described by Henry Winter Davis as "standing paralyzed and stupefied amid the crash of the falling republic, still muttering, 'Not in my time; not in my time; after me the deluge.'"
There were three ways of meeting these overt acts of high treason, namely: (1.) Submitting, either by sympathy and connivance, by frank surrender, or by an equally effective supineness. (2.) Meekly offering to rampant rebellion the bribe of fresh concessions to slavery. (3.) Treating armed secession as treason and its promoters as traitors, and dealing with it and them as such. The first method did not lack for supporters outside of the South. Thousands of Northern Democrats justified secession and promised the cotton States support. Their papers predicted that in case of war "it would be fought in the North,"[A] that "no Democrat would be found to raise an arm against his brethren of the South,"[16] and that "if troops should be raised in the North to march against the people of the South, a fire in the rear would be opened upon such troops which would either stop their march altogether or wonderfully accelerate it."[17] The Mayor of the great city of New York suggested in his annual message that that metropolis might well consider if the time did not seem to be at hand when it could profitably throw off allegiance to the United States and erect itself into "a free city." In public meetings and in party conventions like utterances were heard and applauded, all justifying the declaration of Lawrence M. Keitt in the city of Charleston that "there are a million of Democrats in the North who, when the Black Republicans attempt to march upon the South, will be found a wall of fire in their front." These sympathizers with rebellion were reinforced by the holders of anti-coercion theories, by commercial timidity, and—most unexpectedly—by some Republican sentiment in favor of permitting peaceful separation rather than facing civil war. This sentiment was fortunately short-lived and not cowardly in its origin, but it found an advocate in, and was given public expression by, the most influential Republican journalist of that period, Horace Greeley, and it did much to encourage rebel arrogance and to distract the national councils. But that was the most numerous class which comprised the men who proposed to meet actual civil war with servile tenders to traitors in arms of new guarantees for slavery and with humble petitions for their acceptance. With the meeting of Congress in December, 1860, these gentlemen became the conspicuous figures at Washington, and for three months labored industriously upon compromise schemes, every one of which was, in its essence, a proposition that Freedom should do homage to Slavery, and that the verdict of the people at the polls should be shamefully reversed to placate men who had deliberately plotted treason, and who again and again rejected with frank contempt offers of "conciliation." There were some who co-operated in these movements for the sake of gaining time and keeping the border States out of rebellion until Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated, but the great source of the compromise clamor of that winter was either some feeling of friendliness to the slave power or moral flaccidity.
It need not be said that Mr. Chandler was not found in either of these classes. For three years he had regarded this crisis as imminent. He did not believe that the South would now abandon its cherished dream of independent empire for any compromise. He did not propose to shrink back one inch before armed rebellion or to surrender one iota of principle to traitorous threats. He went to Washington determined to maintain the supremacy of the government at every cost, to listen to no plans of concession, to offer to disunionists only the alternative of obedience to the constitution or the penalties of treason, and to labor incessantly to stir into indignant action the slumbering sentiment of nationality in the hearts of the Northern people. It is in such hours that men of his indomitable stamp step to the front, and he became at once a pioneer leader of that uncompromising and tireless spirit which was the citadel of the Union cause. He spoke but rarely on political questions during the last session of the Thirty-sixth Congress, but was active in all the Republican consultations of that eventful period. In them he steadfastly opposed any policy that savored of bending to or temporizing with rebellion, and in the face of not a little Republican demoralization urged that the crisis should be met with the spirit of Jackson and of Cromwell. Speaking of this session he afterward said: "If I could have had my way, when treason was proclaimed on the floor of the Senate the traitor would never have gone free from the capitol." With the Southern leaders he was frank in his denunciations of their course and plans. In a chance conversation at this time with the craftiest of their number, Slidell of Louisiana, he asked how the pending struggle would end, and Slidell replied, "Oh, we will all go out, and the Union will be broken up."
"And what are you going to do with the mouth of the Mississippi?" said Mr. Chandler.