Now, in the wake of Lincoln’s election, the nation’s only hope was to stitch together yet another new compromise, by which to continue sheltering both freedom and bondage beneath the same threadbare tent. A generation or two earlier, many Americans, Southerners and Northerners alike, had invested their hope in the gradual and peaceful elimination of slavery. Washington and Jefferson themselves had said this would be the only permanent solution. But by now it was impossible for the nation’s leaders to propose such an eventuality, or even to hint that it might be desirable. Not if they wanted to preserve the Union, that is. Slaveholding was now woven so tightly into the South’s culture and economy—indeed, into the whole nation’s economy—as to be almost inextricable. Even its foes acknowledged this. In 1858, Lincoln himself noted in a speech that the region’s four million slaves were valued at no less than two billion dollars. (Most recent historians have put the figure even higher.) This was an absolutely mind-boggling sum, greater than the value of all the nation’s factories and railroads, North and South, combined.19 Any scheme of compensated emancipation—like that adopted by Great Britain several decades earlier—would consume an impractically huge portion of the federal budget (then about 75 million dollars annually) for at least thirty years, without even accounting for the disruption of Southern agriculture and Northern industry. Slaves, even more than land, were the Southern planters’ most valuable and reliable capital asset: not only did they produce annual income (and increase in number over time); they also could be mortgaged, rented, or liquidated quite easily, at prices that were rising steadily each year. The more new territory was opened to slave agriculture, the greater the fresh demand for slave labor, and the higher the value of those human investments would soar.*
No wonder many Southerners, fully aware of these financial realities, so fiercely opposed any limit on slavery’s expansion: their stake was not merely in their individual holdings but in the system and market as a whole. No wonder they had long since begun maintaining that slavery was not a tolerable evil but rather a positive good. No wonder, indeed, that many even made a well-reasoned case that white Americans’ continued freedom depended on the blacks’ continued enslavement. “Actual liberty and equality [for] our white population has been approached much nearer than in the free states,” wrote one of the most extreme theorists, Virginia’s George Fitzhugh. “Few of our whites ever work as day laborers … or in other menial capacities. One free citizen does not lord it over another; hence that feeling of independence and equality that distinguishes us.” As for the Declaration of Independence, with its promise of universal equality, Fitzhugh professed disgust that a fellow Virginian and slaveholder could ever have written such a thing, calling the document “absurd and … dangerous.… Some were born with saddles on their backs,” he concluded, “and others booted and spurred to ride them—and the riding does them good.”20
In 1854, when Fitzhugh wrote those words, it had been easy enough for Northerners to dismiss him as a mere crank propagandist. But soon, even mainstream Southern politicians would be publicly espousing such views. In early 1861, ex-governor Richard Call of Florida—an old-line Unionist—wrote to a friend in Pennsylvania to explain why Northerners must accept slavery as a permanent feature of American life:
It should be considered as it is, an institution interwoven and inseparably connected with our social and political system, as a domestic institution of the States, and a national institution, created by the American people and protected by the Constitution of the United States.… The African seems designed by the Creator for a slave … with a mind incapable of a higher elevation than that which is required to direct the machinery of his limbs to useful action.21
By then, every American—whether Yankee or Southerner, abolitionist or slaveholder—knew that if the Union was to survive without bloodshed, it would have to remain a version of Washington, D.C., writ large. The squalid realities of slavery would continue their uneasy coexistence with the gleaming monuments of freedom or all would be lost. So, in the dark winter days when the states of the Deep South, one by one, lined up to follow South Carolina out of the Union, it was to the last surviving Old Gentlemen that the hopes of the nation turned.
THROUGH THE SLUSHY STREETS of Washington that January hurried a figure familiar to all the longtime residents of the capital: a white-haired man, his hollow cheeks and lantern jaw like a death’s-head on a slate gravestone, his black overcoat flapping around him in the wind. This was the Union’s unlikely guardian angel. Almost everyone in the city knew John J. Crittenden, and all who knew him were fond of him, whatever their political faction. He had the bluff good nature of a backcountry farmer: on meeting an acquaintance, the weatherbeaten senator would, surprisingly, flush with pleasure like a boy, his thin lips breaking into a lopsided grin to reveal a mouthful of splayed teeth stained mahogany by a lifetime of tobacco chewing. (At one of Senator Seward’s high-toned soirees, Crittenden once absentmindedly, though expertly, squirted an ample stream of brown juice onto the richly carpeted floor.)
