Abraham Lincoln: a History Volume Ii Part 32

CHAPTER XXVII

THE HOUSE COMMITTEE OF THIRTY-THREE

[Sidenote] Compare Boteler's statement of origin of his resolution, "Globe," Jan. 10, 1861, p. 316.

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 4, 1860, p. 6.

While this discussion was going on in the Senate, very similar proceedings were taking place in the House of Representatives, except that declarations of revolutionary purpose were generally of a more practical and decisive character. The President's message had no sooner been received and read, and the usual formal motion made to refer and print, than the friends of compromise, representing here, as in the Senate, the substantial sentiment of the border slave-States, made a sincere effort to take control and bring about the peaceable arrangement and adjustment of what they a.s.sumed to be the extreme differences between the South and the North. Mr. Boteler, of Virginia, seizing the momentary leaders.h.i.+p, moved to amend by referring so much of the message "as relates to the present perilous condition of the country" to a special committee of one from each State. The Union being at that time composed of thirty-three States, this committee became known as the Committee of Thirty-three. Several other amendments were offered but objected to, and the previous question having been ordered, the amendment was agreed to and the committee raised by a vote of 145 yeas to 38 nays; the negative vote coming, in the main, from the more p.r.o.nounced anti-slavery men.

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 4, 1860, p. 7.

[Sidenote] Ibid.

[Sidenote] Ibid.

[Sidenote] Ibid.

[Sidenote] Ibid.

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 4, 1860. p. 7.

[Ill.u.s.tration: JUSTIN S. MURPHY.]

Though this was the first roll-call of the session, the disunion conspirators, one after another, made haste to declare the treasonable att.i.tude of their States. Pending the vote, Mr. Singleton declined recording his name for the reason that Mississippi had called a convention to consider this subject. He was not sent here for the purpose of making any compromise or to patch up existing difficulties.

Mr. Jones, of Georgia, said he did not vote on this question because his State, like Mississippi, had called a convention to decide all these questions of Federal relations. Mr. Hawkins, of Florida, said his people had resolved to determine, in convention in their sovereign capacity, the time, place, and manner of redress. It was not for him to take any action on the subject. His State was opposed to all and every compromise. The day of compromise was past. Mr. Clopton, of Alabama, declined voting because the State of Alabama is proceeding to consider in a convention what action is required to maintain her rights, honor, and safety. Believing that a State has the right to secede, and that the only remedy for present evils is secession, he would not hold out any delusive hope or sanction any temporizing policy. Mr. Miles, of South Carolina, said "the South Carolina delegation have not voted on this question because they conceive they have no interest in it. We consider our State as already withdrawn from the confederacy in everything except form." Mr. Pugh, of Alabama, said: "As my State of Alabama intends following South Carolina out of the Union by the 10th of January next, I pay no attention to any action taken in this body."

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 10, 1860, p. 36, 37.

These proceedings occurred on the second day of the session, December 4; two days later the Speaker announced the committee, placing at the head, as chairman, Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, and appointing such members from the different States as to make it of marked influence and ability; the disunion faction being distinctly recognized by several extreme representatives. The names were announced on Thursday, December 6;[1] and at the close of the day's session the House adjourned to the following Monday, the 10th, on which day the general discussion was fairly launched on the request of Mr. Hawkins, of Florida, to be excused from serving on the committee. He said he had asked the opinions of many Southern Members, and, with one or two exceptions, they most cordially agreed with the course he had taken. To serve on the committee would place him in a false position. Florida had taken the initiative; her Legislature had ordered an election to choose members to a convention to be convened on the 3d day of January, 1861.

The committee was a Trojan horse to gain time and demoralize the South; he regretted that it emanated from a Virginia Representative. He would tell the North that Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina were certain to secede from the Union within a short period.

Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas were certain to follow within the ensuing six months.

Three Democratic Representatives responded to this outburst, the Republican members of the House, as in the Senate, remaining discreetly silent. These Democratic speakers alleged an unfair composition of the committee, and joined in denouncing the Republican party. But upon the vital and practical question of disunion their utterances were widely divergent. As the name of each of them will a.s.sume a degree of historical prominence in the further development of the rebellion, short quotations from their remarks made at that early period will be read with interest. Daniel E. Sickles, of New York, said:

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 10, 1860, pp. 40, 41.

