Authors: Adam Goodheart
Perhaps the feistiest Southerner of all was
Louis T. Wigfall, a freshman senator from Texas. If Crittenden represented the past, this new man from a new state might represent the future—though there were many who devoutly hoped not. His very face was that of a man who, whatever his other endowments might be, found it unbearable to hear more than three or four words spoken consecutively by anyone else. His beetling eyebrows
clenched and unclenched when he talked (which was almost incessantly), and his pugnacious black beard seemed to jut out perpendicular to his face. Even his nose, an English journalist wrote, was somehow “argumentative.” But his eyes, the writer continued, were most dangerously transfixing: “of wonderful depth and light, such as I never saw before but in the head of a wild beast. If you look some day when the sun is not too bright into the eye of a Bengal tiger,
in the Regent’s Park, as the keeper is coming round, you will form some notion of the expression I mean.”
32
By the age of twenty-five, Wigfall had managed to squander his considerable inheritance, settle three affairs of honor on the dueling ground, fight in a ruthless military campaign against the Seminoles, consume a small lakeful of bourbon, win an enviable reputation in whorehouses throughout the South, and get hauled before a judge on charges of murder. Three years after that, he took the next logical step and went into Texas politics. Of all the Southern fire-eaters in
the Senate, Wigfall was the most flamboyant—and inflexible. He scorned the very idea of compromise, openly relished the prospect of spilling Yankee blood, and crowed the war would end only after Southern troops had cut a swath of destruction across the North, with the final capitulation signed in Faneuil Hall.
33
Just before Christmas, when Crittenden first unveiled his proposal before the full Senate, a respectful calm fell over the chamber for the first time in weeks. Everyone knew that he had been laboring over a plan. When the senior senator rose, he began neither a philippic against secession nor a sentimental paean to the Union. Instead, he set forth his series of amendments as dryly as if he were introducing a bill to adjust domestic postage rates. Then he turned to the
widening chasm over slavery. In such controversies, he assured his colleagues philosophically, “all the wrong is never on one side, or all the right on the other. Right and wrong, in this world, and in all such controversies, are mingled together.” Finally, he called on his countrymen, of
every state and party, to set aside their differences in the name of the Constitution, of the flag, of the memory of Washington. Why consign all these to oblivion,
he asked, when the alternative was “a comparative trifle”: simply drawing across the national map a perpetual “line of division between slavery and freedom” that would ensure a lasting peace? Hearing Crittenden’s peroration from the back of the chamber, one young Democratic congressman was deeply impressed. The old man spoke, he later wrote, “as if the muse of history were listening to him.”
34
Would anyone besides Clio listen, though? Crittenden had no sooner sat down than
John P. Hale, Republican from New Hampshire, sprang to his feet to praise “the purity of his motive, the integrity, the disinterestedness, and the fervor of his patriotism.” Surely Crittenden winced. After forty years in this chamber, he knew that such praise was only ever spoken as a kind of legislative eulogy. And in fact, Hale’s
next words were like the coffin lid slamming shut: “Everybody accords to him that [much], whatever may be thought of the value or the practicability of the remedy he proposes, and I do not propose to discuss it.” The honorable body then fell back into bickering over the four-year-old
Dred Scott
case. Crittenden’s six amendments were respectfully lowered into the deep, dark grave known as a special bipartisan committee.
The next morning’s
newspapers confirmed his compromise dead and buried already. “There is no gleam of sunshine, no ray of hope,” began a typical report, in the
New York Herald.
The newspaper went on to suggest that the only chance for peace was a well-timed smallpox epidemic to wipe official Washington off the map.
