Chapter XI…

Chapter XI

Congress during the Winter of 1860-61.--Leave-taking of Senators and Representatives.--South Carolina the First to secede.--Her Delegation in the House publish a Card withdrawing.--Other States follow.--Mr. Lamar of Mississippi.--Speeches of Seceding Senators. --Mr. Yulee and Mr. Mallory of Florida.--Mr. Clay and Mr. Fitzpatrick of Alabama.--Jefferson Davis.--His Distinction between Secession and Nullification.--Important Speech by Mr. Toombs.--He defines Conditions on which the Union might be allowed to survive.--Mr. Iverson's Speech.--Georgia Senators withdraw.--Insolent Speech of Mr. Slidell of Louisiana.--Mr. Judah P. Benjamin's Special Plea for his State.--His Doctrine of "A Sovereignty held in Trust."-- Same Argument of Mr. Yulee for his State.--Principle of State Sovereignty.--Disproved by the Treaty of 1783.--Notable Omission by Secession Senators.--Grievances not stated.--Secession Conventions in States.--Failure to state Justifying Grounds of Action.-- Confederate Government fail likewise to do it.--Contrast with the Course of the Colonies.--Congress had given no Cause.--Had not disturbed Slavery by Adverse Legislation.--List of Measures Favorable to Slavery.--Policy of Federal Government steadily in that Direction. --Mr. Davis quoted Menaces, not Acts.--Governing Class in the South. --Division of Society there.--Republic ruled by an Oligarchy.-- Overthrown by Election of Lincoln.--South refuses to acquiesce.

No feature of the extraordinary winter of 1860-61 is more singular in retrospect than the formal leave-taking of the Southern senators and representatives in their respective Houses. Members of the House from the seceding States, with few exceptions, refrained from individual addresses, either of farewell or defiance, but adopted a less demonstrative and more becoming mode. The South-Carolina representatives withdrew on the 24th of December (1860), in a brief card laid before the House by Speaker Pennington. They announced that, as the people of their State had "in their sovereign capacity resumed the powers delegated by them to the Federal Government of the United States," their "connection with the House of Representatives was thereby dissolved." They "desired to take leave of those with whom they had been associated in a common agency, with mutual regard and respect for the rights of each other." They "cherished the hope" that in future relations they might "better enjoy the peace and harmony essential to the happiness of a free and enlightened people."

SOUTHERN REPRESENTATIVES WITHDRAW.

Other delegations retired from the House in the order in which their States seceded. The leave-taking, in the main, was not undignified. There was no defiance, no indulgence of bravado. The members from Mississippi "regretted the necessity" which impelled their State to the course adopted, but declared that it met "their unqualified approval." The card was no doubt written by Mr. L. Q. C. Lamar, and accurately described his emotions. He stood firmly by his State in accordance with the political creed in which he had been reared, but looked back with tender regret to the Union whose destiny he had wished to share and under the protection of whose broader nationality he had hoped to live and die. A few Southern representatives marked their retirement by speeches bitterly reproaching the Federal Government, and bitterly accusing the Republican party; but the large majority confined themselves to the simpler form of the card.

Whether the ease and confidence as to the future which these Southern representatives manifested was really felt or only assumed, can never be known. They were all men of intelligence, some of them conspicuously able; and it seems incredible that they could have persuaded themselves that a great government could be dissolved without shock and without resistance. They took leave with no more formality than that with which a private gentleman, aggrieved by discourteous treatment, withdraws from a company in which he feels that he can no longer find enjoyment. Their confidence was based on the declarations and admissions of Mr. Buchanan's message; but they had, in effect, constructed that document themselves, and the slightest reflection should have warned them that, with the change of administration to occur in a few weeks, there would be a different understanding of Executive duty, and a different appeal to the reason of the South.

The senators from the seceding States were more outspoken than the representatives. They took the opportunity of their retirement to say many things which, even for their own personal fame, should have been left unsaid. A clear analysis of these harangues is impossible. They lacked the unity and directness of the simple notifications with which the seceding representatives had withdrawn from the House. The valedictories in the Senate were a singular compound of defiance and pity, of justification and recrimination. Some of the speeches have an insincere and mock-heroic tone to the reader twenty years after the event. They appear to be the expressions of men who talked for effect, and who professed themselves ready for a shock of arms which they believed would never come. But the majority of the utterances were by men who meant all they said; who, if they did not anticipate a bloody conflict, were yet prepared for it, and who were too deeply stirred by resentment and passion to give due heed to consequences.

On the 21st of January the senators from Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi formally withdrew from the Senate. Their speeches showed little variety of thought, consisting chiefly of indictments against the free States for placing the government under the control of an anti-slavery administration. Mr. Yulee was the first to speak. He solemnly announced to the Senate that "the State of Florida, though a convention of her people, had decided to recall the powers which she had delegated to the Federal Government, and to assume the full exercise of all her sovereign rights as an independent and separate community." At what particular period in the history of the American continent Florida had enjoyed "sovereign rights," by what process she had ever "delegated powers to the Federal Government," or at what time she had ever been "an independent and separate community," Mr. Yulee evidently preferred not to inform the Senate. His colleague, Mr. Mallory, implored the people of the North not to repeat the fatal folly of the Bourbons by imagining that "the South would submit to the degradation of a constrained existence under a violated Constitution." Mr. Mallory regarded the subjugation of the South by war as impossible. He warned the North that they were dealing with "a nation, and not with a faction."

Mr. Clement C. Clay, Jr., of Alabama, boasted that in the convention which adopted the Ordinance of Secession in his State there was not one friend of the Union; and he resented with indignation what he termed the offensive calumny of the Republicans in denouncing slavery and polygamy as twin relics of barbarism. The action of Alabama, he said, was not from "sudden, spasmodic, and violent passion." It was the conclusion her people had reached "after years of enmity, injustice, and injury at the hands of their Northern brethren." Instead of causing surprise, "it is rather matter of reproach that they have endured so much and so long, and have deferred this act of self-defense until to-day." Mr. Clay's speech was insulting and exasperating to the last degree. His colleague, Mr. Fitzpatrick, a man of better tempter, showed reserve and an indisposition to discuss the situation. He contented himself with the expression of a general concurrence in the views of Mr. Clay, adding no word of bitterness himself. He said that he "acknowledged loyalty to no other power than to the sovereign State of Alabama." But for the pressure brought upon him, Mr. Fitzpatrick would have been glad to retain his seat in the Senate and wait the course of events. He was not in his heart a Disunionist, as his colleague was. He would have accepted the nomination for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket with Douglas the preceding year, if the whole political power of the Cotton States had not opposed his wishes and forced him into the support of Breckinridge.

VALEDICTORY OF JEFFERSON DAVIS.

Jefferson Davis expressed his concurrence in the action of the people of Mississippi. He believed that action was necessary and proper, but would "have felt himself equally bound if his belief had been otherwise." He presented an analysis of the difference between the remedies of nullification and secession. Nullification was a remedy inside of the Union; secession a remedy outside. He expressed himself as against the theory of nullification, and explained that, so far from being identified with secession, the two are antagonistic principles. Mr. Calhoun's mistake, according to Mr. Davis, was in trying to "nullify" the laws of the Union while continuing a member of it. He intimated that President Jackson would never have attempted to "execute the laws" in South Carolina as he did against the nullifiers in 1832, if the State had seceded, and that therefore his great example could not be quoted in favor of "coercion." It is not believed that Mr. Davis had the slightest authority for this aspersion upon the memory of Jackson. It seems rather to have been a disingenuous and unwarranted statement of the kind so plentifully used at the time for the purpose of "firing the Southern heart."

There had been an impression in the country that Mr. Davis was among the most reluctant of those who engaged in the secession movement; but in his speech he declared that he had conferred with the people of Mississippi before the step was taken, and counseled them to the course which they had adopted. This declaration was a great surprise to Northern Democrats, among whom Mr. Davis had many friends. For several years he had been growing in favor with a powerful element in the Democracy of the free States, and, but for the exasperating quarrel of 1860, he might have been selected as the Presidential candidate of his party. No man gave up more than Mr. Davis in joining the revolt against the Union. In his farewell words to the Senate, there was a tone of moderation and dignity not unmixed with regretful and tender emotions. There was also apparent a spirit of confidence and defiance. He evidently had full faith that he was going forth to victory and to power.

Mr. Toombs of Georgia did not take formal leave, but on the 7th of January delivered a speech which, though addressed to the Senate of the United States, was apparently intended to influence public sentiment in Georgia, where there was an uncomfortable halting in the progress of secession. The speech had special interest, not alone from Mr. Toombs's well-known ability, but because it was the only presentation of the conditions on which the scheme of Disunion might be arrested, and the Cotton States held fast in their loyalty to the government,--conditions which, in the language of Mr. Toombs, would "restore fraternity and peace and unity to all of us." It was not believed that Mr. Toombs had the faintest expectation that his proposition would receive favorable consideration in the free States. His point would be fully gained by showing that the free States would not accept conditions which Georgia had the right to exact as the basis of her remaining in the Union. Once firmly persuaded that she was deprived of her constitutional rights, Georgia could the more easily be led or forced into secession.

The first condition prescribed by Mr. Toombs was, that in all the territory owned or to be acquired by the United States, slave property should be securely protected until the period of the formation of a State government, when the people could determine the question for themselves. The second condition was, that property in slaves should be entitled to the same protection from the Government of the United States in all its departments everywhere, which is extended to other property, provided that there should be no interference with the liberty of a State to prohibit or establish slavery within its limits. The third condition was, that persons committing crimes against slave property in one State, and fleeing to another, should be delivered up in the same manner as persons committing crimes against other forms of property, and that the laws of the State from which such persons flee should be the test of the criminality of the act. The fourth condition was, that fugitive slaves should be surrendered under the Act of 1850 without being entitled to a writ of habeas corpus, or trial by jury, or other obstructions in the States to which they might flee. The fifth and last demand was, that Congress should pass efficient laws for the punishment of all persons in any of the States who should in any manner aid or abet invasion or insurrection in any other State, or commit any other act against the law of nations tending to disturb the tranquility of the people or government of any other State. Without the concession of these points Mr. Toombs said the Union could not be maintained. If some satisfactory arrangement should not be made, he was for immediate action. "We are," he said, "as ready to fight now as we ever shall be. I will have equality or war." He denounced Mr. Lincoln as "an enemy to the human race, deserving the execration of all mankind."

GEORGIA SENATORS WITHDRAW.

Three weeks later the Georgia senators withdrew. Georgia had on the 19th of January, after much dragooning, passed the Ordinance of Secession, and on the 28th, Mr. Alfred Iverson, the colleague of Mr. Toombs, communicated the fact to the Senate in a highly inflammatory speech. He proclaimed that Georgia was the sixth State to secede, that a seventh was about to follow, and that "a confederacy of their own would soon be established." Provision would be made "for the admission of other States," and Mr. Iverson assured the Senate that within a few months "all the slave-holding States of the late confederacy of the United States will be united together in a bond of union far more homogenous, and therefore more stable, than the one now being dissolved." His boasting was unrestrained, but his conception of the contest which he and his associates were inviting was pitiably inadequate. "Your conquest," said he, addressing the Union senators, "will cost you a hundred thousand lives and a hundred millions of dollars."

The conclusion of Mr. Iverson's harangue disclosed his fear that after all Georgia might prefer the old Union. "For myself," said he, "unless my opinions greatly change, I shall never consent to the reconstruction of the Federal Union. The Rubicon is passed, and with my consent shall never be recrossed." But these bold declarations were materially qualified by Mr. Iverson when he reflected on the powerful minority of Union men in Georgia, and the general feeling in that State against a conflict with the National Government. "In this sentiment," said he, "I may be overruled by the people of my State and of the other Southern States." . . . "Nothing, however, will bring Georgia back except a full and explicit recognition and guaranty of the safety and protection of the institution of domestic slavery." This was the final indication of the original weakness of the secession cause in Georgia, and of the extraordinary means which were taken to impress the people of that State with the belief that secession would lead to reconstruction on a basis of more efficient protection to the South and greater strength to the whole Union.

On the 4th of February Mr. Slidell and Mr. Benjamin delivered their valedictories as senators from Louisiana. Mr. Slidell was aggressively insolent. He informed the Senate that if any steps should be taken to enforce the authority of the Union in the seceded States, they would be resisted. "You may," he said, "under color of enforcing your laws and collecting your revenue, blockade our ports. This will be war, and we shall meet it with different but equally efficient weapons. We will not permit the consumption or introduction of any of your manufactures. Every sea will swarm with our privateers, the volunteer militia of the ocean." He confidently expected foreign aid. "How long," he asked, "will the great naval powers of Europe permit you to impede their free intercourse with their best customers, and to stop the supply of the great staple which is the most important basis of their manufacturing industry?" "You were," said he, adding taunt to argument, "with all the wealth of this once great confederacy, but a fourth or fifth rate naval power. What will you be when emasculated by the withdrawal of fifteen States, and warred upon by them with active and inveterate hostility?"

In a tone of patronizing liberality, Mr. Slidell gave assurance that the new confederacy would recognize the rights of the inhabitants of the valley of the Mississippi and its tributaries to free navigation, and would guarantee to them "a free interchange of agricultural production without impost, and the free transit from foreign countries of every species of merchandise, subjected only to such regulations as may be necessary for a protection of the revenue system which we may establish." Had Mr. Slidell been less inspired by insolence, and more largely endowed with wisdom, he would have remembered that when the Union contained but six millions of people, they were willing to fight any one of three great European powers for freedom of access to the sea for the inhabitants of the valley of the Mississippi, and that it was from the first a physical impossibility to close it or in any way restrict it against the rights of the North-West. The people of that section, even without the prestige of the national flag, were immeasurably stronger than the people of the South-West, and were, unaided, fully competent to fight their way to the ocean over any obstacles which the powers behind Mr. Slidell could interpose. In the mere matching of local strength, it was sheer folly for the States of the lower Mississippi to attempt to control the mouth of that river.

SPEECHES OF BENJAMIN AND SLIDELL.

Mr. Judah P. Benjamin spoke in a tone of moderation as contrasted with the offensive dictation of Mr. Slidell. He devoted himself mainly to answering an argument which came instinctively to every man's mind, and which bore with particular severity upon the action of Louisiana. Mr. Benjamin brought his eminent legal ability to the discussion, but failed even to satisfy himself. The State of Louisiana was formed from territory which had been bought and paid for by the United States out of the common treasury of the whole people. Whatever specious plea might be made for the independent and separate sovereignty of the old thirteen States, the argument could not apply to Louisiana. No one could maintain that Louisiana had ever enjoyed a separate sovereignty of any kind, nominal or real. She had been originally owned by France, had been sold to Spain, had been sold back again to France, and had been bought by the United States. These sales had been made without protest from any one, and the title conferred at each transfer was undisputed, the sovereignty of the purchasing power undeniable.

Confronting these facts, and realizing the difficulty they presented, Mr. Benjamin was reduced to desperate straits for argument. "Without entering into the details of the negotiation," he said, "the archives of our State Department show the fact to be that although the domain, the public lands and other property of France in the ceded province, were conveyed by absolute title to the United States, the sovereignty was not conveyed otherwise than in trust." This peculiar statement of a sovereignty that was "conveyed in trust" Mr. Benjamin attempted to sustain by quoting the clause in the treaty which gave the right of the people of Louisiana to be incorporated into the Union "on terms of equality with the other States." From this he argued that the sovereignty of the Territory of Louisiana held in trust by the Federal Government, and conveyed to the State of Louisiana on her admission to the Union, was necessarily greater than the National sovereignty. Indeed, Mr. Benjamin recognized no "Nation" in the United States and no real sovereignty in the General Government which was but the agent of the sovereign States. It properly and logically followed, according to Mr. Benjamin, that the "sovereignty held in trust," might, when conferred, be immediately and rightfully employed to destroy the life of the trustee. The United States might or might not admit Louisiana to the Union, for the General Government was sole judge as to time and expediency--but when once admitted, the power of the State was greater than the power of the Government which permitted the State to come into existence. Such were the contradictions and absurdities which the creed of the Secessionists inevitably involved, and in which so clever a man as Mr. Benjamin was compelled to blunder and flounder.