The city of New York will cling to the Union to the last; while she will look upon the last hour of its existence as we would upon the setting sun if we were never to see it more, yet when the call for force comes--let it come when it may--no man will ever pa.s.s the boundaries of the city of New York for the purpose of waging war against any State of this Union which, through its const.i.tuted authorities and sustained by the voice of its people, solemnly declares its rights, its interests, and its honor demand that it should seek safety in a separate existence.... The city of New York is now a subjugated dependency of a fanatical and puritanical State government that never thinks of the city except to send its tax-gatherers among us or to impose upon us hateful officials, alien to our interests and sympathies, to eat up the substance of the people by their legalized extortions.... Nothing has prevented the city of New York from a.s.serting her right to govern herself, except that provision of the Federal Const.i.tution which prohibits a State from being divided without its own consent.... When that restraint shall no longer exist, when the obligation of those const.i.tutional provisions, which forbid the division of a State without its own consent, shall be suspended, then I tell you that imperial city will throw off the odious government to which she now yields a reluctant allegiance; she will repel the hateful cabal at Albany, which has so long abused its power over her, and with her own flag sustained by the courage and devotion of her own gallant sons, she will, as a free city, open wide her gates to the civilization and commerce of the world.

Doubtless the secessionists drew hopeful auguries and fresh inspiration from this and other visionary talk frequent amid the unsteady political thought of that day. But, if so, it would have been wiser to ponder deeply the significance of the following utterances coming from a different quarter, and representing a more persistent influence, a more extended geographical area, and a greater numerical force. Clement L.

Vallandigham, of Ohio, said:

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 10, 1860, p. 38.

I speak now as a Western man; and I thank the gentleman from Florida heartily for the kindly sentiments towards that great West to which he has given utterance. Most cordially I reciprocate them, one and all. Sir, we of the North-west have a deeper interest in the preservation of this Government in its present form than any other section of the Union. Hemmed in, isolated, cut off from the seaboard upon every side; a thousand miles and more from the mouth of the Mississippi, the free navigation of which under the law of nations we demand and will have at every cost; with nothing else but our other great inland seas, the lakes, and their outlet, too, through a foreign country--what is to be our destiny? Sir, we have fifteen hundred miles of Southern frontier, and but a little narrow strip of eighty miles, or less, from Virginia to Lake Erie bounding us upon the East. Ohio is the isthmus that connects the South with the British possessions, and the East with the West. The Rocky Mountains separate us from the Pacific. Where is to be our outlet! What are we to do when you shall have broken up and destroyed this government? We are seven States now, with fourteen Senators and fifty-one Representatives, and a population of nine millions. We have an empire equal in area to the third of all Europe, and we do not mean to be a dependency or province either of the East or of the South; nor yet an inferior or secondary power upon this continent; and if we cannot secure a maritime boundary upon other terms, we will cleave our way to the seacoast with the sword. A nation of warriors we may be; a tribe of shepherds never.

No less outspoken were the similar declarations of John A. McClernand, of Illinois, who said the question of secession disclosed to his vision a boundless sea of horrors.

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 10, 1860, p. 39.

Peaceable secession, in my judgment, is a fatal, a deadly illusion.... If I am asked, Why so? I retort the question. How can it be otherwise? How are questions of public debt, public archives, public lands, and other public property, and, above all, the questions of boundary to be settled? Will it be replied that, while we are mutually unwilling now to yield anything, we will be mutually willing, after awhile, to concede everything? That, while we mutually refuse to concede anything now for the sake of national unity, we will be mutually ready to concede everything by and by for the sake of national duality? Who believes this? What, too, would be the fate of the youthful but giant Northwest in the event of a separation of the slave-holding from the non-slave-holding States? Cut off from the main Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico on one hand, or from the eastern Atlantic ports on the other, she would gradually sink into a pastoral state, and to a standard of national inferiority. This the hardy and adventurous millions of the North-west would be unwilling to consent to. This they would not do. Rather would they, to the last man, perish upon the battlefield. No power on earth could restrain them from freely and unconditionally communicating with the Gulf and the great mart of New York.