Kentuckians had first sent Crittenden to the Senate more than forty years earlier. Throughout most of that long span, he had been content to remain in the shadow of his close friend and senior colleague, a man with whom he shared an appreciation for fast horses and fine bourbon: Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser. After Clay’s death in 1852, Crittenden had, somewhat against his will, been anointed the moderates’ new chieftain. Though he had never made a notably brilliant speech, he hated neither slaveholders nor Republicans, and loved his united country with the unfeigned earnestness of one who had come of age in the days of Jefferson, dined with Lafayette, and fought to defend his nation’s sovereignty in 1812. While still a teenager, Crittenden had been a student and protégé of the late Judge Bibb, for whom he later named his eldest son. A Baltimore newspaperman once called him the Senate’s “connecting link between the glorious past and the doubtful present.”22
Now many people hoped Crittenden might be the connecting link that could hold together North and South. By the time the secession crisis broke, he was not only the Senate’s leading moderate but also its most senior member. In the days after the presidential election, some Republican newspapers predicted that Lincoln, as a gesture of national unity, would appoint him secretary of state. Other rumors had it that the seventy-four-year-old statesman was on a confidential mission to South Carolina, working behind the scenes to restore calm. Meanwhile, dozens of Crittenden’s influential friends—from former President Martin Van Buren to Winfield Scott, the army’s highest-ranking general—barraged him with letters proposing various schemes for reconciliation. One envisioned splitting the Union into two perfectly equal parts, while another suggested a law that would emancipate all America’s slaves by 1890, at a rate of precisely 3.3 percent each year. John B. Bibb, the brother of Crittenden’s old mentor, wrote from his Kentucky plantation to recommend—as many other correspondents did—that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 be reinstated, drawing a line straight across the continent to separate slave territory from free. General Scott laid out a detailed plan that would amicably divide the entire country into four “new Unions,” with their capitals at Albany, New York; Columbia, South Carolina; Alton, Illinois; and some unspecified point on the Pacific coast. (If Crittenden found this an odd suggestion from the man in charge of defending the nation’s borders, he didn’t say.)23
Ordinary citizens sent missives, too, offering dozens of different solutions, many of them even more elaborate and far-fetched than Scott’s: surely the national puzzle could be solved with a bit of practical American ingenuity, like a mantelpiece clock that had stopped and just needed some tinkering to set it aright. Many forwarded petitions, resolutions, sermons. Appeals came from the concerned citizens of Dubuque, Iowa, and from the inmates of an asylum for “deaf mutes” in Georgia. One New Jerseyan spoke for many when he vented his disgust at abolitionists and Southern extremists alike, proposing that the middle states should together form their own new cou
ntry, “leaving all the New England states out, to burn witches … and affiliate with Niggers. After we get rid of them we shall have peace.” There was one thing nearly all the letter writers had in common: they extolled Crittenden as the only person who could save the country. A Virginian addressed him as “one of the Fathers of the Republic.” Another called him “the patriarch of the Union.” A third man hailed “one of the last of our Country’s noblest Patriots,” adding, in parentheses, “Alas, for the old days!” An anonymous correspondent signing him-self “A Southerner & Lover of His Country” could not restrain his passion: “I love you God knows I love you,” his somewhat surprising letter to Crittenden began.24 Never in his long life had the genial Kentuckian been the object of so much attention, let alone adoration.
It was as though these citizens believed that, by the sheer force of their hopes and prayers, they could somehow transform an elderly, mild-mannered legislator into some sort of reincarnation of George Washington, into a latter-day national saint. “The eyes of all good men in all sections are turned toward you,” a minister in Baltimore wrote. “The prospect looks dark, but the God of our Fathers will I believe yet in some way bring deliverance.… Unless indeed our national sins are so great that God must punish us.”25
Interestingly, few Americans pinned their hopes for compromise on either the outgoing president or the incoming one. Buchanan was a lame duck, while Lincoln remained at home in Springfield, still seemingly as mute about his plans and intentions as the inmates of that Georgia asylum.26 (“We don’t know what Lincoln wants,” even a leading Republican congressman complained. “He communicates nothing even to his friends here & so we drift along.”)27 Anyhow, the federal government’s executive branch in the antebellum period had usually been far less powerful than its legislative branch. In nearly all past crises, the compromises that preserved the Union had been forged in Congress.
Four years earlier, when Preston Brooks had bludgeoned Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate, it was Crittenden who tried to step between the two men, crying out, “Don’t kill him!”—only to have another Southern congressman brandish his cane to block the Kentuckian from intervening.28 He had failed to stop the bloodshed that day. Now the nation seemed to depend on whether he could succeed—this time on a far larger scale.
So the old man made his sedulous way around the city, pushing his blueprint for national harmony on almost any colleague who would listen. It was not quite as intricate as General Scott’s exercise in topographic geometry, but almost. The Crittenden Compromise, as it came to be known, proposed six amendments to the U.S. Constitution, all of them granting major concessions to the peculiar institution. The first of these amendments would reinstate the Missouri Compromise line, protecting slavery in all the states and territories south of it—including any territories that might be acquired in the future. The second would deny Congress the authority to abolish slavery anywhere under its jurisdiction within a slave state (a military base, for instance). The third specifically protected slavery’s existence in the District of Columbia. The fourth barred Congress from interfering with the interstate slave trade (and thus abrogated the Commerce Clause, which since 1787 had been a cornerstone of the Constitution). The fifth promised that slaveholders who had been forcibly prevented from recovering escaped slaves—prevented by abolitionists, that is—would receive full restitution for their “property” from the federal government. Crittenden’s sixth and final amendment would block all the other amendments from ever being altered, and deny Congress forever the power to abolish slavery.29
His mission was a lonely one. Since Congress had reconvened at the beginning of December—the first time since Lincoln’s election—sarcasm, invective, and histrionics had prevailed.30 Legislator re-opened old wounds at any opportunity, called one another “the honorable Senator” in tones communicating quite the opposite, and turned disagreements over minor points of order into occasions for roiling tirades against the treason of secession or the perfidy of abolition. About ninety seconds into the session’s first day, Senator Thomas Clingman of North Carolina, seizing the floor by responding to a routine motion about printing a document, swerved sharply into an hourlong attack on the president-elect as a “dangerous man” whose aim was “to make war on my section [of the country] until its social system is destroyed.” As soon as Clingman sat down, Senator Crittenden rose to beg his colleagues to maintain a tone of “calm consideration” in the face of impending national disaster. His entreaties were futile. The next morning, Senator Alfred Iverson of Georgia arrived with a speech in hand that made Clingman’s sound measured: “Sir, disguise the fact as you will, there is an enmity between the Southern people that is deep and enduring, and you can never eradicate it—never!… We are enemies as much as if we were hostile States.” Southern politicians who opposed secession, Iverson intimated, should be assassinated if they did not submit. And he closed with a promise to “meet … all the myrmidons of Abolitionism and Black Republicanism everywhere, upon our own soil; and … we will ‘welcome you with bloody hands to hospitable graves.’ ”31
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 Kentuckian36—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
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