Pursuing his argument, Mr. Benjamin wished to know whether those who asserted that Louisiana had been bought by the United States meant that the United States had the right based on that fact to sell Louisiana? He denied in every form that there had ever been such a purchase of Louisiana as carried with it the right of sale. "I deny," said he, "the fact on which the argument is founded. I deny that the Province of Louisiana or the people of Louisiana were ever conveyed to the United States for a price as property that could be bought or sold at will." However learned Mr. Benjamin may have been in the law, he was evidently ill informed as to the history of the transaction of which he spoke so confidently. He should have known that the United States, sixteen years after it bought Louisiana from France, actually sold or exchanged a large part of that province to the King of Spain as part of the consideration in the purchase of the Floridas. He should have known that at the time the Government of the United States disposed of a part of Louisiana, there was not an intelligent man in the world who did not recognize its right and power to dispose of the whole. The theory that the United States acquired a less degree of sovereignty over Louisiana than was held by France when she transferred it, or by Spain when she owned it, was never dreamed of when the negotiation was made. It was an afterthought on the part of the hard-pressed defenders of the right of secession. It was the ingenious but lame device of an able lawyer who undertook to defend what was indefensible.

Mr. Yulee of Florida had endeavored to make the same argument on behalf of his State, feeling the embarrassment as did Mr. Benjamin, and relying, as Mr. Benjamin did, upon the clause in the treaty with Spain entitling Florida to admission to the Union. Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Yulee should both have known that the guaranty which they quoted was nothing more and nothing less than the ordinary condition which every enlightened nation makes in parting with its subjects or citizens, that they shall enter into the new relation without discrimination against them and with no lower degree of civil rights than had already been enjoyed by those who form the nation to which they are about to be annexed. Louisiana, when she was transferred to the United States, received no further guaranty than Napoleon in effect gave to Spain at the treaty of San Ildefonso, or than the Spanish Bourbons had given to the French Bourbons in the treaty of 1763 at the close of the Seven Years' War. In each of the three transfers of the sovereignty of Louisiana, the same condition was perfectly understood as to the rights of the inhabitants. Mr. Benjamin drew the conclusion which was not only diametrically wrong in morals, but diametrically erroneous in logic. Instead of inferring that a State, situated as Louisiana was, should necessarily become greater than the power which purchased it, simply because other States in the Union which she joined had assumed such power, a discriminating mind of Mr. Benjamin's acuteness should have seen that the very position proved the reverse of what he stated, and demonstrated, in the absurdity of Louisiana's secession, the equal absurdity of the secession of South Carolina and Georgia.

THE ARGUMENT OF MR. BENJAMIN.

It seemed impossible for Mr. Benjamin or for any other leader of Southern opinion to argue the question of State rights fairly or dispassionately. They had been so persistently trained in the heresy that they could give no weight to the conclusive reasoning of the other side. The original thirteen, they averred, were "free, sovereign, and independent States," acknowledged to be such by the King of Great Britain in the Treaty of peace in 1783. The new States, so the argument ran, were all admitted to the Union of terms of equality with the old. Hence all were alike endowed with sovereignty. Even the historical part of this argument was strained and fallacious. Much was made in the South of Mr. Toombs's declaration that "the original thirteen" were as "independent of each other as Australia and Jamaica." So indeed they were as long as they remained British Colonies. Their only connection in that condition was in their common dependence on the Crown. But the first step towards independence of the Crown was to unite. From that day onward they were never separate. Nor did the King of Great Britain acknowledge the "independence and sovereignty" of the thirteen individual and separate States. The Treaty of peace declares that "His Majesty acknowledges the said United States [naming them] to be free, sovereign, and independent States."--not separately and individually, but the "said United States." The King then agrees that "the following are and shall be the boundaries of the said United States,"--proceeding to give, not the boundaries of each State, but the boundaries of the whole as one unit, one sovereignty, one nationality. Last of all, the commissioners who signed the treaty with the King's commissioner were not acting for the individual States, but for the United States. Three of them, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay, were from the North, and Henry Laurens from the South. The separate sovereignties whose existence was so persistently alleged by Mr. Benjamin and Mr. Toombs were not represented when independence was conceded. Mr. Benjamin's conclusion, therefore, was not only illogical, but was completely disproved by plain historical facts.

It seems never to have occurred to Mr. Benjamin, or to Mr. Yulee, or to the Texas senators, or to the Arkansas senators, that the money paid from a common treasury of the nation gave any claim to National sovereignty. Their philosophy seems to have been that the General Government had been paid in full by the privilege of nurturing new States, of improving their rivers and harbors, of building their fortifications, of protecting them in peace, of defending them in war. The privilege of leading the new communities through the condition of Territorial existence up to the full majesty of States, was, according to secession argument, sufficient compensation, and removed all shadow of the title or the sovereignty of the National Government, the moment the inhabitants thus benefitted announced their desire to form new connections. Louisiana had cost fifteen millions of dollars at a time when that was a vast sum of money. It had cost five millions of money and the surrender of a province, to purchase Florida, and nearly a hundred millions more to extinguish the Indian title, and make the State habitable for white men. Texas cost the National Treasury ninety millions of dollars in the war which was precipitated by her annexation, and ten millions more paid to her in 1850, in adjustment of her boundary trouble. All these States apparently regarded the tie that bound them to the National Government as in no degree mutual, as imposing no duty upon them. By some mysterious process still unexplained, the more they gained from connection with the National authority, the less was their obligation thereto, the more perfect their right to disregard and destroy the beneficent government which had created them and fostered them.

SOUTHERN GRIEVANCES NOT STATED.

In all the speeches delivered by the senators from the seceding States, there was no presentation of the grievances which, in their own minds, justified secession. This fact elicited less notice at the time than it calls forth in retrospect. Those senators held in their hands in the beginning, the fate of the secession movement. If they had advised the Southern States that it was wiser and better to abide in the Union, and at least to wait for some overt act of wrong against the slave States, the whole movement would have collapsed. But they evidently felt that this would be a shrinking and cowardly policy after the numerous manifestoes they had issued. South Carolina had taken the fatal step, and to fail in sustaining her would be to co-operate in crushing her. While these motives and aims are intelligible, it seems utterly incredible that not one of the senators gave a specification of the wrongs which led the South to her rash step. Mr. Toombs recounted the concessions on which the South would agree to remain; but these were new provisions and new conditions, never intended by the framers of the Federal Constitution; and they were abhorrent to the civilization of the nineteenth century.

Mr. Toombs, Mr. Jefferson Davis, and Mr. Benjamin were the three ablest senators who spoke in favor of secession. Not one of them deemed it necessary to justify his conduct by a recital of the grounds on which so momentous a step could bear the test of historic examination. They dealt wholly in generalities as to the past, and apparently based their action on something that was to happen in the future. Mr. John Slidell sought to give a strong reason for the movement, in the statement that, if Lincoln should be inaugurated with Southern assent, the 4th of March would witness, in various quarters, outbreaks among the slaves which, although they would be promptly suppressed, would carry ruin and devastation to many a Southern home. It was from Mr. Slidell that Mr. Buchanan received the information which induced him to dwell at length in his annual message on this painful feature of the situation. But it was probably an invention of Mr. Slidell's fertile brain--imposed upon the President and intended to influence public sentiment in the North. It was in flat contradiction of the general faith in the personal fealty of their slaves, so constantly boasted by the Southern men,--a faith abundantly justified by the subsequent fact that four years of war passed without a single attempt to servile insurrection. At the time of the John Brown disturbance the South resented the imputation of fear, made upon it by the North. If now the danger was especially imminent, Southern leaders were solely to blame. They would not accept the honorable assurance of the Republican party and of the President-elect that no interference with slavery in the States was designed. They insisted in all their public addresses that Mr. Lincoln was determined to uproot slavery everywhere, and they might well fear that these repeated declarations had been heard and might be accepted by their slaves.

The omission by individual senators to present the grievances which justified secession is perhaps less notable then the same omission by the conventions which ordained secession in the several States. South Carolina presented, as a special outrage, the enactment of personal-liberty bills in the free States, and yet, from the foundation of the Federal Government, she had probably never lost a slave in consequence of these enactments. In Georgia the attempt at justification reached the ludicrous when solemn charge was made that a bounty had been paid from the Federal Treasury to New-England fishermen. The tariff was complained of, the navigation laws were sneered at. But these were all public policies which had been in operation with Southern consent and largely with Southern support, throughout the existence of the Republic. When South Carolina attempted, somewhat after the illustrious model of the Declaration of Independence, to present justifying reasons for her course, the very authors of the document must have seen that it amounted only to a parody.

Finding no satisfactory exhibit of grievances, either in the speeches of senators or in the declarations of conventions, one naturally infers that the Confederate Government, when formally organized at Montgomery in February, must have given a full and lucid statement to the world of the reasons for this extraordinary movement. When our fathers were impelled to break their loyalty to the English king, and to establish an independent government, they declared in the very fore-front of the document which contained their reasons, that "when it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." They followed this assertion with an exhibit of causes which, in the judgment of the world, has been and ever will be, a complete justification of their revolutionary movement.

THOMAS JEFFERSON AND JEFFERSON DAVIS.

The Confederate Government saw fit to do nothing of the kind. Their Congress put forth no declaration or manifesto, and Jefferson Davis in his Inaugural as President utterly failed--did not even attempt--to enumerate the grounds of complaint upon which the destruction of the American Union was based. He said that "the declared compact of the Union from which we have withdrawn was to establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessing of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. And when, in the judgment of the sovereign States now composing this confederacy, it has been perverted from the purposes for which it was ordained, and ceases to answer the ends for which it was established, a peaceful appeal to the ballot-box declared, that, so far as they were concerned, the government created by that compact should cease to exist. In this they merely assert the right which the Declaration of Independence of 1776 defined to be inalienable." But in what manner, at what time, by what measure, "justice, domestic tranquillity, common defense, the general welfare," had been destroyed by the government of the Union, Mr. Jefferson Davis did not deign to inform the world to whose opinion he appealed.

Mr. Jefferson, in draughting the Declaration of Independence which Davis quotes as his model, said "the history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these States." What would have been thought of Mr. Jefferson if he had stopped there and adduced no instance and given no proof of his serious indictment against George III.? But Mr. Jefferson and his fellow-patriots in that great Act proceeded to submit their proof to the judgment of a candid world. They recited twenty-eight distinct charges of oppression and tyranny, depriving them of rights to which they were entitled as subjects of the Crown under the British Constitution. From that hour to this, there has been no disproval of the truth of these charges or of the righteousness of the resistance to which our forefathers resorted. It would have been well for the dignity of the Southern Confederacy in history if one of its many able men had placed on record, in an authentic form, the grounds upon which, and the grievances for which, destruction of the Union could be justified.

In his message to the Confederate Congress, Mr. Davis apparently attempted to cure the defects of his Inaugural address, and to give a list of measures which he declared to have been hostile to Southern interests. But it is to be observed that not one of these measures had been completed. They were merely menaced or foreshadowed. As matter of fact, emphasized by Mr. Buchanan in his message, and known to no one better than to Mr. Davis, not a single measure adverse to the interests of slavery had been passed by the Congress of the United States from the foundation of the government. If the Missouri Compromise of 1820 be alleged as an exception to this sweeping assertion, it must be remembered that that compromise was a Southern and not a Northern measure, and was a triumph of the pro-slavery members of Congress over the anti-slavery members; and that its constitutionality was upheld by the unanimous voice of the Cabinet in which Mr. Crawford of Georgia and Mr. Calhoun of South Carolina were leading members.

On the other hand, the policy of the government had been steadily in favor of slavery; and the measures of Congress which would strengthen it were not only numerous, but momentous in character. They are familiar to every one who knows the simplest elements of our national history. The acquisition of Louisiana, the purchase of Florida, the Mexican war, were all great national movements which resulted in strengthening the slave power. Every demand which the South made for protection had been conceded. More stringent provisions for the return of fugitive slaves were asked, and a law was enacted trampling under foot the very spirit of liberty, and putting in peril the freedom of men who were citizens of Northern States. The Missouri Compromise, passed with the consent and support of the South, was repealed by Southern dictation the moment its operation was found to be hostile to the spread of slavery. The rights of slavery in the Territories required judicial confirmation, and the Supreme Court complied by rendering the famous decision in the case of Dred Scott. Against all these guaranties and concessions for the support of slavery, Mr. Davis could quote, not anti-slavery aggressions which had been made, but only those which might be made in the future.

SOUTHERN RESISTANCE TO LAW.

This position disclosed the real though not the avowed cause of the secession movement. Its authors were not afraid of an immediate invasion of the rights of the slave-holder in the States, but they were conscious that the growth of the country, the progress of civilization, and the expansion of our population, were all hostile to their continued supremacy as the governing element in the Republic. The South was the only section in which there was distinctively a governing class. The slave-holders ruled their States more positively than ever the aristocratic classes ruled England. Besides the distinction of free and slave, or black and white, there was another line of demarcation between white men that was as absolute as the division between patrician and plebeian. The nobles of Poland who dictated the policy of the kingdom were as numerous in proportion to the whole population as the rich class of slave-holders whose decrees governed the policy of their States. It was, in short, an oligarchy which by its combined power ruled the Republic. No President of any party had ever been elected who was opposed to its supremacy. The political revolution of 1860 had given to the Republic an anti-slavery President, and the Southern men refused to accept the result. They had been too long accustomed to power to surrender it to an adverse majority, however lawful or constitutional that majority might be. They had been trained to lead and not to follow. They were not disciplined to submission. They had been so long in command that they had become incapable of obedience. Unwillingness to submit to Constitutional authority was the controlling consideration which drove the Southern States to the desperate design of a revolution, peaceful they hoped it would be, but to a revolution even if it should be one of blood.

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Chapter XII

Congress in the Winter of 1860-61.--The North offers Many Concessions to the South.--Spirit of Conciliation.--Committee of Thirteen in the Senate.--Committee of Thirty-three in the House.--Disagreement of Senate Committee.--Propositions submitted to House Committee.-- Thomas Corwin's Measure.--Henry Winter Davis.--Justin S. Morrill-- Mr. Houston of Alabama.--Constitutional Amendment proposed by Charles Francis Adams.--Report of the Committee of Thirty-three.-- Objectionable Measures proposed.--Minority Report by Southern Members.--The Crittenden Compromise proposed.--Details of that Compromise.--Mr. Adams's Double Change of Ground.--An Old Resolution of the Massachusetts Legislature.--Mr. Webster's Criticism Pertinent. --Various Minority Reports.--The California Members.--Washburn and Tappan.--Amendment to the Constitution passed by the House.--By the Senate also.--New Mexico.--The Fugitive-slave Law.--Mr. Clark of New Hampshire.--Peace Congress.--Invited by Virginia.--Assembles in Washington.--Peace Measures proposed.--They meet no Favor in Congress.--Territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada originated. --Prohibition of Slavery abandoned.--Republicans in Congress do not ask it.--Explanation required.--James S. Green of Missouri.-- His Character as a Debater.--Northern Republicans frightened at their own Success.--Anxious for a Compromise.--Dread of Disunion. --Northern Democrats.--Dangerous Course pursued by them.--General Demoralization of Northern Sentiment.

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 deg. 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."

--The second amendment declared that "Congress shall have no power to interfere with slavery even in those places under its exclusive jurisdiction in the slave States."

--The third amendment took away from Congress the exclusive jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, as guarantied in the Constitution, declaring that Congress should "never interfere with slavery in the District, except with the consent of Virginia and Maryland, so long as it exists in the State of Virginia or Maryland, nor without the consent of the inhabitants of the District, nor without just compensation for the slaves. Nor shall Congress prohibit officers of the General Government nor members of Congress from bringing with them their slaves to the District, holding them there during the time their duties may require them to remain, and afterwards taking them from the District."

