Coming Fury, Volume 1 (33 page)

Shortly after South Carolina seceded, Stephen Douglas had written that “many of the Republican hordes are for disunion while professing intense devotion to the Union.” And he amplified this in another letter by remarking that many Republican leaders “wish to get rid of the Southern Senators in order to have a majority in the Senate to confirm Lincoln’s appointments.” He himself had not quite given up hope for a peaceful settlement, but he could never agree “that any State can secede and separate from us without our consent,” and he felt that no adjustment would work if it failed to “
banish the slavery question from Congress forever
.”
⁸

In the House of Representatives a committee of thirty-three had been wrestling with the problem, and in January this committee found itself unable to agree on anything. Charles Francis Adams, of Massachusetts, dryly remarked that no adjustment would satisfy the deep South unless it put into the Federal Constitution “a recognition of this obligation to protect and extend slavery”; and in the end the helpless committee simply directed its chairman, stout Tom Corwin, of Ohio, to present to the House, with such comments as he cared to make, the principal resolutions the committee had had under consideration. Corwin eventually managed to
win House approval of a resolution asking for repeal of the free state “personal liberty laws” and faithful execution of the fugitive slave laws, and late in February both Houses approved a constitutional amendment providing that the Constitution could never be amended in such a manner as to give Congress the power to interfere with slavery in any slave state. Yet this meant little, the projected amendment died of simple inanition, and Corwin wrote to Lincoln that “Southern men are theoretically crazy … Extreme Northern men are practical fools.” If the several states, he said, were no more ready to seek harmony than the members of the committee of thirty-three, “we must dissolve & a long & bloody civil war must follow.” For whatever consolation there might be, he added: “I think, if you live, you may take the oath.”
⁹

In the Senate the aging Senator John J. Crittenden, of Kentucky, fought valiantly and without success for a plan by which the old Missouri compromise line would be restored and written into the Constitution for all time—no slave states to be formed in territory north of the parallel of thirty-six thirty, slavery to be permitted (at the option of the citizens) in any states to be formed from territory south of that line. But Crittenden could not even bring his proposition to a vote. He at last demanded that his compromise be submitted to the people of the entire nation in a solemn referendum, and as good an abolitionist as Horace Greeley wrote later that if this could have been done, the plan would almost certainly have carried with a large majority. But the Senate refused to vote on this suggestion, either, and any possibilities it might have offered were never put to the test. Crittenden argued for it with moving eloquence: “It will be an open shame to the Senate of the United States, an open shame to the Government of the United States, if, under such circumstances as now exist, this great Government is allowed to fall in ruins.… Peace and harmony and union in a great nation were never purchased at so cheap a rate as we now have it in our power to do.… The people will give good advice as to how this matter ought to be settled.… Balance the consequences of a civil war and the consequences of your now agreeing to the stipulated terms of peace here, and see how they compare with one another.”
¹⁰

This won no votes. In twelve months the country had heard
much talk—too much, perhaps; it had lived too long in a cave of the winds, and now it seemed to be reaching a point where things done were more persuasive than things said. In the North, men could see that there was great danger, but they continued to hope that things might yet be settled peaceably; Major Anderson was a popular hero, partly because he had stood firm, but even more, apparently, because he had refrained from shooting when he had his loaded guns trained on a hostile target. There were odd crosscurrents. Mayor Fernando Wood, of New York, was openly proposing that New York declare itself a free city, dealing with both North and South on a friendly basis and so offering “the only light and hope for a future reconstruction of our once blessed confederacy.” Senator Seward was telling the Senate that the notion that a settlement could be worked out after peaceful separation looked like an admission that destruction must go before reconstruction, and he doubted that the Union could be saved “by some cunning and insincere compact of pacification.” Abolitionist orators were openly welcoming secession, as if this convulsive step would at last take the great evil of slavery off forever beyond the horizon; but audiences were cool to this sort of talk, as if they were beginning to consider Union more important than slavery. The famous agitator Wendell Phillips told a Boston meeting that he was a disunion man, and that he hoped the slave states would leave the Union as quickly as possible; he was hissed and jostled, and police had to escort him out of the hall, and in Rochester a crowd broke up an abolitionist meeting, gave three cheers for the Union, and passed informal resolutions commending Major Anderson and General Scott.
¹¹

Meanwhile, one fact was becoming obvious. The Republicans had won the last election and were in the driver’s seat. They had campaigned on the notion that there should be no extension of slavery in the territories and on that point they would not yield an inch. Their leaders were as unwilling to compromise as any cotton-state fire-eaters—with whom, indeed, they shared an extremely accurate understanding of what the election had really meant. A step had been taken which must ultimately mean the containment of slavery; unless this step were canceled, slavery could not be permanent but must eventually die. The Republican leaders
would no more give up this point than men like Toombs and Davis would accept it. To win peace and a continued harmonious Union, Crittenden was in fact asking the people of the North to reconsider the verdict they had rendered at the polls. What the people themselves might have said if the proposition had finally come to them is beyond determination, but as a political proposition it was something the party leadership would not dream of embracing.

