Mr. Crittenden's proposal of Amendments to the Constitution did not and could not command the two-thirds majority in Congress necessary to their submission to the several states for ratification. The cry of the Northern extremists was "No backing down! No inch of concession to the slave power! No surrender of the fruits of the victory we have won!" The cry of the Southern radicals was: "There is no use in paper guarantees! We cannot trust them! Our enemies have not kept faith in the past and will not keep faith in the future. Let us abandon the hopeless effort for compromises that cannot be enforced! Let us secede and set up a new republic of our own!"
Then came Virginia into the breach, as she had so often come before. Standing as she did for conservatism and for that Union which her legislature had been the first to suggest and which her statesmen had done so much to bring into beneficent being, she appealed to the sentiment of Union and patriotism throughout the land. Her legislature asked that all the states should appoint delegates to a great peace conference at Washington, whose statesmanlike duty it should be to devise and agree upon some plan of adjustment by which the danger that overshadowed the Republic might be averted. This appeal for peace was made on the nineteenth day of January, 1861—more than a fortnight before the date appointed for the election of a constitutional convention in Virginia to consider the crisis.
It is idle to speculate upon the "might have been." What actually happened was that many of the states appointed to that peace conference delegates of radical views and intemperate minds, whose endeavors from first to last were ceaselessly devoted not to the task of finding a way out, but to the preconceived purpose of defeating the objects of the peace conference.
In the end a committee of that body did indeed recommend a policy practically identical with that outlined in Mr. Crittenden's proposed amendments to the Constitution. But the extremists on both sides and especially the politicians on both sides who sniffed preferment in the air of radicalism, were by that time so far dominant that the proposal came to nothing. It failed of acceptance in either house of Congress when put to a vote within a brief time before the end of the session.
Nevertheless Virginia still resolutely held out against secession and five other border states stood by her in that patriotic attitude for a month and a half more.
Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated on the fourth of March, and straightway there set in a rivalry among the Republican leaders for the control of his administration. Even those who had most actively aided in his election gravely misunderstood and seriously underestimated the character of the man they had chosen to be president. They assumed from the beginning that somebody, other than himself, must direct his administration, and there was eager rivalry among them to usurp that function.
They did not know Abraham Lincoln or realize his intellectual or moral power. The extreme abolitionists beset him with plans to make war upon the seceding states with the avowed purpose of abolishing slavery in all the states by the high hand and without regard to that Constitution which they had declared to be a "league with death and a covenant with hell." To these Mr. Lincoln replied that while they were free to advocate any policy they pleased, he at least, was bound by his official oath to support and maintain the Constitution of the United States. In the end, of course, and when strenuous war was on he did indeed take a different view. As a "war measure" he in the end proclaimed emancipation, without even a pretense of constitutional authority to do so, and indeed in direct defiance of the Constitution. But at least he hesitated to do this, and waited before doing it until the exigencies of an uncertain war seemed to force that extreme measure upon him as one of national self-defense.
At the first he decided as his fixed policy to assert the authority of the National Government in the seceding states, to insist upon the enforcement of the laws there, to recover such government property as those states had seized upon and to use such force as might be required for these ends. He clearly understood that there were men by hundreds of thousands in the North who would stand by him in an endeavor thus to restore and maintain the Union, but who would instantly and angrily desert him should he proclaim a war for the extirpation of slavery within the states in which that institution constitutionally existed.
Accordingly he addressed all his endeavors solely to the task of asserting and maintaining the national authority in the seceding states.
Had all the Southern states seceded before he assumed office his problem would have been an easy one. He would simply have had to call upon the Northern states for military forces sufficient to carry out this program of law enforcement. But Virginia had not seceded, and five other Southern states had submitted their course to Virginia's decision. Virginia was anxiously busying herself to find some ground of reconciliation, some means of accomplishing that preservation of the Union which Mr. Lincoln had declared to be his own and only object of endeavor.
But if Mr. Lincoln was to enforce the laws in the seceding states, and thus to maintain the Union, he must have troops. The little regular army could not furnish them. Either the militia must be called out or volunteers must be summoned for the purpose.
Mr. Lincoln called upon all the states that had not yet seceded for their several quotas required to make up an army of 75,000 men, with which in effect to coerce the seceding states into submission. He demanded that Virginia should furnish her quota of troops for this purpose, and Virginia, deeming the purpose to be an unlawful and iniquitous one, decided to secede—as she had thitherto resolutely refused to do—rather than aid in a coercion which all her Union-loving and peace-loving people regarded as a wrong, an injustice, an unconstitutional and unlawful aggression upon the rights of sovereign states.
Virginia seceded unwillingly and not at all because her people regarded Mr. Lincoln's election as affording any just ground for the withdrawal of any state from the Union, but solely because the mother state was forced to choose between secession on the one hand and the lending of active assistance on the other to what all Virginians regarded as a wicked and wanton warfare by the Federal Government upon sovereign states for having exercised what all Virginians held—as most Americans had previously and sometimes aggressively held—to be their reserved rights under the Constitution.
It was on the fifteenth day of April, 1861, that Mr. Lincoln called upon Virginia for her quota of troops with which to coerce the seceding states into submission. It was on the sixteenth day of April that Virginia's constitutional convention, bravely resolute in its love for the Union and in its antagonism to the policy of secession, was confronted with the choice of furnishing troops to aid in what its members almost unanimously regarded as a political crime or the alternative of joining that secession movement from which the sober and conservative thought of Virginia had so long and so courageously held aloof in defiance of criticism and in face of contempt and contumely.
To men of high minds, holding these views, there could be but one choice in such a case. They decreed that Virginia should prefer a secession which that state overwhelmingly disapproved, to a dishonor which no Virginian could contemplate with a satisfied mind. Accordingly Virginia's strongly pro-Union convention reluctantly adopted an ordinance of secession, on the seventeenth day of April, 1861, not of choice but upon a conviction of necessity. The other border states that had waited for Virginia's decision to determine their own, became at once members of the new Southern Confederacy and the question of war or peace was finally decided in behalf of war—war to the limit of possibility, war to the utmost end of endurance, war to the point of exhaustion on the one side or the other.
A wise prophet, basing his prophecies upon the patent facts of the situation, could not have failed to foretell the outcome of such a war with precision and certainty. The utmost that the South could do—even by "robbing the cradle and the grave" as was wittily and sadly said at the time, was to put 600,000 men into the field, first and last. The North was able to enlist an aggregate of 2,778,304, or, if we reduce this to a basis of three years' service for each man, the Union enlistments for three full years numbered no less than 2,326,168—or nearly four times the total enlistments in the Confederate army from beginning to end of the war. Yet the Confederate armies included practically every white man in the South who was able to bear arms. There was in effect a levy en masse, including the entire white male population from early boyhood to extreme old age.
Again the Federal Government had a navy and the Confederates none. It was