--The fourth amendment prohibited Congress from interfering with the transportation of slaves from one State to another, or from one State to any Territory south of the Missouri line, whether that transportation be by land, by navigable river, or by the sea.

--The fifth amendment conferred upon Congress the power, and prescribed its duty, to provide for the payment to the owner of a fugitive slave his full value from the National Treasury, in all cases where the marshal was prevented from arresting said fugitive by violence or intimidation, or where the fugitive, after arrest, was rescued by force.

--The sixth amendment provided for a perpetual existence of the five amendments just quoted, by placing them beyond the power of the people to change or revise--declaring that "no future amendment to the Constitution shall ever be passed that shall affect any provision of the five amendments just recited; that the provision in the original Constitution which guaranties the count of three- fifths of the slaves in the basis of representation, shall never be changed by any amendment; that no amendment shall ever be made which alters or impairs the original provision for the recovery of fugitives from service; that no amendment shall be made that shall ever permit Congress to interfere in any way with slavery in the State where it may be permitted."

PROPOSITIONS OF COMPROMISE.

Before Mr. Corwin submitted his report, Mr. Charles Francis Adams appears to have become disgusted with his own proposition for the amendment of the Constitution. This disgust was caused by the refusal of the Southern members of the committee to agree to the declaration that "peaceful acquiescence in the election of the Chief Magistrate, accomplished in accordance with every legal and constitutional requirement, is the paramount duty of every good citizen of the United States." The proposition of Mr. Adams to this effect was amended by Mr. Millson of Virginia, who substituted "high and imperative" for "paramount." But even in this modified form, seven Southern members asked to be excused from voting upon it, and Mr. Adams seems wisely to have thought that "if there could not be agreement on a proposition so fundamental and essential as that, it was of no use to seek any remedy for the existence of evils by legislation of Congress." Mr. Adams, therefore, made a report dissenting from the committee, stating that he had changed his course, and now declined to recommend the very measures which he had in good faith offered. This was on the 14th of January.

On the 31st of January Mr. Adams changed his course again, and returned to the unqualified support of the measures proposed by the committee. In his speech of that date, he asked, addressing the South, "How stands the case, then? We offer to settle the question finally in all of the present territory that you claim, by giving you every chance of establishing Slavery that you have any right to require of us. You decline to take the offer because you fear it will do you no good. Slavery will not go there. Why require protection where you will have nothing to protect? . . . All you appear to desire it is for New Mexico. Nothing else is left. Yet you will not accept New Mexico at once, because ten years of experience have proved to you that protection has been of no use thus far." These are somewhat extraordinary words in 1861 from a man who in 1850 had, as a Conscience Whig, declined to support Mr. Webster for making in advance the same statements, and for submitting arguments that were substantially identical.

During the debate, in which Mr. Adams arraigned the Disunionists of the South with considerable power, he was somewhat embarrassed by a Southern member who quoted resolutions which Mr. Adams had introduced in the Massachusetts Legislature in 1844, and which had been passed by that body, respecting the annexation of Texas. He had declared therein, just as Josiah Quincy had declared with reference to the acquisition of Louisiana, "that the power to unite an independent foreign State with the United States is not among the powers delegated to the General Government by the Constitution of the United States." He declared, further, that "the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood and acceded to by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation; and that it is determined, as it doubts not other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth; and that the project of the annexation of Texas, unless resisted on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union." This resolution of Mr. Adams was unfortunate in every respect for his position in the debate on that day, since it really included and justified every constitutional heresy entertained by Mr. Calhoun, and claimed for the State of Massachusetts every power of secession or dissolution which was now asserted by the Southern States.

Mr. Webster, in one of his ablest speeches (in reply to Mr. Calhoun in February, 1833), devoted his great powers to demonstrating that the Constitution was not "a compact," and that the people of the States had not "acceded" to it. Mr. Adams had unfortunately used the two words which, according to Mr. Webster, belonged only to the lexicon of disloyalty. "If," said Mr. Webster, "in adopting the Constitution nothing was done but acceding to a compact, nothing would seem necessary in order to break it up but to secede from the same compact." "Accession," as a word applied to political association, implies coming into a league, treaty, or confederacy. "Secession" implied departing from such league or confederacy. Mr. Adams had further declared that the people of Massachusetts are "faithful to the compact according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them." But according to Mr. Webster, and in accordance with the principles absolutely essential to maintain a constitutional government, Massachusetts had no part or lot in deciding the question which Mr. Adams's resolution covered. If Massachusetts reserved to herself the right to determine the sense in which she understood her accession to the compact of the Federal Government, she gave full warrant to South Carolina to determine for herself the sense of the compact to which she acceded, and therefore justified the action of the Southern States. Whether Texas was constitutionally or unconstitutionally annexed to the Union was no more to be decided by Massachusetts than the constitutionality of the prohibition of Slavery north of the Missouri line was to be decided by South Carolina. The position of Mr. Adams in 1844 had therefore returned to plague its inventor in 1861, and in a certain sense to weaken the position of the loyal States.

REPORT OF COMPROMISE COMMITTEE.

Various reports were submitted by members of the minority, of no special significance, differing often on immaterial points. The members from California and Oregon who represented the Breckinridge party of the North, united in a recommendation for a general convention to be called under the authority of the Constitution, to propose such amendments as would heal all existing differences, and afford sufficient guaranties to the growing interests of the government and people. The only bold words spoken were in the able report by Cadwallader C. Washburn of Wisconsin and Mason W. Tappan of New Hampshire. They made an exhaustive analysis of the situation in plain language. They reviewed ably and conclusively the report made by Mr. Corwin for the majority of the committee, and spoke as became men who represented the justice and the power of a great Republic. They vindicated the conduct of the General Government, and showed that the Union was not to be preserved by compromises nor by sacrifice of principle. They regarded the discontent and hostility in the South as without just cause, and intimated that those States might purchase at a high price some valuable information to be learned only in the school of experience. They embodied their entire recommendations in a single resolution in which they declared that the provisions of the Constitution were ample for the preservation of the Union; that it needed to be obeyed rather than amended; and that "our extrication from present difficulties is to be looked for in efforts to preserve and protect the public property and enforce the laws, rather than in new guaranties for particular interests, or in compromises, or concessions to unreasonable demands."

When the report of the committee of thirty-three came before the House for action, the series of resolution were first tested by a motion to lay upon the table, which was defeated by a vote of nearly two to one; and after angry debate running through several days, the resolutions, which were only directory in their character, were adopted by a large majority. When the constitutional amendment was reached, Mr. Corwin substituted for that which was originally draughted by Mr. Adams, an amendment declaring that "no amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish, or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State." This was adopted by a vote of 133 to 65. It was numbered as the thirteenth amendment to the Federal Constitution, and would have made slavery perpetual in the United States, so far as any influence or power of the National Government could affect it. It intrenched slavery securely in the organic law of the land, and elevated the privilege of the slave-holder beyond that of the owner of any other species of property. It received the votes of a large number of Republicans who were then and afterwards prominent in the councils of the party. Among the most distinguished were Mr. Sherman of Ohio, Mr. Colfax, Mr. C. F. Adams, Mr. Howard of Michigan, Mr. Windom of Minnesota, and Messrs. Moorhead and McPherson of Pennsylvania. The sixty-five negative votes were all Republicans whom the excitement of the hour did not drag from their moorings, and many of whom have since done, as they had done before, signal service for their party and their country. Thaddeus Stevens was at their head, and he was sustained by the two Washburns, by Bingham of Ohio, by Roscoe Conkling, by Anson Burlingame, by Owen Lovejoy, by Marston and Tappan of New Hampshire, by Galusha A. Grow, by Reuben E. Fenton, and by others who, if less conspicuous, were not less deserving.

When the proposition reached the Senate, it was adopted by a vote of 24 to 12, precisely the requisite two-thirds. Among those who aided in carrying it were Hunter of Virginia, Nicholson of Tennessee, Sebastian of Arkansas, and Gwin of California, who soon after proceeded to join the Rebellion. Eight Republican senators, Anthony of Rhode Island, Baker of Oregon, Dixon and Foster of Connecticut, Grimes and Harlan of Iowa, Morrill of Maine, and Ten Eyck of New Jersey, voted in the affirmative. Only twelve out of twenty-five Republican senators voted in the negative. Mr. Seward, Mr. Fessenden, Mr. Collamer, and others among the weightiest Republican leaders are not recorded as voting. As pairs were not announced, it may be presumed that they consented to the passage of the amendment. Before the resolution could reach the States for concurrence, either by convention or Legislature, the evidences of Southern outbreak had so increased that all such efforts at conciliation were seen to be vain, and in the end they proved hurtful. Only two States, Maryland and Ohio, gave their assent to the amendment. In the New- England States it was rejected, and in many it was not acted upon. Whoever reads the thirteenth amendment to the Constitution as it now stands, and compares it with the one which was proposed by the Thirty-sixth Congress, will be struck with the rapid revolution of public sentiment, and will not be at a loss to draw some useful lessons as to the course of public opinion and the conduct of public men in times of high excitement.

THE CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE.

The propositions of the committee of thirty-three to admit New Mexico as a slave State, and to amend the Fugitive-slave Law, were both passed by the House, but were defeated or not acted upon in the Senate. In that body the efforts of the friends of conciliation were mainly confined to the Crittenden compromise which has already been outlined in the proceedings of the House. But for the eminent respectability of the venerable senator from Kentucky, his propositions would have had short consideration. They were of a character not to be entertained by a free people. They dealt wholly in the finding of new guaranties for slavery, without attempting to intimate the possible necessity of new guaranties for freedom. Perhaps the most vicious feature in this whole series of proposed amendments to the Constitution was the guaranty of slavery against the power of Congress in all territory of the United States south of 36 deg. 30'. This offered a premium upon the acquisition of territory, and was an encouragement to schemes of aggression against friendly powers south of the United States, which would always have had the sympathy and support of one-half the Union, and could hardly have been resisted by any moral power of the General Government. It would have opened anew the old struggle for equality between free States and slave States, and would in all probability have led the country to war within three years from its adoption,--war with Mexico for the border States of that Republic, war with Spain for the acquisition of Cuba. This would have followed as matter of policy with Southern leaders, whether they intended to abide in the Union, or whether they intended, at some more advantageous and opportune moment, to secede from it. If they concluded to remain, their political power in the National Government would have been greatly increased from the acquisition of new States. If they desired to secede, they would have acquired a much more formidable strength and vastly larger area by the addition of Southern territory to which the Crittenden propositions would not only have invited but driven them.

While these propositions were under discussion, Mr. Clark of New Hampshire offered as a substitute the resolution with which Messrs. Washburn and Tappan had closed their report in the House,--a resolution of which Mr. Clark was the author, and which he had previously submitted to the consideration of the Senate. The test question in the Senate was whether Mr. Clark's resolution should be substituted for the Crittenden proposition, and this was carried by a vote of 25 to 23. The twenty-five were all Republicans; the twenty-three were all Democrats, except Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky and Mr. Kennedy of Maryland, who had been supporters of Mr. Bell in the Presidential election. It is a fact worthy of note that six senators from the extreme Southern States sat in their seats and refused to vote on the proposition. Had they chosen they could have defeated the action. But they believed, with a certain consistency and wisdom, that no measure could be of value to the South unless it had the concurrence of senators from the North; and with this motive they imposed upon the Republicans of the Senate the responsibility of deciding the Crittenden proposition. It was matter of congratulation with Republicans who did not lose their judgment in that trying season, that the Senate stood firmly against the fatal compromise which was urged by so many strong influences. Much was forgiven for other unwise concessions, so long as this was definitely rejected.

PROPOSITIONS OF THE PEACE CONFERENCE.

Meanwhile a body of men had assembled in the National Capital upon the invitation of the State of Virginia, for the purpose of making an earnest effort to adjust the unhappy controversy. The Peace Congress, as it was termed, came together in the spirit in which the Constitution was originally formed. Its members professed, and no doubt felt, an earnest desire to afford to the slave-holding States, consistently with the principles of the Constitution, adequate guaranties for the security of their rights. Virginia's proposition was brought to the National Capital by Ex-President John Tyler, deputed by his State to that honorable duty. In response to the invitation twenty-one States, fourteen free and seven slave, had sent delegates, who assembled in Washington on the 4th of February, 1861. After remaining in session some three weeks, the Peace Congress submitted an article of amendment to the Constitution, contained in seven sections, making as many distinct propositions.

--The first section restored the line of the Missouri Compromise as it was before the repeal in 1854.

--The second provided that no further acquisition of territory should be made except by the consent of a majority of all the senators from the slave-holding States and a majority of all the senators from the free States.

--The third declared that no amendment to the Constitution shall be made interfering with Slavery in the States, nor shall Congress prohibit it in the District of Columbia, nor interfere with the inter-State slave-trade, nor place any higher rate of taxation on slaves than upon land. At the same time it abolished the slave- trade in the District of Columbia.

--The fourth provided that no construction of the Constitution shall prevent any of the States aiding, by appropriate legislation, in the arrest and delivery of fugitive slaves.

--The fifth forever prohibited the foreign slave-trade.

--The sixth declared that the amendments to the Constitution herein proposed shall not be abolished or changed without the consent of all the States.

--The seventh provided for the payment from the National Treasury for all fugitive slaves whose recapture is prevented by violence.

These propositions met with little favor in either branch of Congress. Mr. Crittenden, finding that he could not pass his own resolutions, endeavored to substitute these, but could induce only six senators to concur with him. In the House there was no action whatever upon the report. The venerable Ex-President was chosen to preside over the deliberations of the conference, but was understood not to approve the recommendations. Far as they went, they had not gone far enough to satisfy the demands of Virginia, and still less the demands of the States which had already seceded. It is a curious circumstance that one of the delegates from Pennsylvania, Mr. J. Henry Puleston, was not a citizen of the United States, but a subject of Queen Victoria, and is now (1884), and has been for several years, a member of the British Parliament.

To complete the anomalies and surprises of that session of Congress, it is necessary to recall the fact, that, with a Republican majority in both branches, Acts organizing the Territories of Colorado, Dakota, and Nevada were passed without containing a word of prohibition on the subject of slavery. From the day that the administration of Mr. Polk began its career of foreign acquisition, the question of slavery in the Territories had been a subject of controversy between political parties. When the Missouri Compromise was repealed, and the Territories of the United States north of the line of 36 deg. 30' were left without slavery inhibition or restriction, the agitation began which ended in the overthrow of the Democratic party and the election of Mr. Lincoln to the Presidency of the United States. It will therefore always remain as one of the singular contradictions in the political history of the country, that, after seven years of almost exclusive agitation on this one question, the Republicans, the first time they had the power as a distinctive political organization to enforce the cardinal article of their political creed, quietly and unanimously abandoned it. And the abandoned it without a word of explanation. Mr. Sumner and Mr. Wade and Mr. Chandler, the most radical men in the Senate on the Republican side, sat still and allowed the bill to be passed precisely as reported by James S. Green of Missouri, who had been the ablest defender of the Breckinridge Democracy in that body. In the House, Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, Mr. Owen Lovejoy, the Washburns, and all the other radical Republicans vouchsafed no word explanatory of this extraordinary change of position.

COLORADO, DAKOTA, AND NEVADA.

If it be said in defense of this course that all the Territories lay north of 36 deg. 30', and were therefore in no danger of slavery, it only introduces fresh embarrassment by discrediting the action of the Republican party in regard to Kansas, and discrediting the earnest and persistent action of the anti-slavery Whigs and Free- Soilers, who in 1848 successfully insisted upon embodying the Wilmot Proviso in the Act organizing the Territory of Oregon. Surely, if an anti-slavery restriction were needed for Oregon, it was needed for Dakota which lay in the same latitude. Beyond doubt, if the Territory of Kansas required a prohibition against slavery, the Territory of Colorado and the Territory of Nevada, which lay as far south, needed it also. To allege that they could secure the President's approval of the bills in the form in which they were passed, and that Mr. Buchanan would veto each and every one of them if an anti-slavery proviso were embodied, is to give but a poor excuse, for, five days after the bills received the Executive signature, Mr. Buchanan went out of office, and Abraham Lincoln was installed as President.

