with slavery south of that line. The resolutions called for the faithful execution of the Fugitive-Slave Law, the repeal of the Personal-Liberty Acts, and the enforcement of the laws against the African slave trade. The committee met on December 21, the day that the news of the secession of South Carolina reached Washington. Throughout the North there was a lively hope that the Crittenden Compromise might be adopted, especially in the financial and commercial circles, where there was much anxiety for the safety of large sums of money invested in the South. It is fairly certain that if a popular referendum had been taken on the Compromise it would have been adopted. But the committee could not agree. Davis voted with Seward against the restoration of the 36° 30' line. The Republican members, supported by Lincoln, who wrote "Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery," voted steadily in the negative. Their furthest concession was that slavery should not be disturbed in the slave states. On December 31 the committee reported that it had not been able to agree on any general plan of adjustment. A committee of thirty-three in the House met with no better success. Its only fruit was the recommendation of a constitutional amendment making slavery inviolable in the states where it was established by law. The amendment passed both Houses by the necessary two-thirds vote, but only two states took pains to ratify it. Major Anderson, exercising the discretion given to him by verbal orders from the War Office, had spiked the guns of Fort Moultrie on the day after Christmas and moved his little garrison to the safer walls of Fort Sumter. The South Carolinians regarded this act as a breach of Buchanan's pledge not to disturb the situation in Charleston harbor, and three commissioners from the "sovereign state," who were in Washington to treat with the United States government "for the apportionment of the public debt and the possession of the forts and other property of the United States within the state," called on the President in peremptory terms to order the return of Anderson to Fort Moultrie. The bewildered Buchanan seemed about to yield to their demand when the Unionists of his cabinet, led by Secretary of State Black,' virtually took control of affairs and compelled the President to uphold Anderson. "I cannot and I will not" was the new language in which he replied to the request of South Carolina that he withdraw the troops from Charleston harbor. It gave the North cause for rejoicing at the beginning of the new year. Buchanan's supineness and the failure of Congress to reach any agreement gave strength to the secession movement, which moved rapidly with the opening of the new year. Between January 1 and February 1, 1861, conventions in the states of Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas, in the order named, passed ordinances of secession, generally by large majorities. Only in Alabama and Georgia was there a decided opposition to overcome, led in the latter state by Alexander H. Stephens, who had "not lost hopes of securing [our] rights in the Union," and was opposed to secession "as a remedy for anticipated aggression on the part of the Federal Executive or Congress." Texas was the only state in which the convention submitted the secession ordinance to the people for a referendum; and the figures of the popular vote (37,794 to 11,235), contrasted with the vote in the convention (166 to 7) and with the large popular vote cast for the Unionist candidates Bell and Douglas in the November election, tempt one to speculate on the truth of the frequent statement that the people of the South were far ahead of their leaders in the desire for independence. 1 Cass had resigned on December 15, and Black had been moved up to his place. Edwin M. Stanton had succeeded to the Attorney-Generalship. Cobb had left his department of the Treasury December 8. Floyd had been forced to resign on account of crooked financial dealings, on December 29. Thompson remained in the cabinet until January 7. 2Stephens might well speak so, for he had a letter from his friend Presidentelect Lincoln, written December 23, 1860, assuring him that the Southern states need have no fear that the incoming administration would disturb slavery within their limits. Stephens should have made the letter public. 3 Rhodes (Vol. III, pp. 276-279) collects a number of citations to show that the politicians of the South were far behind the people in secessionist sentiment. So many instances can be cited on both sides of such a question, however, that it is impossible to be sure of one's conclusions. Rhodes feels "an additional con The adoption of the Crittenden Compromise by Congress or of a Jacksonian policy in the White House1 might have halted secession at the borders of South Carolina, though it is doubtful whether more than a brief postponement of the ultimate appeal to arms could have been accomplished. The difference between the sections was beyond any device of constitutional machinery to compose. There could be no enduring peace in our land until slavery was banished. Lincoln was right about "the house divided." Two civilizations confronted each other across Mason and Dixon's line, each convinced that it stood for the welfare of man and enjoyed the blessing of God; each convinced that the