[Sidenote] Ibid., Dec. 10, 1860, p. 59.

No further noteworthy discussion occurred for a time, except the declaration of Mr. Cobb, of Alabama, that if anything were done to save his State it must be done immediately. The election for delegates to the convention would take place on the 24th of that month, and the convention would meet on the 7th of the next month. His State would not remain in this Confederacy longer than the 15th of January unless something were done.

[Sidenote] Ibid.

The House refused to excuse the several objecting members from serving on the committee; and the temper in which they proceeded to the discharge of their duty is perhaps best ill.u.s.trated by the remarks of Representative Reuben Davis, of Mississippi. He said he could "but regard this committee as a tub thrown out to the whale, to amuse only, until the 4th of March next, and thus arrest the present n.o.ble and manly movements of the Southern States to provide by that day for their security and safety out of the Union. With these views I take my place on the committee for the purpose of preventing it being made a means of deception by which the public mind is to be misled and misguided; yet intending honestly and patriotically to entertain any fair proposition for adjustment of pending evils which the Republican members may submit."

On Wednesday, December 12, the morning hour was by agreement set apart for receiving all bills and resolutions to be submitted to the Committee of Thirty-three. They were duly read and referred, without debate, to the number of twenty-three.[2] They came princ.i.p.ally from Northern members, though all four parties of the late Presidential campaign were represented, the att.i.tude of which they mainly reflected.

In substance, therefore, they embodied the same medley of affirmations and denials, of charges and countercharges, of evasions and subterfuges which party discussion had worn threadbare.

These twenty-three propositions, which were by subsequent additions increased to forty or fifty, exhibit such a variety of legislative plans that it is impossible to subject them to any cla.s.sification. They give us an abstract of the divergent views which Members of Congress entertained concerning the cause of the crisis and its remedy. They range in purport from a mere a.s.sertion of the duty of preserving and administering the government as then existing, in its simple form and symmetrical structure, to proposals to destroy and change it to a complex machine, fantastic in proportion and impracticable in its workings. They afford us evidence of the bewilderment which beset Congress as well as the outside public, and not so much the absence of reasonable political principles as the absence of a simple and direct political will, which would resolutely insist that recognized principles and existing laws should be respected and obeyed.

[Sidenote] "Globe," Dec. 12, 1860, p. 77.

[Sidenote] Ibid., p. 78.

Among the propositions submitted then and afterwards were several wild and visionary projects of government. Thus Mr. Jenkins, a Virginia member, proposed an arrangement requiring separate sanction of the slave-holding interest to each and every operation of government; a dual executive; a dual senate, or dual majority of the senate, or other advisory body or council. Mr. Noell, of Missouri, proposed to abolish the office of President, create an executive council of three members, from districts of contiguous States, give each member the veto power, and establish equilibrium between the free and the slave-States in the Senate by voluntary division of some of the slave-States.

[Sidenote] Ibid., Dec. 13, 1860, pp. 82, 83.

Stronger minds were not entirely free from the infection of this mania for innovation and experiment. On the 13th of December, 1860, Andrew Johnson, of Tennessee, afterwards President of the United States, submitted to the Senate a proposal to amend the Const.i.tution in substance as follows: That the Presidential election should take place in August; that a popular plurality in each district should count as one vote; that Congress should count the votes on the second Monday of October; that the President chosen in 1864 be from a slave-holding State, and the Vice-President from a free-State; and in 1868 the President be from a free-State and the Vice-President from a slave State, and so alternating every four years. Senators to be elected by vote of the people. Federal judges to be divided so that one-third of the number would be chosen every fourth year; the term of office to be twelve years; also all vacancies to be filled, half from free and half from slave States, the Territories to be divided, establis.h.i.+ng slavery south and prohibiting it north of a fixed line, and providing that three-fifths representation and inter-State slave trade shall not be changed.

[Sidenote] "Globe," Feb. 7, 1861, pp. 794, 795.

Perhaps the most complicated project of government was that gravely suggested in the House on the 7th of February, 1861, by Clement L.