If, indeed, it be fairly and frankly admitted, as was the fact, that receding from the anti-slavery position was part of the conciliation policy of the hour, and that the Republicans did it the more readily because they had full faith that slavery never could secure a foothold in any of the Territories named, it must be likewise admitted that the Republican party took precisely the same ground held by Mr. Webster in 1850, and acted from precisely the same motives that inspired the 7th of March speech. Mr. Webster maintained for New Mexico only what Mr. Sumner now admitted for Colorado and Nevada. Mr. Webster acted from the same considerations that now influenced and controlled the judgment of Mr. Seward. As matter of historic justice, the Republicans who waived the anti- slavery restriction should at least have offered and recorded their apology for any animadversions they had made upon the course of Mr. Webster ten years before. Every prominent Republican senator who agreed in 1861 to abandon the principle of the Wilmot Proviso in organizing the Territories of Colorado and Nevada, had, in 1850, heaped reproach upon Mr. Webster for not insisting upon the same principle for the same territory. Between the words of Mr. Seward and Mr. Sumner in the one crisis and their votes in the other, there is a discrepancy for which it would have been well to leave on record an adequate explanation. The danger to the Union, in which they found a good reason for receding from the anti-slavery restriction on the Territories, had been cruelly denied to Mr. Webster as a justifying motive. They found in him only a guilty recreancy to sacred principle for the same act which in themselves was inspired by devotion to the Union.

It was certainly a day of triumph for Mr. Douglas. He was justified in his boast that, after all the bitter agitation which followed the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the Republicans adopted his principle and practically applied its provisions in the first Territory which they had the power to organize. Mr. Douglas had been deprived of his chairmanship of the Committee of Territories by the Southern leaders, and his place had been given to James S. Green of Missouri. His victory therefore was complete when Mr. Seward waived the anti-slavery guaranty on behalf of the Republicans, and when Mr. Green waived the pro-slavery guaranty on behalf of the Breckinridge Democracy. It was the apotheosis of Popular Sovereignty, and Mr. Douglas was pardonable even for an excessive display of self-gratulation over an event so suggestive and so instructive. Mr. Grow, the chairman of Territories in the House, frankly stated that he had agreed with Mr. Green, chairman of Territories in the Senate, that there should be no reference whatever to the question of slavery in any of the Territorial bills. It cannot be denied that this action of the Republican party was a severe reflection upon that prolonged agitation for prohibition of slavery in the Territories by Congressional enactment. A surrender of the principle with due explanation of the reasons, properly recorded for the instruction of those who should come after, would have left the Republican party in far better position than did the precipitate retreat which they made without a word of apology, without an attempt at justification.

If receding from the anti-slavery creed of the Republican party was intended as a conciliation to the South, the men who made the movement ought to have seen that it would prove ineffectual. The Republicans no more clearly perceived that they risked nothing on the question of slavery in organizing those Territories without restriction, than the Southern leaders perceived that they would gain nothing by it. In vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird. The South had realized their inability to compete with Northern emigration by their experience in attempting to wrest Kansas from the control of free labor. They were not to be deluded now by a nominal equality of rights in Territories where, in a long contest for supremacy, they were sure to be outnumbered, outvoted, and finally excluded by organic enactment. The political agitation and the sentimental feeling on this question were therefore exposed on both sides,--the North frankly confessing that they did not desire a Congressional restriction against slavery, and the South as frankly conceding that the demand they had so loudly made for admission to the Territories was really worth nothing to the institution of slavery. The whole controversy over the Territories, as remarked by a witty representative from the South, related to an imaginary negro in an impossible place.

James Stephens Green, who was so prominent in this legislation, who prepared and reported the bills, and who was followed by a unanimous Senate, terminated his public service on the day Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated. He was then but forty-four years of age, and had served only four years in the Senate. He died soon after. No man among his contemporaries had made so profound an impression in so short a time. He was a very strong debater. He had peers, but no master, in the Senate. Mr. Green on the one side and Mr. Fessenden on the other were the senators whom Douglas most disliked to meet, and who were the best fitted in readiness, in accuracy, in logic, to meet him. Douglas rarely had a debate with either in which he did not lose his temper, and to lose one's temper in debate is generally to lose one's cause. Green had done more than any other man in Missouri to break down the power of Thomas H. Benton as a leader of the Democracy. His arraignment of Benton before the people of Missouri in 1849, when he was but thirty-two years of age, was one of the most aggressive and successful warfares in our political annals. His premature death was a loss to the country. He was endowed with rare powers which, rightly directed, would have led him to eminence in the public service.

NORTHERN DEMORALIZATION.

It would be unjust to the senators and representatives in Congress to leave the impression that their unavailing efforts at conciliating the South were any thing more or less than a compliance with a popular demand which overspread the free States. As soon as the election was decided in favor of Mr. Lincoln, and the secession movement began to develop in the South, tens of thousands of those who had voted for the Republican candidates became affrighted at the result of their work. This was especially true in the Middle States, and to a very considerable extent in New England. Municipal elections throughout the North during the ensuing winter showed a great falling-off in Republican strength. There was, indeed, in every free State what might, in the political nomenclature of the day, be termed an utter demoralization of the Republican party. The Southern States were going farther than the people had believed was possible. The wolf which had been so long used to scare, seemed at last to have come. Disunion, which had been so much threatened and so little executed, seemed now to the vision of the multitude an accomplished fact,--a fact which inspired a large majority of the Northern people with a sentiment of terror, and imparted to their political faith an appearance of weakness and irresolution.

Meetings to save the Union upon the basis of surrender of principle were held throughout the free States, while a word of manly resistance to the aggressive disposition of the South, or in re-affirmation of principles so long contended for, met no popular response. Even in Boston, Wendell Phillips needed the protection of the police in returning to his home after one of his eloquent and defiant harangues, and George William Curtis was advised by the Republican mayor of Philadelphia that his appearance as a lecturer in that city would be extremely unwise. He had been engaged to speak on "The Policy of Honesty." But so great had been the change in popular feeling in a city which Mr. Lincoln had carried by a vast majority, that the owner of the hall in which Mr. Curtis was to appear, warned him that a riot was anticipated if he should speak. Its doors were closed against him. This was less than five weeks after Mr. Lincoln was elected, and the change of sentiment in Philadelphia was but an index to the change elsewhere in the North.

The South, meanwhile, had been encouraged in the work of secession by thousands of Democrats who did not desire or look for the dissolution of the Union, but wished to plot of secession to go far enough, and the danger to the Union to become just imminent enough, to destroy their political opponents. Men who afterwards attested their loyalty to the Union by their lives, took part in this dangerous scheme of encouraging a revolt which they could not repress. They apparently did not comprehend that lighted torches cannot be carried with safety through a magazine of powder; and, though they were innocent of intentional harm, they did much to increase an evil which was rapidly growing beyond all power of control. As already indicated, the position of President Buchanan and the doctrines of his message had aided in the development of this feeling in the North. It was further stimulated by the commercial correspondence between the two sections. The merchants and factors in the South did not as a class desire Disunion, and they were made to believe that the suppression of Abolitionism in the North would restore harmony and good feeling. Abolitionism was but another name for the Republican party, and in business circles in the free State that party had come to represent the source of all our trouble. These men did not yet measure the full scope of the combination against the Union, and persisted in believing that its worst enemies were in the North. The main result of these misconceptions was a steady and rapid growth of strength throughout the slave States in the movement for Secession.

ENACTMENT OF THE MORRILL TARIFF.

Fruitless and disappointing as were the proceedings of this session of Congress on the subjects which engrossed so large a share of public attention, a most important change was accomplished in the revenue laws,--a change equivalent to a revolution in the economic and financial system of the government. The withdrawal of the Southern senators and representatives left both branches of Congress under the control of the North, and by a considerable majority under the direction of the Republican party. In the preceding session of Congress the House, having a small Republican majority, had passed a bill advancing the rate of duties upon foreign importations. This action was not taken as an avowed movement for protection, but merely as a measure to increase the revenue. During Mr. Buchanan's entire term the receipts of the Treasury had been inadequate to the payment of the annual appropriations by Congress, and as a result the government had been steadily incurring debt at a rate which was afterwards found to affect the public credit at a critical juncture in our history. To check this increasing deficit the House insisted on a scale of duties that would yield a larger revenue, and on the 10th of May, 1860, passed the bill. In the Senate, then under the control of the Democratic party, with the South in the lead, the bill encountered opposition. Senators from the Cotton States thought they saw in it the hated principle of protection, and protection meant in their view, strength and prestige for the manufacturing States of the North. The bill had been prepared in committee and reported in the House by a New- England member, Mr. Morrill of Vermont, which of itself was sufficient in the eyes of many Southern men to determine its character and its fate.

Mr. Robert M. T. Hunter of Virginia was at the time Chairman of the Senate Committee of Finance. He was a man of sturdy common sense, slow in his methods, but strong and honest in his processes of reasoning. He advanced rapidly in public esteem, and in 1839, at thirty years of age, was chosen Speaker of the House of Representatives. He was a sympathizer with the South-Carolina extremists, and coalesced with the Whigs to defeat the regular Democrats who were sustaining the Administration of Mr. Van Buren. In 1847 Mr. Hunter was chosen senator from Virginia, and served continuously till the outbreak of the war. He was a conservative example of that class of border State Democrats who were blinded to all interests except those of slavery.

The true wealth of Virginia, in addition to her agriculture and in aid of it, lay in her vast deposits of coal and iron, in her extensive forests, in her unsurpassed water power. Her natural resources were beyond computation, and suggested for her a great career as a commercial and manufacturing State. Her rivers on the eastern slope connected her interior with the largest and finest harbor on the Atlantic coast of North America, and her jurisdiction extended over an empire beyond the Alleghanies. Her climate was salubrious, and so temperate as to forbid the plea always used in justification of negro slavery in the Cotton States, that the white man could not perform agricultural labor. A recognition of Virginia's true destiny would point to Northern alliances and Northern sympathies. Mr. Hunter's sympathies were by birth and rearing with the South. The alliances he sought looked towards the Gulf and not towards the Lakes. Any measure which was displeasing to South Carolina or Alabama was displeasing to Mr. Hunter, and he gave no heed to what might be the relations of Virginia with the New England, Middle, and Western States. He measured the policy of Virginia by the policy of States whose geographical position, whose soil, climate, products, and capacities were totally different from hers. By Mr. Hunter's policy, Virginia could sell only slaves to the South. A more enlightened view would have enabled Virginia to furnish a large proportion of the fabrics which the Southern States were compelled to purchase in communities far to the north of her. Mr. Hunter was no doubt entirely honest in this course. He was upright in all his personal and political relations, but he could not forget that he was born a Southern man and a slave-holder. He had a full measure of that pride in his State so deeply cherished by Virginians. At the outset of his public career he became associated with Mr. Calhoun, and early imbibed the doctrines of that illustrious senator, who seldom failed to fascinate the young men who fell within the sphere of his personal influence.

Mr. Hunter therefore naturally opposed the new tariff, and under his lead all action upon it was defeated for the session. This conclusion was undoubtedly brought about by considerations outside of the legitimate scope of the real question at issue. The struggle for the Presidency was in progress, and any concession by the slave States on the tariff question would weaken the Democratic party in the section where its chief strength lay, and would correspondingly increase the prestige of Lincoln's supporters in the North and of Mr. Fillmore's followers in the South. Mr. Hunter had himself just received a strong support in the Charleston convention for the Presidency, securing a vote almost equal to that given to Douglas. This was an additional tie binding him to the South, and he responded to the wishes of that section by preventing all action on the tariff bill of the House pending the Presidential struggle of 1860.

SENATE VOTES ON THE MORRILL TARIFF.

But the whole aspect of the question was changed when at the ensuing session of Congress the senators and representatives from the Cotton States withdrew, and betook themselves to the business of establishing a Southern Confederacy. Mr. Hunter's opposition was not relaxed, but his supporters were gone. Opposition was thus rendered powerless, and the first important step towards changing the tariff system from low duties to high duties, from free-trade to protection, was taken by the passage of the Morrill Bill on the second day of March, 1861. Mr. Buchanan was within forty-eight hours of the close of his term and he promptly and cheerfully signed the bill. He had by this time become not only emancipated from Southern thraldom but in some degree embittered against Southern men, and could therefore readily disregard objections from that source. His early instincts and declarations in favor of a protective policy doubtless aided him in a conclusion which a year before he could not have reached without a conflict in his Cabinet that would probably have ended in its disruption.

The passage of the Morrill Tariff was an event which would almost have marked an era in the history of the government if public attention had not been at once absorbed in struggles which were far more engrossing than those of legislative halls. It was however the beginning of a series of enactments which deeply affected the interests of the country, and which exerted no small influence upon the financial ability of the government to endure the heavy expenditure entailed by the war which immediately followed. Theories were put aside in the presence of a great necessity, and the belief became general that in the impending strain on the resources of the country, protection to home industry would be a constant and increasing strength to the government.

On the passage of the bill in the Senate, on the 20th of February, the yeas were 25 and the nays 14. No Democratic senator voted in the affirmative and no Republican senator in the negative. It was not only a sharp division on the party line but almost equally so on the sectional line. Mr. Douglas, Mr. Rice of Minnesota, Mr. Latham of California, and Mr. Lane of Oregon were the only Northern senators who united with the compact South against the bill. Senators from Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas were still taking part in the proceedings. Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky and Mr. Kennedy of Maryland were favorable to the policy of protection, but on this bill they withheld their votes. They had not abandoned all hope of an adjustment of the Disunion troubles, and deemed the pending measure too radical a change of policy to be adopted in the absence of the senators and representatives from seven States so deeply interested. Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, sympathizing warmly with the Republicans on all questions relating to the preservation of the Union, was too firmly wedded to the theory of free-trade to appreciate the influence which this measure would exert in aid of the national finances.

The test vote in the House was taken on the 27th of February, on a motion made by Mr. Branch of North Carolina to lay the bill on the table. Only 43 votes were given in favor, while 102 were recorded against this summary destruction of the measure. The sectional line was not so rigidly maintained as it was in the House. Of the hostile vote 28 were from the South and 15 from the North. The Virginia delegation, following Mr. Hunter's example, voted solidly in opposition. The Southern men who voted for the bill were in nearly every instance distinguished for their hostility to secession. John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, Thomas A. R. Nelson, and William B. Stokes of Tennessee, William C. Anderson, Francis M. Bristow, Green Adams, and Laban T. Moore of Kentucky, separated from their section, and in their support of a protective tariff openly affiliated with the North.

The Morrill Tariff, as it has since been popularly known, was part of a bill whose title indicates a wider scope than the fixing of duties on imports. It provided also for the payment of outstanding Treasury notes and authorized a loan. These additional features did little to commend it to those who were looking to an alliance with the Secessionists, nor did the obvious necessity of money for the national Treasury induce the ultra disciples of free-trade in the North to waive their opposition to a measure which distinctly looked to the establishment of protection. It was a singular combination of circumstances which on the eve of the Southern revolt led to the inauguration of a policy that gave such industrial and financial strength to the Union in its hour of dire necessity, in the very crisis of its fate.