35
Soon enough, though, despite the dismissive pronouncements of journalists and politicians, many Americans would be calling for a resurrection of the Crittenden Compromise. Two days after the bill had been declared dead, news came from Charleston that South Carolina had seceded. Six days after that, Major Anderson—Crittenden’s friend and fellow Kentuckian
36
—moved his troops into Fort Sumter. Suddenly war felt like a much more imminent and real prospect than it had a week earlier, when it had seemed to many merely a phantasm of congressional bluster. The senator’s “comparative trifle” of safeguarding slavery might indeed be a bargain price for peace. So while Crittenden’s plan languished in the oblivion of the special bipartisan committee, his name became a rallying cry for people
across the country. Each day, larger and larger bundles of mail arrived in the Capitol post office: sheaves of individual letters at first, and then parcels bound up in twine and brown paper, some of them quite bulky. The
first of these mass petitions was from the citizens of Harrisburg and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, conservative towns in the southern part of the state. Before long, others were arriving from Philadelphia, from Illinois, even from
New England. New York City’s two petitions bore 63,000 names. The appeal from St. Louis filled ninety-five pages of foolscap paper and came wrapped, literally, in the American flag. The one from
Massachusetts—hit hard by the first economic shocks of the crisis—was a scroll so massive that it had to be rolled like a cartwheel onto the floor of the House. One particular petition especially pleased Crittenden:
it was signed by 14,000 women in states from Vermont to North Carolina. (“I hope their interposition may have some influence upon the sterner nature of man,” he told the Senate.) So many entreaties eventually arrived that it required four pages of small type in the
Senate Journal
simply to list the names of all the towns and cities. Elsewhere massive outdoor rallies were held despite the January cold. On a snowy night in Philadelphia, six thousand
“workingmen” gathered outside Independence Hall and unanimously endorsed Crittenden’s plan with throaty cheers.
37
Part of the reason for such an outpouring is that people were starting to grasp the potential costs—the literal costs—of war. The first warning came from the
stock market, which began to falter and then plunge in the first weeks after Lincoln’s election. Few ordinary citizens owned shares in those days, but when wealthy bankers like
August Belmont began reporting that their
investments were down as much as 30 percent, more democratic misery seemed certain to follow. Textile manufacturers and their shareholders panicked at the prospect of losing the South’s
cotton shipments; by January, their stocks had fallen 40 percent from what they were a year earlier.
Western
merchants and steamboat lines faced the possibility that the entire lower
Mississippi might be closed to commercial shipping indefinitely. And would secession mean that all the debts owed by Southern planters—many of them mortgaged up to their eyebrows—would become uncollectable? Demand for new goods plummeted, and soon enough factories began laying off workers by the tens of thousands. “Boston streets to-day are full of discharged workmen,” reported the
Boston Courier.
“Our laboring population have a dreary
winter before them.”
38
Ads that began appearing in the major New York newspapers did not exactly help matters:
In consequence of the
PANIC! PANIC! PANIC!
We are determined to offer our very large stock of fall importations
for the balance of the season at such prices as will command an immediate sale.
E. WILLIAMS & CO.
Owing to the troublesome times into which our country has fallen we have made a
FURTHER REDUCTION
in our prices, in order to convert our goods into cash before the
UNION GOES TO PIECES!
W.J.F. Dailey & Co.
39
One day in early January, when a rumor reached Wall Street that “the compromise measures proposed by Mr. Crittenden had been agreed to unanimously,” stocks shot instantly back up, only to drop again when the report proved erroneous. In the weeks that followed, as grassroots support for the Crittenden plan surged, the market began gradually rising once more. “ ‘It is said’ and ‘perhaps’ are quite sufficient to give
stocks a lift,” noted the editor of one commercial newspaper.
40
It was a month of hearsay, anonymous leaks, and contradictions; a month when everything seemed to be happening much too fast, and when many of the strangest reports were the ones that turned out to be true.
In Washington, there was talk of an impending coup d’état against the federal government, a popular uprising against the “official imbecility” that was letting the nation drift toward the brink of
catastrophe. Hastily formed militia units drilled by night in the remoter reaches of the District, pledging that they would sooner reduce the entire capital to ashes than permit the inauguration of a Black Republican president.
41
In New York, Mayor
Fernando Wood declared his support for secession: not just of the South but also of his own
city, which was to become an independent trading republic. (One presumes that the mayor himself would have become its president.) Wood even had a name for his imaginary nation: “Tri-Insula,” since it would consist of Manhattan,
Staten Island, and
Long Island. New York’s city council endorsed the idea, as did a number of leading businessmen. “I would have New York a free city,” one
of them wrote, “not a free city with respect to the liberty of the negro, but a free city in commerce and trade.”