To outward appearances Lincoln, the President-elect, was doing nothing much more lofty than work on the selection of his cabinet, which was partly a matter of choosing his own administrative advisers and assistants and partly a matter of putting the new party together on an enduring basis. Privately, however, he was working against compromise. On January 28 the New York
Herald
reported him as saying that he would “suffer death” before accepting any compromise “which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of this government to which we have a constitutional right.” Correspondent Henry Villard wrote from Springfield that Lincoln was “firmly, squarely and immovably set against any compromise position that will involve a sacrifice of Republican principles,” and Senator Charles Sumner exultantly wrote to Governor John A. Andrew, of Massachusetts, that Lincoln “is firm as a rock” against the Crittenden proposal. Sumner wrote out the words Lincoln had given him:

“Give them personal liberty bills & they will pull in the slack, hold on, & insist on the border state compromise—give them that, they’ll again pull in the slack & demand Crit’s comp.—that pulled in, they will want all that So. Carolina asks.” To one pleader for compromise, Sumner wrote, Lincoln had said that “he would sooner go out into his back yard & hang himself”; and according to Sumner’s letter, Lincoln had ended his interview with the flat statement: “By no act or complicity of mine shall the Republican party become a ‘mere sucked egg—all shell—no principle in it.’ ” In a postscript, Summer labeled this letter “private—except for the faithful.”
¹²

This did not mean that there could never be a compromise. Villard believed that Lincoln’s firmness rested in large part on the belief that his election must be accepted first. Chosen by a minority of all the voters, he had nevertheless been chosen in the Constitutional manner, and the reporter wrote that “he desires to see the somewhat
uncertain disposition of the border slave states yield to the rights of the majority, and obedience to the Federal Constitution and laws fully decided by his inauguration, before his friends shall make any move for reconciliation upon the basis of congressional enactments or Constitutional amendments.” In informal conversations at this time, Villard said Lincoln expressed doubts about the possibility of retaining in the Union, by force, states that were determined to leave; he refused to encourage anti-slavery leaders who hoped that the whole secession crisis would somehow bring about the end of slavery, and he firmly believed that property in slaves was protected by the Constitution. Lincoln was under pressure, and he was showing it. On January 11, the Illinois politician W. H. L. Wallace wrote that “he is continually surrounded by a crowd of people,” and said that “he looks care worn & more haggard & stooped than I ever saw him.” Editor C. H. Ray, of the Chicago
Tribune
, a dedicated enemy of slavery, wrote that Lincoln was honest and patriotic enough for anybody, but that “more
iron
would do him no harm.”
¹³

It may be that by insisting on immediate secession the leaders of the Gulf Squadron had played their high trump too soon. The threat to secede had been a powerful weapon, but when secession became a visible fact rather than a threat, the argument was moved to a level where it was very hard to carry on negotiations. On most points affecting slavery, moderate Republican leaders like Lincoln were prepared to make some adjustments, but they would make no adjustments whatever on the question of union. Slowly but steadily the men of the North were beginning to realize that they were facing a new issue. Once they fully understood this point they would show a firmness that had not been anticipated.

Signs of this new firmness were appearing. On January 11 the New York legislature passed resolutions pledging full support to the President, in men and in money, in any action he might take to enforce the laws and uphold the authority of the Federal government. The resolutions also thanked the Union-loving citizens of those slave states that had not seceded; and, with a blithe incapacity to understand how these resolves might be regarded in the South, the New York authorities sent copies to the various Southern governors. Virginia’s governor indignantly returned his copy with the curt request that no more communications of this kind be forwarded,
and the Tennessee legislature asked Governor Harris to tell New York that if that state ever sent armed forces into the South, the people of Tennessee would resist “at all hazards and to the last extremity.” But if the action of the New York legislature was tactless, it was indicative of a changing attitude, as was the fact that similar resolutions were presently adopted in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The Pennsylvania legislature chimed in with the considered opinion that “the right of the people of a single state to absolve themselves at will, and without the consent of other states, from their most solemn obligations, and hazard the liberties and happiness of the millions composing this union, cannot be acknowledged.”
¹⁴

On the surface the Southern position looked weak. Of the fifteen slave states, only seven had voted to secede. The border states’ reluctance to move hinted strongly that outside of the cotton belt the institution was in fact beginning to die, and that “containment” was actually beginning to take place. Yet this very weakness served to stiffen the spines of the secessionists. Time was running out, and the whole way of life that was based on slavery and symbolized by slavery’s existence was threatened not so much by a recent Republican victory as by the inexorable passage of the years. To remain in the Union was to consent to the eventual transformation of Southern society. It was now or never, and this was the imperative that drove moderates like Davis down the trail blazed by extremists like Yancey.

Even though most of them owned no slaves and never would own any, the great mass of Southern people would follow when the final testing came. They identified themselves completely with a life and a land that seemed good to them; even more, they identified themselves with a dominant race which drew status and happiness from a rigid caste system whose dissolution, as far as they could see, would reduce their ordered existence to chaos. It was the massed presence of the mute and luckless Negro that exerted the real pressure. The average Southerner might not fight for slavery, but he would fight to the death to avert race equality. The average Northerner, in turn, even though he might share in this prejudice, would not understand the force it exerted—not until he tripped over it.

Nearly two years later, when the war that was now approaching
was in full swing, a North Carolina mountaineer wrote to Governor Zebulon Vance a letter that expressed the non-slaveholder’s point of view perfectly. Believing that some able-bodied men ought to stay at home to preserve order, this man set forth his feelings: “We have but little interest in the value of slaves, but there is one matter in this connection about which we feel a very deep interest. We are opposed to Negro equality. To prevent this we are willing to spare the last man, down to the point where women and children begin to suffer for food and clothing; when these begin to suffer and die, rather than see them equalized with an inferior race we will die with them. Everything, even life itself, stands pledged to the cause; but that our greatest strength may be employed to the best advantage and the struggle prolonged let us not sacrifice at once the object for which we are fighting.”
¹⁵

Real compromise was all but impossible. The most profound emotional force in the South was leading men to revolt against the whole trend of the times, and a tragically isolated society was preparing to risk everything in the attempt to preserve a past that was dissolving. Even if the Republican leaders had had the will to give the South the “guarantees” which it demanded, they actually lacked the power to do it, because those guarantees were out of any man’s reach. War might come and great victories might be won, but the South was struggling for an unattainable.