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Chapter XIII

Mr. Lincoln's Journey from Springfield to Washington.--Speeches on the Way.--Reaches Washington.--His Secret Journey.--Afterwards regretted.--Precautions for his Safety.--President Buchanan.-- Secretary Holt.--Troops for the Protection of Washington.--Inauguration of Mr. Lincoln.--Relief to the Public Anxiety.--Inaugural Address. --Hopefulness and Security in the North.--Mr. Lincoln's Appeal to the South.--Fails to appease Southern Wrath.--Dilemma of the South. --The New Cabinet.--The "Easy Accession" of Former Times.--Seward Secretary of State.--Chase at the Head of the Treasury.--Radical Republicans dissatisfied.--Influence of the Blairs.--Comment of Thaddeus Stevens.--The National Flag in the Confederacy.--Flying at only Three Points.--Defenseless Condition of the Government.-- Confidence of Disunion Leaders.--Extra Session of the Senate.-- Douglas and Breckinridge.--Their Notable Debate.--Douglas's Reply to Wigfall.--His Answer to Mason.--Condition of the Territories.-- Slavery not excluded by Law.--Public Opinion in Maine, 1861.--Mr. Lincoln's Difficult Task.--His Wise Policy.--His Careful Preparation. --Statesmanship of his Administration.

When Southern confidence was at its height, and Northern courage at its lowest point, Mr. Lincoln began his journey from Springfield to Washington to assume the government of a divided and disorganized Republic. His speeches on the way were noticeable for the absence of all declaration of policy or purpose touching the impending troubles. This peculiarity gave rise to unfavorable comments in the public press of the North, and to unfounded apprehensions in the popular mind. There was fear that he was either indifferent to the peril, or that he failed to comprehend it. The people did not understand Mr. Lincoln. The failure to comprehend was on their part, not on his. Had he on that journey gratified the aggressive friends of the Union who had supported him for the Presidency, he would have added immeasurably to the serious troubles which already confronted him. He had the practical faculty of discerning the chief point to be reached, and then bending every energy to reach it. He saw that the one thing needful was his regular, constitutional inauguration as President of the United States. Policies both general and in detail would come after that. He could not afford by imprudent forwardness of speech or premature declaration of measures to increase the embarrassment which already surrounded him. "Let us do one thing at a time and the big things first" was his homely but expressive way of indicating the wisdom of his course.

A man of ordinary courage would have been overwhelmed by the task before him. But Mr. Lincoln possessed a certain calmness, firmness, and faith that enabled him to meet any responsibility, and to stand unappalled in any peril. He reached Washington by a night journey, taken secretly much against his own will and to his subsequent chagrin and mortification, but urged upon him by the advice of those in whose judgment and wisdom he was forced to confide. It is the only instance in Mr. Lincoln's public career in which he did not patiently face danger, and to the end of his life he regretted that he had not, according to his own desire, gone through Baltimore in open day, trusting to the hospitality of the city, to the loyalty of its people, to the rightfulness of his cause and the righteousness of his aims and ends. He came as one appointed to a great duty, not with rashness, not with weakness, not with bravado, not with shrinking, but in the perfect confidence of a just cause and with the stainless conscience of a good man. Threats that he never should be inaugurated had been numerous and serious, and it must be credited to the administration of Mr. Buchanan, that ample provision had been made for the protection of the rightful ruler of the nation.

PATRIOTIC CONDUCT OF JOSEPH HOLT.

The active and practical loyalty of Joseph Holt in this crisis deserves honorable mention. When, at the close of December, 1860, he succeeded Mr. Floyd as Secretary of War, no troops were stationed in Washington or its neighborhood. After consultation with General Scott, then in command of the army, and with the full approval of President Buchanan, Secretary Holt thought it wise to make precautions for the safety of the National Capital. Seven companies of artillery and one company of sappers and miners were accordingly brought to Washington. This movement gave offense to the Southern men who still remained in Congress, and Mr. Branch of North Carolina offered a resolution declaring that "the quartering of troops around the capital was impolitic and offensive," and that, "if permitted, it would be destructive of civil liberty, and therefore the troops should be forthwith removed." The House laid the resolution on the table by a vote of 125 to 35. Ex-President Tyler had formally complained to the President from the Peace Congress, that United- States troops were to march in the procession which was to celebrate the 22d of February. When so many of the Southern people were engaged in seizing the forts and other property of the government, it was curious to witness their uneasiness at the least display of power on the part of the National Government.

The tone of Secretary Holt's report to the President in regard to the marshaling of troops in the National Capital was a manifestation of courage in refreshing contrast with the surrounding timidity. He stated in very plain language that "a revolution had been in progress for the preceding three months in several of the Southern States;" that its history was one of "surprise, treacheries, and ruthless spoliations;" that forts of the United States had been captured and garrisoned, and "hostile flags unfurled from the ramparts;" that arsenals had been seized, and the arms which they contained appropriated to the use of the captors; that more than half a million of dollars, found in the mint of New Orleans, had been unscrupulously applied to replenish the treasury of Louisiana; that a conspiracy had been entered into for the armed occupation of Washington as part of the revolutionary programme; and that he could not fail to remember that, if the early admonitions in regard to the designs of lawless men in Charleston Harbor had been acted on, and "adequate re-enforcements sent there before the revolution began, the disastrous political complications which ensued might not have occurred."

The inauguration of Mr. Lincoln was an immense relief to the country. There had been an undefined dread throughout the Northern States, colored and heightened by imagination, that Mr. Lincoln would in some way, by some act of violence or of treachery, be deprived of the Presidency, and the government thrown into anarchy. Mr. Breckinridge was the Vice-President, and there had been a vague fear that the count of the electoral votes, over which he presided, would in some way be obstructed or tampered with, and that the regularity of the succession might be interrupted, and its legitimacy stained. But Mr. Breckinridge had performed his official duty with scrupulous fidelity, and Mr. Lincoln had been declared by him, in the presence of the two Houses of Congress, to be lawfully and constitutionally elected President of the United States. Anarchy and disorder in the North would at that time have proved so advantageous to the leaders of Secession, that the apprehension was firmly fixed in the Northern mind that some attempt would be made to bring it about. The very fact, therefore, that Mr. Lincoln was in possession of the office, that he was quietly living in the Executive mansion, that the Senate of the United States was in session, with a quorum present, ready to act upon his nominations, imported a new confidence and opened a new prospect to the friends of the Union.

The Inaugural address added to the feeling of hopefulness and security in the North. It effectually removed every trace of unfavorable impression which had been created by Mr. Lincoln's speeches, and gave at once a new view and an exalted estimate of the man. He argued to the South, with persuasive power, that the institution of Slavery in the States was not in danger by his election. He admitted the full obligation under the Constitution for the return of fugitive slaves. He neither affirmed nor denied any position touching Slavery in the Territories. He was fully aware that many worthy, patriotic citizens desired that the National Constitution should be amended; and, while he declined to make any recommendation, he recognized the full authority of the people over the subject, and said he should favor rather than oppose a fair opportunity for them to act upon it. He expressed a preference, if the Constitution was to be amended, for a general convention rather than for action through State Legislatures. He so far departed from his purpose not to speak of particular amendments as to allude to the one submitted by the late Congress, to the effect that the Federal Government shall never interfere with the domestic institutions of the States; and he said that, holding such a provision to be now implied in the Constitution, he had no objection to its being made express and irrevocable. He pleaded earnestly, even tenderly, with those who would break up the Union. "In your hands," said he, "my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without yourselves being the aggressors. You can have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it. I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break, our bonds of affection."

While the effect produced by the Inaugural in the North was so auspicious, no corresponding impression was made in the South. Mr. Lincoln's concise and candid statement of his opinions and purposes in regard to Slavery, his majestic and unanswerable argument against Secession, and his pathetic appeal to the people and States of the South, all alike failed to win back the disaffected communities. The leaders of the Secession movement were only the more enraged by witnessing the favor with which Mr. Lincoln's position was received in the North. The declaration of the President that he should execute the laws in all parts of the country, as required by his oath, and that the jurisdiction of the nation under the Constitution would be asserted everywhere and constantly, inspired the doubting with confidence, and gave to the people of the North a common hope and a common purpose in the approaching struggle. The address left to the seceding States only the choice of retiring from the position they had taken, or of assuming the responsibilities of war. It was clear that the assertion of jurisdiction by two separate governments over the same territory and people must end in bloodshed. In this dilemma was the South placed by the Inaugural address of President Lincoln. Mr. Buchanan had admitted the right of Secession, while denying the wisdom of its exercise; but the right when exercised carried jurisdiction with it. Hence it was impossible for Mr. Buchanan to assert jurisdiction and attempt its exercise over the territory and people of the seceding States. But Mr. Lincoln, by his Inaugural address, set himself free from all logical entanglements. His emphatic words were these: "I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken; and to the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the States. . . . I trust this will not be regarded as a menace, but only as a declared purpose of the Union that it will constitutionally defend and maintain itself."

THE CABINET OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

Mr. Lincoln constituted his Cabinet in a manner at least unusual if not unprecedented. It had been the general practice of Presidents, from the first organization of the government, to tender the post of Secretary of State to the man considered to be next in prominence to himself in the party to which both belonged. In the earlier history of the country, the expected successor in the Executive office was selected. This was indeed for a long period so uniform that the appointment to the State Department came to be regarded as a designation to the Presidency. In political phrase, this mode of reaching the coveted place was known as the "easy accession." By its operation Madison succeeded Jefferson, Monroe succeeded Madison, John Quincy Adams succeeded Monroe. After successful application for a quarter of a century the custom fell into disfavor and, by bitter agitation, into disuse. The cause of its overthrow was the appointment of Henry Clay to the State Department, and the baseless scandal of a "bargain and sale" was invented to deprive Mr. Clay of the "easy accession." After a few years, when National Conventions were introduced, it became the habit of the President to tender the State Department to a leading or prominent competitor for the Presidential nomination. Thus General Harrison offered the post to Mr. Clay, who declined; and then to Mr. Webster, who accepted. President Polk appointed Mr. Buchanan. President Pierce appointed Mr. Marcy. President Buchanan appointed General Cass.

Following in the same line, Mr. Lincoln now invited his chief rival, Mr. Seward, to the State Department. But his courtesy did not stop there. He was generous beyond all example to his rivals. He called Salmon P. Chase to the Treasury, appointed Simon Cameron to the War Department, and made Edward Bates of Missouri Attorney-General. These were the three who, next to Mr. Seward, received the largest votes of the minority in the convention which nominated Mr. Lincoln. The Cabinet was completed by the appointment of Gideon Welles of Connecticut Secretary of the Navy, Caleb B. Smith of Indiana Secretary of the Interior, and Montgomery Blair of Maryland Postmaster- General.

The announcement of these names gave fair satisfaction to the party, though the most advanced and radical element of the Republicans regarded its composition with distrust. There had been strong hope on the part of the conservative friends of the Union that some prominent man from the Cotton States would be included in the Cabinet, and overtures were undoubtedly made to that effect directly after the election in November. But the rapidly developing revolt against the Union made such an appointment undesirable if not altogether impracticable. By the time of the inauguration it was found that such an olive-branch from the President would exert no influence over the wild passions which had been aroused in the South. The name most frequently suggested was that of Mr. John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, who was a sincere friend of the Union, and did all in his power to avert a conflict; but his appointment to the Cabinet would have destroyed him at home, without bringing strength at that crisis to the National cause.

The opinions and characteristics of each member of the Cabinet were very closely scanned and criticised. Mr. Seward was known to be fully committed to the policy of conciliation towards the South, and to the adoption of every measure consistent with the honor of the country to avert war and induce the return of the seceding States. Mr. Chase was understood to favor a moderate policy, but did not go so far as Mr. Seward. Mr. Cameron sympathized with Mr. Seward more than with Mr. Chase. Mr. Bates was extremely conservative, but a zealous friend of the Union, and a lifelong disciple of Mr. Clay. Mr. Welles was of Democratic antecedents, a follower of Van Buren and Wright, an associate of John M. Niles, anti-slavery in principle, a strict constructionist, instinctively opposed to Mr. Seward, readily co-operating with Mr. Chase. His appointment was a surprise to New-England Republicans who expected a much more prominent member of the party to be called to the Cabinet. It was understood that the selection was due to the counsel of Vice- President Hamlin, who soon after had such serious differences with Mr. Welles that a state of absolute non-intercourse existed between them during the whole period of his incumbency of the Navy Department. Mr. Caleb B. Smith had been prominent in the House of Representatives when Mr. Lincoln was a member, had been popular as a public speaker in the West, but had no aptitude for so serious a task as the administration of a great department, and did not long retain his position.

THE CABINET OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

Mr. Blair was appointed as a citizen of Maryland. This gave serious offense to many of Mr. Lincoln's most valued supporters, and was especially distasteful to the Union men of Maryland, with Henry Winter Davis at their head. They regarded Mr. Blair as a non- resident, as not in any sense identified with them, and as disposed from the outset to foment disturbance where harmony was especially demanded. Mr. Bates had been appointed from Missouri largely by the influence of Francis P. Blair, Jr.; and the border-State Republicans were dissatisfied that the only two members of the Cabinet from the slave States had been appointed apparently without any general consultation among those who were best fitted to give the President advice on so important a matter. The extreme men in the Republican party, of the type of Benjamin F. Wade and Owen Lovejoy, believed that the Cabinet was so constituted as to insure what they termed "a disgraceful surrender to the South." It was a common saying at the time in Washington, among the radical Republicans, that Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet did not contain three as absolute and strong defenders of the Union as Dix, Holt, and Stanton, who had just retired with Mr. Buchanan. Thaddeus Stevens, with his accustomed sharpness of speech, said the Cabinet was composed of an assortment of rivals whom the President appointed from courtesy, one stump-speaker from Indiana, and two representatives of the Blair family.

In the seven States which constituted the original Southern Confederacy, the flag of the United States was flying at only three points on the day of Mr. Lincoln's inauguration. The army of the United States still held Fort Sumter, in the harbor of Charleston; Fort Pickens, opposite the Pensacola Navy Yard; and Key West, the extreme southern point of Florida. Every other fort, arsenal, dock- yard, mint, custom-house, and court-house had been seized by the Confederacy, and turned to hostile use. Fort Moultrie, Castle Pinckney, and the United-States arsenal at Charleston had been seized by the troops of South Carolina; Forts Jackson and Pulaski, and the United-States arsenal at Augusta, by the troops of Georgia; the Chattahoochee and St. Augustine arsenals and the Florida forts, by the troops of that State; the arsenal at Baton Rouge, and Forts Jackson and St. Philip, together with the New-Orleans mint and custom-house, by the troops of Louisiana; the Little-Rock arsenal by the troops of Arkansas; Forts Johnson and Caswell by the troops of North Carolina; and General Twiggs had traitorously surrendered to the State of Texas all the military stores in his command, amounting in value to a million and a half of dollars. By these means the seceding States had come into possession of all the artillery, small arms, ammunition, and supplies of war needed for immediate use, and were well prepared for the opening of the campaign. On the part of the government there was no such preparation. Indeed the government did not at that moment have twelve thousand available troops against the most formidable rebellion in history. Its whole navy could not make one large squadron, and its most effective ships were at points remote from the scene of conflict. The revenues of the country were not then yielding more than thirty millions per annum, and the credit was so low that one per cent. a month had been paid by the retiring administration for the funds necessary to close its unfortunate career.

In view of all these facts, it cannot be matter of wonder that the Disunion leaders in the South laughed to scorn any efforts on the part of the Government of the United States to arrest their progress, much less to subdue them, and enforce their return to the Union. North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Arkansas had not yet seceded. The Union sentiment was strong in each one of these States, and the design of Mr. Lincoln was to pursue a policy so mild and conciliatory as to win them to the side of the government. Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri were excited by strong minorities who desired to aid the South, while no strong element in their population was ready to take decisive measures for the Union. Palliation, conciliation, concession, compromise, were the only words heard, and the almost universal opinion in the South, shared largely by the North, was that to precipitate war would be to abandon the last hope for restoration of the Union.

EXTRA SESSION OF THE SENATE.