42
The national disaster seemed to have unleashed all manner of explosive energies, sending the planets spinning out of their accustomed orbits. Every day brought fresh astonishments. One morning in late January, Northern readers opened their newspapers to discover support
for Southern secession coming from the very last place they would have expected. At a Boston abolitionist meeting,
Wendell Phillips had rejoiced at
the slave states’ departure and the Constitution’s demise. “The Covenant with Death is annulled—the Agreement with Hell is broken to pieces,” he cried. “The chain which has held the slave system since 1787 is parted.” The closing words of his speech seemed calculated to provoke howls of rage—and did: “All hail, then,
Dis
union!”
Telegraphic dispatches brought Phillips’s speech to readers across the North, most of whom—even those who spared no sympathy for slaveholders—branded him a traitor. (“THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE,” screamed a typical headline in the usually staid and solidly Republican
New York Times.
“The Abolitionists Giving the Right Hand of Fellowship to the Disunionists.”) Less than a week later,
when Phillips again stepped onto a public stage at the annual meeting of the
Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, several hundred rough-looking characters—clearly not dues-paying members—packed the balconies. As soon as he tried to speak, they drowned him out with hisses, jeers, foot-stomping, barnyard noises, cheers for Crittenden and the Union, and even a sarcastic chorus or two of “Dixie.” Next, no less a luminary
than
Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped up warily with a sheaf of lecture notes in hand, only to be hooted and heckled off the speakers’ platform. At last, after the mayor of Boston ordered the hall cleared to avert a full-on riot and abolitionists scattered in all directions, several hundred infuriated demonstrators chased Phillips back to his house on Essex Street, waving brickbats and howling “Carve him out!” as policemen
struggled to restrain the mob. For weeks afterward Phillips was a virtual prisoner, with bodyguards standing vigil outside his front door and Boston toughs prowling nearby, vowing vengeance.
43
Back in Washington, however, Crittenden’s cause—despite such warm support in the North—was growing more and more desperate. Time and again he took to the Senate floor with his latest armload of petitions. He hosted a dinner party for thirty people at the National Hotel—hospitality that stretched the limits of his modest pocketbook—including such potential allies as General Scott and the justices of the Supreme Court, as well as
influential senators and congressmen from both parties. When that availed him little, he made an unprecedented proposal: Congress, instead of voting on the compromise package, should submit it to a nationwide popular referendum. Finally, to render his legislative ideas yet more alluring to the South, he added two new constitutional amendments that had originally been suggested by
Stephen Douglas. One would bar free blacks from voting
in elections or holding public office, while the other guaranteed that if any state wished to eliminate its population of free blacks entirely, the federal government would pay to have them shipped off to Africa or South America. “Peace and harmony and union in a great nation were never purchased at so cheap a rate,” Crittenden pleaded to his Northern colleagues, sounding more than ever like a rug merchant trying to unload the last odds and ends of his shopworn
stock. A few weeks earlier, he had called the price a comparative trifle; now he compared it to “a barleycorn” and “a little atom.”
44
But fewer and fewer of Crittenden’s fellow senators from the free states seemed much interested in his merchandise, no matter how low the price. The entire existence of the Republican Party was predicated on a commitment to containing slavery within its present bounds. Were its leaders to abrogate this fundamental principle, at the very hour of their electoral triumph? The cartloads of petitions in support of compromise must be weighed against the grassroots
fervor of the recent campaign: nearly two million Americans in the North had voted for Lincoln, despite all the Southern warnings that his victory would mean
disunion. Although it was true that the Republican candidate had carried the nation as a whole with fewer than 40 percent of the votes cast, all but three of the Northern states had given him solid majorities—in some cases, overwhelming ones. It was clear which way the wind was blowing
above the Mason-Dixon Line; Major
Anderson’s move to Fort Sumter had made him a hero precisely because he had refused to yield to Southern threats.