Vallandigham, of Ohio, who, not content with the clogs of a dual form, proposed the following absurd quadruple machinery: The Union to be divided into four sections: North, West, Pacific, and South. On demand of one-third of the Senators from any section, for any action to which the concurrence of the House of Representatives may be necessary,--except on adjournment,--a vote shall be by sections, and a majority of Senators from each section shall be necessary to the validity of such action. A majority of all the electors in each of the four sections to be necessary to choice of President and Vice-President; they should hold the office six years; not to be eligible to reelection except by vote of two-thirds of the electors of each section; or of the States of each section whenever the choice devolved upon the Legislature; Congress to provide for the election of President and Vice-President when electors failed. No State might secede without consent of the Legislatures of all States of that section, the President to have power to adjust differences with seceding States, the terms of agreement to be submitted to Congress; neither Congress nor Territorial Legislatures should have power to interfere with citizens immigrating--on equal terms--to the Territories, nor to interfere with the rights of person or property in the Territories. New States to be admitted on an equal footing with old ones.

The adoption of any or all of the legislative nostrums which were severally suggested, presupposed a willingness on the part of the South to carry them out and be governed thereby. The authors of these projects lost sight of the vital difficulty, that if the South refused obedience to laws in the past she would equally refuse obedience to any in the future when they became unpalatable. It was not temporary satisfaction, but perpetual domination which she demanded. She did not need an amendment of the fugitive-slave act, or a repeal of personal liberty bills, but a change in the public sentiment of the free-States.

Give her the simple affirmation that slaves are property, to be recognized and protected like other property, embody the proposition in the Const.i.tution, and secure its popular acceptance, and she would snap her fingers at an enumeration of other details. Fugitive-slave laws, inter-State slave trade, a Congressional slave code, right of transit and sojourn in the free States, compensation for runaways, new slave States, and a majority in the United States Senate would follow, as inevitably as that the well planted acorn expands by the forces of nature into roots, trunk, limbs, twigs, and foliage. This was what Jefferson Davis formulated in discussing his Senate resolutions of February, 1860,[3] and the doctrine for which Yancey rent the Charleston Convention in twain. This is what Jefferson Davis would again demand of the Senate Committee of Thirteen; and, knowing the North would never concede it, he would, even prior to the demand, join in instigating and proclaiming secession.

[1] The following were members of the Committee of Thirty-three: Messrs. Thomas Corwin, of Ohio; John S. Millson, of Virginia; Charles F. Adams, of Ma.s.sachusetts; Warren Winslow, of North Carolina; James Humphrey, of New York; William W. Boyce, of South Carolina; James H.

Campbell, of Pennsylvania; Peter E. Love, of Georgia; Orris S. Ferry, of Connecticut; Henry Winter Davis, of Maryland; Christopher Robinson, of Rhode Island; William G. Whiteley, of Delaware; Mason W. Tappan, of New Hamps.h.i.+re; John L.N. Stratton, of New Jersey; Francis M. Bristow, of Kentucky; Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont; Thomas A.R. Nelson, of Tennessee; William McKee Dunn, of Indiana; Miles Taylor, of Louisiana; Reuben Davis, of Mississippi; William Kellogg, of Illinois; George S.

Houston, of Alabama; Freeman H. Morse, of Maine; John S. Phelps, of Missouri; Albert Rust, of Arkansas; William A. Howard, of Michigan; George S. Hawkins, of Florida; Andrew J. Hamilton, of Texas; Cadwalader C. Washburn, of Wisconsin; Samuel E. Curtis, of Iowa; John C. Burch, of California; William Windom, of Minnesota; and Lansing Stout, of Oregon.--"Globe," December 6, 1860, page 22.

[2] Below are brief extracts of the salient points of twenty-one of them; the other two, are given in the text:

1. By Eli Thayer, of Ma.s.sachusetts: No further acquisition of territory. No Congressional legislation about slavery. Presidential electors to be chosen by districts.

2. By John Cochrane, of New York: Divide the Territories on the line of 36 30', prohibiting slavery north and permitting it south. No prohibition of inter-State slave trade. Unrestricted right of transit and sojourn with slaves in free States. Personal liberty laws to be null and void.

3. By Garnett B. Adrain, of New Jersey: Non-intervention by Congress.

Repeal of personal liberty laws. Fraternity, conciliation, and compromise.