The extra session of the Senate, called by Mr. Buchanan for the convenience of the new administration, assembled on the 4th of March. All the Southern States were represented in full except those which had members in the Confederate Congress at Montgomery, and from one of these--the State of Texas--both senators, John Hemphill and Louis T. Wigfall, were present. Texas was indeed represented in the Congress of the Confederate States at Montgomery and in the Congress of the United States at Washington at the same time. Some excuse was given for the continuance of the senators by an alleged lack of completeness in the secession proceedings of their State; but to the apprehension of the ordinary mind, a secession that was complete enough to demand representation at Montgomery was complete enough to end it at Washington. The Texas senators, therefore, did not escape the imputation of seizing a mere pretext for remaining at Washington somewhat in the character of spies upon the new administration. John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky and Thomas L. Clingman of North Carolina took the usual oath to support the Constitution--Clingman for his second term, Breckinridge for his first. Salmon P. Chase was sworn in as senator from Ohio, and retired the next day to the Treasury Department. John Sherman was his successor. Among the new senators who entered, and who afterwards became conspicuous, were Howe of Wisconsin and Baker of Oregon. The session was only for Executive purposes, and of course possessed no legislative power; but the debates were of interest and of value to the country.

Mr. Douglas, with the characteristic boldness of a leader and with a patriotism which did him honor, defended the Inaugural address of Mr. Lincoln against the assault of opposition senators. In reply to Wigfall of Texas, who wished to know Douglas's views upon certain points of policy, he said, "I do not choose to proclaim what my policy would be, in view of the fact that the senator does not regard himself as the guardian of the honor and the interests of my country, but is looking to the interests of another which he thinks is in hostility. It would hardly be good policy or wisdom for me to reveal what I think ought to be our policy to one who may so soon be in the councils of the enemy and in the command of his armies." Being pressed by Wigfall to know what he would advise the President to do in the critical condition of Fort Sumter, Douglas sarcastically answered that he "should have no hesitancy in replying to the senator from Texas if that senator held himself bound by his oath to support the Constitution of the United States, and to protect and aid the honor of the country instead of communicating it to the enemy to be used against us." It was a vast gain to the Union that Douglas spoke so boldly in defense of Mr. Lincoln; and it was significant that Wigfall received imputations upon his honor without threats of a duel, and without even using the language of resentment.

Mr. Mason of Virginia came to the aid of Wigfall in the debate, but fared badly at the hands of Douglas. He asked Douglas to define what should be done in this crisis in regard to Fort Sumter. "If the senator from Virginia," said Douglas, "had voted right in the last Presidential election, I should have been, perhaps, in a position to-day to tell him authoritatively what ought to be done. Not occupying that position, I must refer the senator from Virginia to those who have been intrusted by the American people, according to the Constitution, with the decision of that question." The speech of Wigfall had given great offense, and the castigation administered by Douglas was heartily responded to throughout the North. Wigfall had boasted that he owed no allegiance to the government; that he was a foreigner and owed allegiance to another government. On the next day, reciting these words as a preamble, Mr. Foster of Connecticut moved "that Louis T. Wigfall be and hereby is expelled from the Senate." Mr. Clingman of North Carolina moved as a substitute a declaration that "Texas having seceded from the Union, and being no longer one of the United States, is not entitled to be represented in this body." After a brief debate, the resolutions were referred to the Judiciary by the votes of Republican senators, who, not wishing to precipitate any issue prematurely, and persuaded that Wigfall's presence was helping rather than harming the Union cause, concluded to let the matter rest.

BRECKINRIDGE AND DOUGLAS.

A notable debate took place between Breckinridge and Douglas, in which the issues that had led to the disruption of the Democracy in the late Presidential election were, in a certain sense, fought over again. Mr. Breckinridge's speech was carefully prepared, and presented the Southern side in a tone of dignity and confidence; but the reply of Douglas exhibited his superiority as a debater. Breckinridge had declared that whatever settlement be made of other questions, there must be a concession to the South of the right to emigrate into all the Territories, or at least an equitable partition of the National Domain. In reply, Douglas reminded him that the South had, by the action of a Republican Congress, the full right to emigrate into all the territory of the United States; and that, with the consent of the Republican Congress, every inch of the territory of the United States south of the thirty-seventh degree of latitude was at that hour open to slavery. "So far," said he, "as the doctrine of popular sovereignty and non-intervention is concerned, the Colorado Bill and the Nevada Bill and the Dakota Bill are identically the same with the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and in its precise language." The answer was at once a complete destruction of the argument of Breckinridge, and a severe indictment of the Republican party. Never before in the existence of the Federal Government had its territory been so open, by Congressional enactment and by judicial decision, to the slave-holder as on the day that Abraham Lincoln assumed the office of President of the United States. It is a singular fact that, on the eve of the utter destruction of the institution of Slavery, its legal status was stronger than ever before in the history of the government, and the area over which it might lawfully spread was far larger than at any previous period. Douglas showed in this debate how absolutely groundless was the excuse of slave-holders for basing secession or revolution upon the failure to acquire their rights in the Territories, when never before had their rights in the Territories been so absolutely complete.

Public opinion in March, 1861, was so unsettled, the popular mind so impressible, that a spirit of discontent soon began to spread over the loyal States on the part of those who had hoped for what they termed a vigorous administration. For a few weeks the conduct of the government fell under the animadversion of all classes in the North. To those who wanted an instant settlement, and the return of the seceding States upon their own terms, the administration seemed too radical. To those who demanded that the flag be maintained, and Fort Sumter promptly re-enforced, who would be satisfied with nothing less than the recovery of every piece of public property of which the Confederates had possessed themselves, the administration appeared altogether too conservative. The overwhelming public desire after all was for peace, and the overwhelming public opinion was against the extremists who would, by any possibility, precipitate war. The administration thus began its career with no firm footing beneath it, with an aggressive and defiant enemy in front of it, with a public opinion divided, distrustful, and compromising, behind it.

No more difficult task has ever been presented to any government than that which Mr. Lincoln and his Cabinet assumed in the month of March, 1861. To judge it now by any appearance of irresolution, or by any seeming deficiency of courage, would be trying it by a standard totally inapplicable and unfair. Before and beyond all things, Mr. Lincoln desired to prevent war, and he felt that every day of peace gave fresh hope that bloodshed might be avoided. In his Inaugural address he had taken the strongest ground for the preservation of the Union, and had carefully refrained from every act and every expression which would justify, even in the public opinion of the South, an outbreak of violence on the part of the Confederates. He believed that the Southern revolt had attained its great proportions in consequence of Mr. Buchanan's assertion that he had not power to coerce a seceding State. Mr. Lincoln had announced a different creed, and every week that the South continued peaceful, his hope of amicable adjustment grew stronger. He believed that with the continuance of peace, the Secessionists could be brought to see that Union was better than war for all interests, and that in an especial degree the institution of Slavery would be imperiled by a resort to arms. He had faith in the sober second- thought. If the South would deliberate, the Union would be saved. He feared that the Southern mind was in the condition in which a single untoward circumstance might precipitate a conflict, and he determined that the blood of his brethren should not be on his hands.

STATESMANSHIP OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

Mr. Lincoln saw, moreover, that war between a divided North and a united South would be a remediless calamity. If, after all efforts at peace, war should be found unavoidable, the Administration had determined so to shape its policy, so to conduct its affairs, that when the shock came it should leave the South entirely in the wrong, and the government of the Union entirely in the right. Consolidated as might be the front which the Rebellion would present, the administration was resolved that it should not be more solid, more immovable, more courageous, than that with which the supporters of the government would meet it. Statesmanship cannot be judged upon theories. It must be decided by results. When that conclusive test is brought to bear, Mr. Lincoln's administration of the government in the weeks immediately following his inauguration deserves the highest praise; and all the more because it was compelled to disregard the clamor and disappoint the expectations of many who had been conspicuously influential in bringing it into power, and who therefore thought themselves entitled to give counsel.

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Chapter XIV

President Lincoln and the Confederate Commissioners.--Misleading Assurance given by Judge Campbell.--Mr. Seward's Answer to Messrs. Forsythe and Crawford.--An Interview with the President is desired by the Commissioners.--Rage in the South.--Condition of the Montgomery Government.--Roger A. Pryor's Speech.--President determines to send Provisions to Fort Sumter.--Advises Governor Pickens.--Conflict precipitated.--The Fort surrenders.--Effect of the Conflict on the North.--President's Proclamation and Call for Troops.--Responses of Loyal States.--Popular Uprising.--Democratic Party.--Patriotism of Senator Douglas.--His Relations with Mr. Lincoln.--His Death.-- Public Service and Character.--Effect of the President's Call on Southern States.--North Carolina.--Tennessee.--Virginia.--Senator Mason's Letter.--Responses of Southern Governors to the President's Call for Troops.--All decline to comply.--Some of them with Insolent Defiance.--Governors of the Free States.--John A. Andrew, E. D. Morgan, Andrew G. Curtin, Oliver P. Morton.--Energetic and Patriotic Action of all Northern Governors.--Exceptional Preparation in Pennsylvania for the Conflict.--Governors of Free States all Republicans except in California and Oregon.--Critical Situation on Pacific Coast.--Loyalty of its People.--President's Reasons for postponing Session of Congress.--Election in Kentucky.--Union Victory.--John J. Crittenden and Garrett Davis.--John Bell.-- Disappoints Expectation of Union Men.--Responsibility of Southern Whigs.--Their Power to arrest the Madness.--Audacity overcomes Numbers.--Whig Party of the South.--Its Brilliant Array of Leaders. --Its Destruction.

The negotiation which the seceding State of South Carolina had unsuccessfully attempted with President Buchanan, for the surrender of Fort Sumter, was now formally renewed by the Confederate Government with the administration of Mr. Lincoln. The week following the inauguration, John Forsythe of Alabama and Martin J. Crawford of Georgia appeared in Washington in the character of Commissioners from the Confederate States, "with a view," as they defined it, "to a speedy adjustment of all questions growing out of the political separation, upon such terms of amity and good will as the respective interests, geographical contiguity, and future welfare of the two nations, may render necessary." They addressed their communication to the Secretary of State as a matter pertaining to the Foreign Department of the government, and waited with confidence for an answer that would practically recognize the nationality which they assumed to represent. Judge Campbell of the Supreme Court, a citizen of Alabama, had held some conferences with Mr. Seward, the result of which was his personal assurance to the Commissioners that Fort Sumter would be evacuated before the 25th of March; and he urged them not to insist upon too prompt an answer to their demand. At his instance, the reply of Mr. Seward was withheld from official delivery, and, though dated the 15th of March, was really not read by the Commissioners until the 7th or 8th of April.

THE CONFEDERATE COMMISSIONERS.

Mr. Seward's answer threw the Commissioners and the entire South into a rage. He declined to comply with the request of Messrs. Forsythe and Crawford. He saw in them, "not a rightful and accomplished revolution, not an independent nation with an established government, but only the perversion of a temporary and partisan excitement, and an inconsiderate purpose of unjustifiable and unconstitutional aggression upon the rights and the authority vested in the Federal Government." Mr. Seward further advised them that he "looked for the cure of evils which should result from proceedings so unnecessary, so unwise, so unusual, so unnatural, not to irregular negotiations having in view untried relations, but to regular, considerate action of the people of those States through the Congress of the United States, and through such extraordinary conventions, if there be need thereof, as the Federal Constitution contemplates and authorizes to be assembled." Under these circumstances, Mr. Seward informed the Commissioners that his official duties were confined to the conduct of the foreign relations of his country, and did not at all embrace domestic questions, or questions arising between the several States and the Federal Government.

The Secretary of State was unable, therefore, to comply with the request of Messrs. Forsythe and Crawford, and declined to appoint a day on which they might submit the objects of their visit to the President of the United States. He refused to recognize them as diplomatic agents, and would not hold correspondence or further communication with them. Lest the Commissioners might console themselves with the reflection that Mr. Seward was speaking only for himself, and that the President might deal with them less curtly, he informed them that he had cheerfully submitted his answer to Mr. Lincoln, who coincided in the views it expressed, and sanctioned the Secretary's decision declining official intercourse with Messrs. Forsythe and Crawford. The rejoinder of the Confederate Commissioners to Mr. Seward was in a threatening tone, upbraiding him with bad faith, and advising him that "Fort Sumter cannot be provisioned without the effusion of blood;" reminding him also that they had not come to Washington to ask the Government of the United States to recognize the independence of the Confederacy, but for an "adjustment of new relations springing from a manifest and accomplished revolution."

Up to this time there had not been the slightest collision between the forces of the Confederacy and the forces of the Union. The places which had been seized, belonging to the Federal Government, had been taken without resistance; and the authorities of Montgomery appeared to a great many Southern people to be going through blank motions, and to be aping power rather than exercising it. Their defiant attitude had been demoralizing to the public sentiment in the North, but their failure to accomplish any thing in the way of concession from the National Government, and their apparent timidity in refraining from a shock of arms, was weakening the Disunion sentiment in the States which composed the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated with great pomp and pretension in February, and now April had been reached with practically nothing done but the issuing of manifestoes, and the maintenance of a mere shadow of government, without its substance. The Confederates had as yet no revenue system and no money. They had no armed force except some military companies in the larger cities, organized long before secession was contemplated. They had not the pretense of a navy, or any power apparently to create one. While the administration of Mr. Lincoln, therefore, was disappointing great numbers in the North by its failure to do something decisive towards re-establishing the National authority in the rebellious States, the inhabitants of those States were becoming daily dissatisfied with the fact that the administration of Mr. Davis was doing nothing to consolidate and protect the Confederacy.

DISSATISFACTION WITH THE CONFEDERACY.

Ever since the inauguration of Jefferson Davis, the flag of the United States had been flying over the strongest fortress in the Confederacy, and no forcible effort had been made to displace it. The first flush of joy and congratulation was over, and re-action had begun throughout the revolting States. The Confederate Government was reminded by many of the leading newspapers of the South that unless some decisive step were taken to assert its authority and establish its prestige, it would quietly crumble to pieces. The apparent non-resistance of Mr. Lincoln's administration had, in many minds, the effect of casting contempt upon the whole Southern movement, and the refusal to recognize or receive commissioners of Mr. Davis's appointment was regarded as a direct insult to their government, which, unless met by some decisive step, would subject the leaders to the derision of public opinion throughout the new Confederacy. Mr. Buchanan had been willing to receive commissioners from seceding States, so far as to confer with them, even when he declared that he had no power to take any action in the premises. Mr. Lincoln had advanced beyond the position of Mr. Buchanan when he refused even to give audience to representatives bearing the commission of the Confederate States.

The situation therefore had become strained. The point had been reached where it was necessary to go forward or go backward; where the Confederacy must assert itself, or the experiment of secession be abandoned. From all quarters of the seven States came the demand upon the Montgomery government to do something decisive. A prominent member of the Alabama Legislature told Jefferson Davis that "unless he sprinkled blood in the face of the Southern people they would be back in the old Union in less than ten days." Public meetings were held to urge the government to action. At Charleston, in answer to a large crowd who came to pay him honor, Roger A. Pryor (whose attractive eloquence has since been used to better ends) told the people that only one thing was necessary to force Virginia into the Southern Confederacy: "to strike a blow." That done, he promised them that "Virginia would secede in less than an hour by Shrewsbury clock."

The indifference of Mr. Lincoln's administration to the program of the Southern Confederacy was apparent and not real. In his Inaugural he had declared that the power confided to him would be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts, but, beyond what was necessary for those objects, there would be no invasion, no use of force against or among the people anywhere. Influential persons connected with Mr. Lincoln's administration may have wavered in regard to the expediency of re-enforcing Major Anderson and holding possession of Fort Sumter, but the President himself wisely concluded that to retreat from that point would be an almost fatal step. There was not a citizen in the North who had not become interested in the fate of Major Anderson and the brave soldiers under his command. Though many patriotic men of conservative or timid nature advised a quiet withdrawal from Fort Sumter rather than an open conflict for its possession, there was an instinctive undertone in the masses of the people in the Northern States against a concession so humiliating. If prestige were needed for the government at Montgomery, Mr. Lincoln felt that it was needed for the government at Washington, and if he withdrew from Sumter he could not see any point where he could make a stand.

