Surely nothing more senseless, more absurd or more impracticable than this was ever proposed in any country by anybody pretending to be a statesman. But the fact that it was seriously proposed and earnestly urged by a senator who at the next election was nominated and elected vice-president and who became president by virtue of Mr. Lincoln's assassination, is suggestive at least and illustrative of the intensity with which the country and its statesmen were at that time longing for a way out of the difficulty and endeavoring to find it.
In the meanwhile the radicals and extremists on both sides laughed and jeered at all such endeavors to save a Union which they had doomed to destruction by their common fiat, though in nothing else were they agreed. They found means of thwarting every effort of conservatism, and, by intemperate and incessant vituperation, they succeeded in driving many thousands out of the ranks of patriotic conservatism on the one side or the other, and into support of their demand for disunion, chaos and black night.
It was frankly recognized by many leaders of public opinion at the North, that the Southerners were somewhat justified in their attitude by their misconception of the Republican party's purposes and views, a misconception to which the intemperate utterances of extreme anti-slavery men, very naturally ministered. It was in recognition of this natural misunderstanding that Senator Benjamin F. Wade, himself an earnest and even extreme anti-slavery man, said in the Senate, two days before South Carolina seceded:
"I do not so much blame the people of the South, because I think they have been led to believe that we, to-day the dominant party, who are about to take the reins of government, are their mortal foes, and stand ready to trample their institutions under foot."
That was precisely what the Southern people believed. They were firmly convinced that the success of the Republican party meant a merciless, relentless, implacable war upon their labor and social system and upon themselves as the supporters and beneficiaries of that system.
Nevertheless they clung to the Union and labored for its preservation. Virginia supported by the other border states made every effort to secure a pacification.
Chief among these efforts was that made in Congress by John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. On the nineteenth of December, the day before South Carolina's adoption of the ordinance of secession, Mr. Crittenden offered a series of resolutions in the Senate which were designed to compose the troubles of the time and to furnish a basis of peaceful settlement.
Mr. Crittenden proposed amendments to the Constitution providing:
1. That slavery should be prohibited in all territories north of the Missouri Compromise line while they remained territories and freely permitted in all territories south of that line, but with the provision that every state to be formed out of such territory, whether lying north or south of that line, should be free to decide for itself whether or not as a state it would permit slavery.
2. That Congress should have no power to abolish slavery in any place subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the United States—meaning, of course, the District of Columbia, the public reservations and the territories. It was especially provided that Congress should at no time abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of the state of Maryland and of the owners of slaves within the District.
3. That Congress should not in any way forbid the traffic in slaves from one slave state to another.
4. That the United States should be liable for the value of any fugitive slave whose recapture should be prevented by force or by intimidation and that the county in which the force or intimidation had been used should be liable to the United States for the mulct.
There were other details which need not here be considered in view of the general absurdity of the proposal. Not even Andrew Johnson's plan, already set forth, embodied more conspicuous elements of impossibility. The Northern States would never have consented to these constitutional provisions. The Southern States would never have been satisfied with them, because they carried with them no effectual provision for their own enforcement. It was folly and futility, from beginning to end, but at any rate it was patriotic folly and country-loving futility. It represented the dominant desire of the people to find some basis of reconciliation upon which the crumbling foundations of the Union might be rebuilt and securely buttressed.
The proposal—absurd and impossible as it was—was strongly supported both in Congress and in the country. Mr. Pugh of Ohio expressed in the Senate the opinion that it would command the support of nearly every state in the Union, and he pointed out the fact that no other proposal ever submitted to Congress had been supported by the petitions of so great a multitude of citizens. The conservative newspaper press passionately urged its adoption, declaring it to be a measure which would completely disarm the disunion sentiment on both sides, and suggesting to Mr. Seward that one word from him in its behalf would make a final end of the fearful threat of war which overshadowed the country.
But all these urgings were founded upon neglect to consider the all-controlling fact that the conflict between slavery and anti-slavery had become actually irrepressible, with the added element of what Charles Sumner called a "sacred animosity."
There was an active, aggressive, anti-slavery minority at the North whose members cared not one pin-point's worth for the Union except in so far as they hoped to use its power for the abolition of slavery in any way and upon any terms that might be available. They had already declared their hostility to the Constitution, and the insertion of Mr. Crittenden's amendments into that document would have served only to intensify their hatred of it and to stimulate their purpose to be rid of it. On the other hand there was an active and ceaselessly aggressive pro-slavery party at the South whose members were resolutely bent upon the destruction of the Union in order that a new Republic might be founded with African slavery as its corner stone.
Between these two radical parties there could be no peace and no neutral ground upon which to negotiate a peace. Each held the Union in contempt—the one because the Constitution protected slavery, the other because it did not adequately protect that institution. Each was ready to sacrifice the Union if by such sacrifice it might achieve its cherished purposes. The one had decried the Union and its Constitution as "a league with death and a covenant with hell" but now clung to it as a power that might be conveniently used for the accomplishment of cherished purposes. The other had despaired of its hope of using the Federal power further for its own ends. The Southern extremists wished to destroy the Union in order that its power might not be used for the extirpation of slavery; the Northern extremists, who had formerly been equally willing to "let the Union slide," were now eager for its preservation in order that its tremendous potentialities of force and compulsion might be employed in behalf of that extirpation of slavery for which alone they cared.
Neither of these extreme parties in the least degree sympathized with any effort to preserve the Union for its own sake by measures of compromise and reconciliation. The Northern radicals wanted the South to secede in order that military force might be employed for the compulsory abolition of slavery. The Southern radicals wanted the Union dissolved in order that slavery might be no further interfered with.
Neither at the North nor at the South were the radicals even yet in a majority. But in both sections they held a sort of balance of power and in both they were in effect dominant.
Under such conditions, with a conflict so truly and hopelessly irrepressible confronting the country, what conceivable hope was there of a peaceful adjustment by means of Mr. Crittenden's resolutions, or by any other means that patriotic ingenuity might devise?
The first gun had not yet been fired, but there was war on, nevertheless, and no paper resolutions however plausibly phrased could stop its progress to the cannon and