other was aggressive, faithless, and accursed. They no longer understood each other's language. Words like "honor," "right," "freedom," "citizen," meant different things to each section. The South asked the North to call an institution right which the North believed to be wrong. The North seemed to cast a stigma on the highest society of the South by regarding slavery as a blot on civilization and the slaveholder as a deliberate sinner. The South accused the North of being sectional and at the same time demanded that it should mind its own business and cease to "meddle" with an institution which the North looked on as a national disgrace. Inconsistency, misunderstanding, and passion ruled. "It would not be enough to please the Southern states," wrote James Russell Lowell in the Atlantic Monthly of January, 1861, "that we should stop asking them to abolish slavery; what they demand of us is nothing less than that we should abolish the spirit of the age." fidence" in his statements "for the reason that the careful historians Von Holst and Schouler have come to the same conclusion" (p. 279, note). But these are just the two historians who would emphasize most the testimony to Southern disunionism. 1 General Scott quotes from Southern papers the admission that there would have been no Southern Confederacy if his advice to strengthen the forts had been followed (Memoirs, p. 616). But the opinion of a few Southern editors was neither infallible nor representative. CHAPTER X THE CIVIL WAR And when the step of Earthquake shook the house, He held the ridgepole up, and spiked again The rafters of the home. THE RESORT TO ARMS EDWIN MARKHAM In spite of the critical situation in Charleston harbor and the perplexity of the administration at Washington; in spite of the failure of the congressional committees to agree on a plan of conciliation; in spite of the rapid secession of the cotton states in January and the formation of a Southern Confederacy at Montgomery, Alabama, on the fourth of February, 1861; in spite of the fact that the Star of the West, a merchant vessel carrying provisions from New York to Fort Sumter and flying the American flag at her masthead, had been fired upon and turned back by the batteries of Charleston harbor, the great majority of the citizens of both sections refused to believe that the gates of the temple of Janus were really to be thrown open. War was a horrid thought. The country was prosperous, and a hundred projects of industrial enterprise and social reform were stirring in the American mind. However severe the temporary setback of the panic of 1857, there was no effect of it visible in 1860. Our population during the decade had increased from 23,191,876 to 31,443,322-a gain of 35.59 per cent. The increase in the city population was 78.62 per cent. The farm, to be sure, still maintained its lead over the factory in 1860, when our agricultural products were valued at $1,913,000,000 (as much as farm products and manufactures combined in 1850), with manufactures running a very close second at $1,885,862,000. The output of woolen goods had jumped from $48,600,000 to $73,400,000 and of cotton from $65,500,000 to $115,600,000 in the ten years. In 1850 iron rails to the value of $25,000 were manufactured; in 1860 this had increased to $105,000. The tonnage on the Great Lakes had grown from 215,787 to 611,398; the railroad mileage, from 9021 to 30,635. There were 50,000 miles of telegraph wires and 186,000 miles of postroads. Over 2,500,000 immigrants had come to America during the decade. The 6 per cent government securities were selling at a premium of 17 points. In the summer of 1858 a cable had been laid on the bed of the Atlantic from Newfoundland to the British Isles, and a message of greeting had been exchanged between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan. The same year the "pony express" carried mail from the Missouri River to the Pacific coast in ten days, arousing renewed interest in a transcontinental railroad. Conventions were meeting to discuss women's rights, prison reform, temperance, free religion, and a host of other topics. The intellectual ferment out of which these various movements came was stimulated by a rich literature of idealism from Emerson, Lowell, Holmes, Whittier, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Curtis, Simms—the great essayists, historians, and poets whose names are the glory of American letters. The people of the North and the border slave states were loath to accept the deadlock in the committees of conciliation. Petitions poured in upon Congress for the reconsideration of the Crittenden amendments. Public men in high station and influential newspapers declared their belief that an overwhelming majority of the country was in favor of their adoption. Let them be submitted to a plebiscite. The people with a mighty voice would decree peace where the legislators had failed. On the same day that the delegates from the seceding states met at Montgomery to form a Southern Confederacy, a peace convention was opened at Washington with the venerable ex-President Tyler in the chair. Over 150 delegates, representing 21 of the 33 states of the Union, labored for a month, with diminishing harmony, to devise an acceptable plan of compromise—"a Convention of Notables," as Lowell sneeringly called it, "to |