The President determined, therefore, to send supplies to Major Anderson. He wisely saw that if he failed to do this he would be receding from the temperate and conservative position taken in the Inaugural, and that it would give to the Confederates a degree of courage, and to the North a degree of despondency, which would vastly increase the difficulty of restoring the Union. In Mr. Lincoln's own language: "the abandonment of Sumter would be utterly ruinous, under the circumstances." . . . "At home it would discourage the friends of the Union, embolden its adversaries, and go far to insure to the latter a recognition abroad. In fact, it would be our national destruction consummated." Having taken this determination, he communicated it to Governor Pickens of South Carolina just at the time that Mr. Seward delivered to the commissioners of Jefferson Davis the government's refusal to receive them. The answer to the commissioners, and the determination not to permit Anderson to be starved out of Fort Sumter with the hostile guns of the Confederacy pointed at him, brought on the conflict. As soon as the two events were made public, the Confederate Secretary of War instructed General Beauregard that if the information conveyed to Governor Pickens was authentic, he should proceed to reduce the fort. The conflict came on the 12th of April, and after a furious cannonade of thirty-four hours, Major Anderson, being out of provisions, was compelled to surrender. The fleet that was bringing him relief arrived too late, and the flag of the United States was lowered to the Confederacy. Those who had urged Mr. Davis to strike a blow and to sprinkle blood in the faces of the people as a means of consolidating Southern opinion, were undoubtedly successful. Throughout the States of the Confederacy the inhabitants were crazed with success. They had taken from the National Government its strongest fortress on the South-Atlantic coast. They felt suddenly awakened to a sense of power, and became wild with confidence in their ability to defy the authority of the United States.

EFFECT OF FORT SUMTER'S FALL.

The Confederate Government, however, had not anticipated the effect of an actual conflict on the people of the North. Until the hour of the assault on Sumter they had every reason for believing that Mr. Lincoln's administration was weak; that it had not a sustaining force of public opinion behind it in the free States; that, in short, Northern people were divided very much on the line of previous party organizations, and that his opponents had been steadily gaining, his supporters as steadily losing, since the day of the Presidential election in November. The Confederates naturally counted much on this condition of Northern sentiment, and took to themselves the comforting assurance that vigorous war could never be made by a divided people. They had treasured all the extreme sayings of Northern Democrats about resisting the march of a Black Republican army towards the South, and offering their dead bodies as obstructions to its progress. They believed, and had good reason for believing, that half the population of the North was opposed to the policy of subjugation, and they accepted the creed of Mr. Buchanan that there was no power in the Constitution to coerce a sovereign State.

Never was popular delusion so suddenly and so completely dispelled. The effect of the assault on Sumter and the lowering of the National flag to the forces of the Confederacy acted upon the North as an inspiration, consolidating public sentiment, dissipating all differences, bringing the whole people to an instant and unanimous determination to avenge the insult and re-establish the authority of the Union. Yesterday there had been doubt and despondency; to- day had come assurance and confidence. Yesterday there had been division; to-day there was unity. The same issue of the morning paper that gave intelligence of the fall of Sumter, brought also a call from the President of the United States for seventy-five thousand men to aid him "in suppressing combinations against the law, too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings." He notified the people that "the first service assigned to the force hereby called forth will probably be to repossess the forts, places, and property which have been seized from the Union;" and he concluded by convening an extra session of Congress to assemble on the fourth day of the ensuing July. The President stated, in his Proclamation, that the laws of the United States had been "for some time past opposed, and their execution obstructed, in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, by combinations too powerful to be suppressed by the ordinary course of judicial procedure, or by the powers vested in the marshals by law." He had therefore "called forth the militia to suppress such combinations, and to cause the laws to be duly executed." He appealed to all loyal citizens "to aid in maintaining the honor, the integrity, and the existence of the National Union, and the perpetuity of popular government." The Proclamation was general. The Call for troops was issued specifically to every State except the seven already in revolt.

The Proclamation was responded to in the loyal States with an unparalleled outburst of enthusiasm. On the day of its issue hundreds of public meetings were held, from the eastern border of Maine to the extreme western frontier. Work was suspended on farm and in factory, and the whole people were roused to patriotic ardor, and to a determination to subdue the Rebellion and restore the Union, whatever might be the expenditure of treasure or the sacrifice of life. Telegrams of congratulation and sympathy fell upon the White House like snow-flakes in a storm; and the President was made to feel, after all the months of gloom and darkness through which he had passed since his election, that light had broken, that day had dawned, and that the open struggle for the Union, however severe and however sanguinary it might prove, was preferable to the slough of despond in which the nation had been cast, and the valley of humiliation through which the government had been groping.

In the history of popular uprisings and of manifestations of National enthusiasm, there is perhaps no equal to that which was seen in the free States of the Union in the weeks immediately following the rash attack on Fort Sumter. While the feeling was too deep to brook resistance, or quietly to endure a word of opposition, it was happily so tempered with discretion as to prevent personal outrages upon the few who did not join in the general chorus for the Union. Suspected men were waited upon and requested to speak for the loyal cause, and newspapers, which before the firing of Sumter had been offensive in tone, were compelled to hoist the National flag over their offices, and openly support the government. But these cases were few and exceptional; and it is due to the Democracy of the North to say, that however strongly they had opposed the election of Mr. Lincoln, and however hostile they had been to the principles which he represented, the mass of the party responded with noble enthusiasm and with patriotic fidelity to the Union. Their great leader, Senator Douglas, set a worthy example by promptly waiting on the President, and expressing his deepest sympathy and his most earnest co-operation in the struggle for the life of the nation.

PATRIOTIC COURSE OF MR. DOUGLAS.

The patriotic course of Mr. Douglas had been of invaluable service to the government from the hour of Mr. Lincoln's inauguration. The old friendship between the illustrious rivals from Illinois, which had begun when each was in his youth, was now strongly revived. Differing always on political issues, they were at once in accord when the fate of the government was at stake. The position of Douglas during the extra session of the Senate had given marked satisfaction to Mr. Lincoln, and when the deliberations came to a close, on the 28th of March, the President said that a great gain had been made to the cause of the Union, by the direction which the speeches of Douglas would give to the sympathy and action of the Northern Democracy. From the hour of actual danger, Mr. Douglas had spoken no partisan word, had known no partisan division, had labored only for the government of the nation, had looked only to its safety and its honor. He had a larger following than any other party leader of his day. Nearly a million and a half of men believed in his principles, were devoted to him personally, trusted him implicitly. The value of his active loyalty to the Union may be measured by the disaster which would have been caused by hesitation on his part. When he returned to his State, after the firing on Sumter, the Republican Legislature of Illinois received him with a display of feeling as profound as that with which they would have welcomed Mr. Lincoln. His address on that memorable occasion was worthy of the loftiest patriot, and was of inestimable value to the cause of the Union. Perhaps no words spoken carried confidence to more hearts, or gave greater strength to the National cause.

Mr. Douglas did not live to return to the Senate. The extra session of March closed his public service. He died in Chicago on the third day of June, 1861, at the early age of forty-eight. His last days were his best days. The hour of his death was the hour of his greatest fame. In his political career he had experienced the extremes of popular odium and of popular approval. His name had at different periods been attended with as great obloquy as ever beset a public man. It was his happy fate to have changed this before his death, and to have secured the enthusiastic approbation of every lover of the Union. His career had been stormy, his partisanship aggressive, his course often violent, his political methods sometimes ruthless. He had sought favor at the South too long to regain mastery of the North, and he had been defeated in the Presidential struggle of 1860,--a struggle in which the ambition of his life had been centred. But with danger to the Union his early affections and the associations of his young life had come back. He remembered that he was a native of New England, that he had been reared in New York, that he had been crowned with honors by the generous and confiding people of Illinois. He believed in the Union of the States, and he stood by his country with a fervor and energy of patriotism which enshrined his name in the history and in the hearts of the American people. His death created the profoundest impression in the country, and the Administration felt that one of the mighty props of the Union had been torn away.

The rank of Mr. Douglas as a statesman is not equal to his rank as a parliamentary leader. As a statesman, he was full of resources, fertile in expedients. But he lacked the truest form of conservatism, and more than once in his career carried partisan contests beyond the point of safety. His participation in the repeal of the Missouri Compromise is an illustration, all the more pertinent and impressive because his own judgment was against the measure, and he allowed himself to be controlled by the fear that another might usurp the place in Southern regard so long held by himself. In parliamentary discussion it is not easy to overstate the power of Mr. Douglas. Indeed, it would be difficult to name his superior. He did not attain the dignity of Webster's stately style. He was not gifted with the fire that burned through Clay's impulsive speech. But as a ready, comprehensive speaker, armed at all points and using his weapons with deadliest effect, he was the equal of either. In the rapidity with which he marshaled the facts favorable to his position, in the consummate skill with which he presented his argument, in the dashing and daring manner by which he overcame an opponent more strongly intrenched than himself, Mr. Douglas is entitled to rank with the most eminent of parliamentary debaters.

ADDITIONS TO THE CONFEDERACY.

The effect of Major Anderson's surrender of Sumter and of the President's call for troops proved prejudicial to the Union sentiment in the slave States which had not yet seceded. It would be more correct, perhaps, to say that Mr. Lincoln's Proclamation was a test of loyalty which revealed the actual character of public sentiment in those States, till then not known in the North. Mr. Lincoln had done every thing in his power to conciliate them, and to hold them fast in their loyalty to the Union. But the sympathy with the South, engendered by the common danger to the institution of Slavery, was too powerful to be resisted. North Carolina, which had always been moderate, conservative, and Union-loving, threw her fortunes with the Confederacy. Tennessee, distracted by the unforeseen defection of such staunch Union men as John Bell and Baillie Peyton,* went Southward with the general current. Virginia could not be restrained, although she was warned and ought to have seen, that if she joined the Rebellion she would inevitably become the battle-ground, and would consign her territory to devastation and her property to destruction. The Virginia convention which was in session before the firing on Fort Sumter, and which was animated by a strong friendship for the Union, was carried in to the vortex of secession by the surrounding excitement. By a vote of 88 to 55 the State determined to join the Confederacy. The wonder is that in the prevailing excitement and arrogant dictation, there could have been found fifty-five men to resist so powerful a tide of public opinion. The minority was strong enough, however, to command the submission of the ordinance to a vote of the people, --a submission which was in form and not in substance, for in reality no freedom of opinion was conceded.

The ordinance which was passed on the 17th of April, three days after the fall of Sumter, declared that "it should take effect when ratified by a majority of the votes of the people of the State, cast at a poll to be taken thereon on the fourth Thursday in May." The Convention did not submit its work to popular review and decision in a fair and honorable way. Eight days after the act of submission, the Convention passed another ordinance, by which Virginia agreed "to adopt and ratify the Constitution of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States." They provided that this second ordinance should have no effect if the first should be rejected by the people. It is not difficult to see that the action was taken in order to render the rejection of the first ordinance impossible. Under the second ordinance, the Convention at once entered into a formal alliance, offensive and defensive, with the Confederate States. Their Vice-President, Alexander H. Stephens, appeared in Richmond as commissioner of his government, and the Convention appointed Ex- President John Tyler, William Ballard Preston, James P. Holcombe, and other leading citizens, as commissioners for Virginia. These joint commissioners made a formal compact between Virginia and the Confederate States on the 25th of April, the day after the Convention had adopted the Confederate Constitution. By this compact, Virginia, "looking to a speedy union with the Confederate States," placed "the whole military force of the Commonwealth under the control and direction of the Confederate States, upon the same basis and footing as if said Commonwealth were now a member of said Confederacy."

Without waiting for the decision of the people on the question of secession, the national flag was removed from the public buildings, and the Confederate flag was raised. All the property of the General Government was seized and, by an article in the agreement with the Confederate commissioner, was in due time to be turned over to the Montgomery government. In short, the State Government of Virginia proceeded in its mad career of hostility to the Union, without the slightest regard to the future decision of the people on the important issue which in form had been submitted to them. They evidently intended to make a rejection of the Disunion ordinance impossible. For their own honor, the man who contrived and guided these proceedings would better have adopted the bold precedent of those States which refused altogether to submit the ordinance to popular vote.

It ought not to escape notice that General Robert E. Lee is not entitled to the defense so often made for him, that in joining the Disunion movement he followed the voice of his State. General Lee resigned his commission in the army of the Union and assumed command of Confederate troops, long before Virginia had voted upon the ordinance of secession. He gave the influence of his eminent name to the schemes of those who, by every agency, fas aut nefas, were determined to hurl Virginia into secession. The very fact that General Lee had assumed command of the troops in Virginia was a powerful incentive with many to vote against the Union. Jefferson Davis had anticipated and measured the full force of the effect which would be produced upon Virginians by General Lee's identification with the Confederate cause. Whether or not there be ground for making General Lee the subject of exceptional censure, there is surely none for excusing him as one who reluctantly obeyed the voice of his State. If he had remained in the national army until the people of Virginia voted on the ordinance of secession, the strength of the Union cause in his State would have been greater. If he had chosen, as a citizen of Virginia, to stand by the Union until his State decided against him, secession might have been defeated. It is fair that his action should be clearly understood, and that his name should bear the just responsibility.

THE SECESSION OF VIRGINIA.

All pretense of a fair submission of the question to popular vote was finally abandoned, and the abandonment practically proclaimed in a letter of Senator James M. Mason, which was published on the 16th of May, some ten days in advance of the election. "If it be asked," wrote Mr. Mason, "what those shall do who cannot in conscience vote to separate Virginia from the United States, the answer is simple and plain. Honor and duty alike require that they should not vote on the question, and if they retain such opinions they must leave the State." Mr. Mason thus accurately defined what the South understood by the submission of secession ordinances to popular vote. It meant that a man might vote for an ordinance but not against it; if he desired to vote against it, and persisted in the desire, he should leave the State. It is rather a matter of surprise that of 161,000 votes cast in Virginia on the question, 32,000 were registered against secession. These friends of the Government were, it is true, in large part from the western section of the State where slaves were few and the loyal sentiment was strong. It is an interesting fact that along the mountain range through Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and even as far South as Georgia, the inhabitants generally sympathized with the Union. Though often forced to aid the Rebellion, they were at heart loyal to the government of their fathers, and on many important occasions rendered the most valuable service to the National cause. The devotion of large numbers in East Tennessee to the Federal Government seriously embarrassed the new Confederacy. The remaining slave States, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri, gave trouble to the administration, but did not succeed in separating themselves from the Union. Large numbers of their people joined the Southern army, but the political power of those States was wielded in favor of the loyal cause. They desired to enact the part of neutrals; but the National Government, from the first, took strong ground against a policy so dishonorable in the States, so injurious to the Union.

The responses made by the Southern governors to the President's call for troops are so characteristic, and afford so true a picture of the times, as to merit notice. Nearly every one returned a scornful and defiant message. Governor Magoffin replied that Kentucky "would furnish no troops for the wicked purpose of subduing her sister States of the South." Governor Letcher declared that "the militia of Virginia would not be furnished to the powers at Washington for any such use or purpose as they had in view, which was the subjugation of the Southern States," and that "the civil war which the powers at Washington had chosen to inaugurate would be met by the South in a spirit as determined." Governor Jackson considered "the call to be illegal, unconstitutional, and revolutionary; its objects to be inhuman and diabolical," and it "would not be complied with by Missouri." Governor Harris said that Tennessee "would not furnish a single man for coercion, but would raise fifty thousand men for the defense of her rights, and those of her Southern brethren." Governor Ellis of North Carolina answered that he "could be no party to the wicked violation of the laws of the country and to the war upon the liberties of a free people." Governor Rector declared that the President's call for troops was only "adding insult to injury, and that the people of Arkansas would defend, to the last extremity, their honor and their property against Northern mendacity and usurpation." Governor Hicks for prudential reasons excused Maryland at the time from responding to the President's call, and when a month afterwards he notified the War Department of his readiness to comply with the request of the Government, he was informed that three-months' men were not needed, and that arrangements had been made for accepting three-years' volunteers from Maryland. Governor Burton of Delaware replied that "there was no organized militia in the State, and no law authorizing such organization." Indisposition to respond to the President was therefore in different degrees manifest in every part of the Union where Slavery had wrought its demoralizing influence. Mr. Lincoln was disappointed at this proof of the sectional character of the contest, and he realized that if American nationality was to be preserved, it must look for help to the abounding resources and the patriotic loyalty of the free States.

THE GOVERNORS OF LOYAL STATES.

It fortunately happened that the governors of the free States were devoted to the Union in as great degree as the Southern governors were devoted to the Confederacy. It may well be doubted whether at any time in history of the government there had been so large a number of able men occupying the gubernatorial chairs of the Northern States. They were not only eminent in an intellectual point of view, but they had a special fitness for the arduous and patriotic duties so unexpectedly devolved upon them. They became popularly known as the "War Governors," and they exercised a beneficent and decisive influence upon the fortunes of the Union.

The Governor of Massachusetts, John A. Andrew, added fervor to the patriotism of the whole people, and nobly led his State in her generous outpouring of aid and comfort to the loyal cause. The vigor which Massachusetts had imparted to the Revolution against the Crown was surpassed by the ardor with which she now threw herself into the contest for the Union. She had been often reproached for urging forward the anti-slavery agitation, which was the excuse of the South for rebelling against the National authority. A somewhat similar accusation had been lodged against her by the Royal Governors and by the Tories a century before. But the men who found this fault with Massachusetts--a fault wholly on virtue's side--will not deny that when the hour of trial came, when convictions of conscience were to be maintained by the strength of the right arm, and faith in principle was to be attested by a costly sacrifice of blood, her sons added imperishable honor to their ancestral record of heroism in the cause of human Liberty and Constitutional Government.

The other New-England States were not less ardent than Massachusetts. Israel Washburn, the Governor of Maine, impulsive, energetic, devoted to the cause of the Union, was sustained by the people of the State without regard to party and with the noblest enthusiasm. William A. Buckingham of Connecticut, of mature years and stainless life, was a young man once more when his country demanded his best energies. The young Governor of Rhode Island, William Sprague, laid aside the civilian's dress for the uniform of a soldier, and led the troops of his State to the National Capital. Ichabod Goodwin of New Hampshire and Erastus Fairbanks of Vermont, two of their most honored and useful men, filled out the list of New England's worthy Executives. Throughout the six States there was but one anxiety, one resolve,--anxiety for the safety of the government, resolve to subdue the revolt against it.

New England is not mentioned first except in a geographical sense. More important even than her patriotic action was the course of the great Central and Western States. New York and Pennsylvania of themselves constituted no mean power, with a population of seven millions, with their boundless wealth, and their ability to produce the material of war. Edwin D. Morgan was the Executive of New York. He was a successful merchant of high character, of the sturdiest common sense and soundest judgment. A man of wealth himself, he possessed the entire confidence of the bankers and capitalists of the metropolis. His influence in aid of the finances of the government in its early period of depression was given without stint and was of incalculable value. In the neighboring State of New Jersey, Governor Charles Olden was ready for hearty co-operation, and seconded with patriotic zeal every movement in aid of the loyal cause.

Of a different type from Governor Morgan, but equally valuable and more enthusiastic, was the Governor of Pennsylvania, Andrew G. Curtin. Circumstances had thrown him into close and cordial relations with Mr. Lincoln,--relations which had their origin at the time of the Chicago Convention, and which had grown more intimate after Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated. Before the firing on Sumter, but when the States of the Confederacy were evidently preparing for war, Mr. Lincoln earnestly desired a counter signal of readiness on the part of the North. Such a movement in New England would have been regarded in the South merely as a fresh ebullition of radicalism. In New York the tone was too conservative and Governor Morgan too cautious to permit the demonstration to be made there. Governor Curtin undertook to do it in Pennsylvania at the President's special request. On the eleventh day of April, one day before the South precipitated the conflict, the Legislature of Pennsylvania passed an Act for the better organization of the militia, and appropriated five hundred thousand dollars to carry out the details of the measure. The manifest reference to the impending trouble was in the words prescribing the duty of the Adjutant-General of the State in case the President should call out the militia. It was the first official step in the loyal States to defend the Union, and the generous appropriation, made in advance of any blow struck by the Confederacy, enabled Governor Curtin to rally the forces of the great Commonwealth to the defense of the Union with marvelous promptness. His administration was vigorous, and his support of the Union cause was in the highest degree efficient, patriotic, and successful. He attained an exceptional popularity with the soldiers, and against the most bitter attacks never lost his hold on the confidence and personal regard of Mr. Lincoln.

GOVERNORS OF LOYAL STATES.

In the West the commanding figure among a number of distinguished Executives was Oliver P. Morton of Indiana. He was of stalwart frame, full health, and the highest physical vigor. His energy was untiring, his will unconquerable. In the closely balanced condition of parties in his State, he had been trained to the most aggressive and exacting form of leadership, so that he entered upon his gubernatorial duties with a certain experience in the control of men which was of marked value. He possessed a mind of extraordinary strength; and in frequent contests at the bar and upon the stump, he had thoroughly disciplined his faculties. In debate he was formidable. It cannot be said that he exhibited striking originality of thought, or that he possessed in large degree the creative power. But in the art of presenting with force and clearness a subject which he had studied, of analyzing it and simplifying it to the comprehension of the common mind, of clothing it in language as plain and forcible as the diction of John Bunyan, he has had few equals among the public men of America.

The Governor of Iowa was Samuel J. Kirkwood, a man of truth, courage, and devoted love of country. Distinguished for comprehensive intelligence, for clear foresight, for persuasive speech, for spotless integrity, for thorough acquaintance with the people, he was a model of executive efficiency. Alexander Ramsey, the first governor of the Territory of Minnesota, was now governor of that State. As strong in character as he was in popularity, as able as he was patriotic, he broadened by his executive career a personal fame already enviable. Austin Blair of Michigan was a worthy compeer of these eminent officials, and administered his high trust with honor to himself and with advantage to his country. Richard Yates of Illinois had been chosen governor the day Mr. Lincoln was elected President, and enjoyed an exceptional popularity with the people of his State. William Dennison had succeeded Salmon P. Chase in the gubernatorial chair of Ohio, and was unremitting in his labor for the Union. Alexander W. Randall of Wisconsin had contributed in no small degree by public and attractive speech to the triumph of Mr. Lincoln, and was now intrusted with an important duty, to which he gave himself with genuine zeal.

In these sixteen States--all the non-slaveholding Commonwealths east of the Rocky Mountains--the governors were members of the Republican party. They were in political accord, and in complete personal sympathy with the administration. This was regarded by Mr. Lincoln as not in all respects a fortunate circumstance. It was his belief, as it was the belief of many others, that if loyal Democrats had been in the executive chairs of some of the largest States, the effect would have been more impressive. It would have suggested a more absolute unity of the Northern people in support of the government. It would in some degree have relieved the struggle for national life from the opprobrium contained in the reproach which subsequently became too common, that after all it was "a Republican war," waged merely for the abolition of slavery.

The two States on the Pacific coast had Democratic governors, and, by reason of the strong influence which the Southern Democrats had exercised in both under the influence of William M. Gwin and Joseph Lane, there was deep solicitude as to the course of event in that important outpost of the Union. The loyal adherence of those States to the National Government was a profound disappointment to the Confederacy. Jefferson Davis had expected, with a confidence amounting to certainty, and based, it is believed, on personal pledges, that the Pacific Coast, if it did not actually join the South, would be disloyal to the Union, and would, from its remoteness and its superlative importance, require a large contingent of the national forces to hold it in subjection. It was expected by the South that California and Oregon would give at least as much trouble as Kentucky and Missouri, and would thus indirectly but powerfully aid the Southern cause. The enthusiastic devotion which these distant States showed to the Union was therefore a surprise to the South and a most welcome relief to the National Government. The loyalty of the Pacific Coast was in the hearts of its people, but it was made more promptly manifest and effective by the patriotic conduct of Governor Downey and Governor Whittaker, and by the fervid and persuasive eloquence of Thomas Starr King.

The war wrought a great change in the relative position of parties in California. In the autumn of 1861 the Republican candidate, Leland Stanford, was chosen Governor of the State. He received 56,036 votes, while John Conness, a war Democrat, received 30,944, and McConnell who was the representative of the Gwin Democracy, which had so long controlled the State, received 32,750. The men who supported Conness, if driven to the choice, would have supported Stanford as against McConnell, thus showing the overwhelming sentiment of California in favor of the Union. Two years before, in the election of 1859, Mr. Stanford, as the Republican candidate, received but 10,110 votes, while Milton S. Latham, representing the Buchanan administration, received 62,255, and Curry, the Douglas candidate, 31,298. The majority of the Douglas men, if forced to choose, would have voted for Latham as against Stanford. In the Presidential election of 1860 California gave Mr. Lincoln 38,734 votes, Mr. Douglas 38,120, Mr. Breckinridge 33,975, Mr. Bell 9,136. The vote which Governor Stanford received in September, 1861, shows how rapid, radical, and complete was the political revolution caused in California by the Southern Rebellion.

THE ELECTION IN KENTUCKY.

In the eager desire of the loyal people to hasten all measures of preparation for the defense of the Union, fault was found with Mr. Lincoln for so long postponing the session of Congress. Between the date of his proclamation and the date of the assembling of Congress, eighty days were to elapse. Zealous and impatient supporters of the loyal cause feared that the Confederacy would be enabled to consolidate its power, and to gather its forces for a more serious conflict than they could make if more promptly confronted with the power of the Union. But Mr. Lincoln judged wisely that time was needed for the growth and consolidation of Northern opinion, and that senators and representatives, after the full development of patriotic feeling in the free States, would meet in a frame of mind better suited to the discharge of the weighty duties devolving upon them. An additional and conclusive reason with the President was, that Kentucky had not yet elected her representatives to the Thirty-seventh Congress, and would not do so, under the constitution and laws, until the ensuing August. Mr. Lincoln desired to give ample time for canvassing Kentucky for the special election, which was immediately ordered by the governor of the State for the twentieth of June. From the first, Mr. Lincoln had peculiar interest in the course and conduct of Kentucky. It was his native State, and Mr. Clay had been his political exemplar and ideal. He believed also that in the action of her people would be found the best index and the best test of the popular opinion of the Border slave States. He did every thing therefore that he could properly do, to aid Kentucky in reaching a conclusion favorable to the Union. He was rewarded with a great victory. Of the ten representatives chosen, nine were decided friends of the Union, with the venerable Crittenden at their head, ably seconded by Robert Mallory and William H. Wadsworth. Only one member, Henry C. Burnett, was disloyal to the government, and he, after a few months' tarry in the Union councils, went South and joined the Rebellion. The popular vote showed 92,365 for the Union candidates, and 36,995 for the Secession candidates, giving a Union majority of more than 55,000. Mr. Lincoln regarded the result in Kentucky as in the highest degree auspicious, and as amply vindicating the wisdom of delaying the extra session of Congress. The effect was to stimulate a rapidly developing loyalty in the western part of Virginia, to discourage rebellious movements in Missouri, and to arrest Disunion tendencies in Maryland.

Under the protection of the administration, and inspired by the confidence of its support, the Union men of Kentucky had done for that State what her Union men might have done for Tennessee if John Bell and his Whig associates had been as bold and as true to their old principles and John J. Crittenden and Garrett Davis had proved in Kentucky. The conduct of Mr. Bell was a sad surprise to his Northern friends, and a keen mortification to those Southern Whigs who had remained firm in their attachment to the Union. The vote which he had received in the South at the Presidential election was very nearly as large as that given to Breckinridge. The vote of Bell and Douglas united, exceeded that given to Breckinridge in the slave States by more than a hundred thousand. The popular judgment in the North had been that the Disunion element in the South was massed in support of Breckinridge, and that all who preferred the candidacy of Bell or Douglas might be relied upon in the supreme crisis as friends of the Union. Two Southern States, Kentucky and Tennessee, had given popular majorities for Mr. Bell, and there was no reason for supposing that the Union sentiment of Tennessee was any less pronounced than that of Kentucky. Indeed, Tennessee had the advantage of Mr. Bell's citizenship and long identification with her public service, while Kentucky encountered the personal influence and wide-spread popularity of Mr. Breckinridge, who took part against the Union.

If Mr. Bell had taken firm ground for the Union, the Secession movement would have been to a very great extent paralyzed in the South. Mr. Badger of North Carolina, of identically similar principles with Crittenden, could have given direction to the old Whig sentiment of his State, and could have held it steadily as Kentucky was held to the Union. The Bell and Everett campaign had been conducted upon the single and simple platform of the Union and the Constitution,--devotion to the Union, obedience to the Constitution. Mr. Everett, whose public life of grace, eloquence, and purity had not been especially distinguished for courage, pronounced with zeal and determination in favor of Mr. Lincoln's administration, and lent his efforts on the stump to the cause of the Union with wonderful effect through the Northern States. The eagerness of Virginia Democrats never could have swept their State into the whirlpool of Secession if the supporters of Mr. Bell in Tennessee and North Carolina had thrown themselves between the Old Dominion and the Confederacy. With that aid, the former Whigs of Virginia, led by Stuart and Botts and Wickham and Baldwin, and united with the loyal Democrats of the mountain and the valley, could have held the State firmly to the support of the Union, and could have effectively nullified the secret understanding between Mr. Mason and the Montgomery government, that Virginia should secede as soon as her open co-operation was needed for the success of the Southern revolt.

THE WHIGS OF THE SOUTH.

A large share of the responsibility for the dangerous development of the Rebellion must therefore be attributed to John Bell and his half million Southern supporters, who were all of the old Whig party. At the critical moment they signally failed to vindicate the principles upon which they had appealed in the preceding canvass for popular support. They are not justly chargeable with original Disunion proclivities. Sentiments of that kind had been consolidated in the Breckinridge party. But they are responsible for permitting a party whose rank and file did not outnumber their own to lead captive the public opinion of the South, and for permitting themselves to be pressed into a disavowal of their political principles, and to the adoption of the extreme views against which they had always warred. The precipitate manner in which the Southern men of the ancient Whig faith yielded their position as friends of the Union was an instructive illustration of the power which a compact and desperate minority can wield in a popular struggle. In a secret ballot, where every man could have voted according to his own convictions and desires, the Secession scheme would have been defeated in Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas. But the men who led the Disunion movement, understood the practical lesson taught by the French revolutionist, that "audacity" can overcome numbers. In such a contest conservatism always goes down, and radicalism always triumphs. The conservative wishes to temporize and to debate. The radical wishes to act, and is ready to shoot. By reckless daring a minority of Southern men raised a storm of sectional passion to which the friends of the Union bowed their heads and surrendered.

It would be incorrect to speak of a Whig party in the South at the outbreak of the civil war. There were many Whigs, but their organization was gone. It was the destruction of that party which had prepared the way for a triumph of the Democratic Disunionists. In the day of their strength the Whigs could not have been overborne in the South by the Secessionists, nor would the experiment have been tried. No party in the United States ever presented a more brilliant array of talent than the Whigs. In the South, though always resting under the imputation of not being so devoted to the support of Slavery as their opponents, they yet maintained themselves, by the power of intellect and by the prestige of chivalric leadership, in some extraordinary political battles. Many of their eminent men have a permanent place in our history. Others, with less national renown, were recognized at home as possessing equal power. In their training, in their habits of mind, in their pride and independence, in their lack of discipline and submission, they were perhaps specially fitted for opposition, and not so well adapted as men of less power, to the responsibility and detail of administration. But an impartial history of American statesmanship will give some of the most brilliant chapters to the Whig party from 1830 to 1850. If their work cannot be traced in the National statute-books as prominently as that of their opponents, they will be credited by the discriminating reader of our political annals as the English of to-day credit Charles James Fox and his Whig associates--for the many evils which they prevented.

[* Baillie Peyton is erroneously described as uniting with the South. He remained true to the Union throughout the contest.]

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