CHAPTER XXI

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November, 1860-March, 1861.

THE ACTION OF CONGRESS ON THE RECOMMENDATIONS OF THE PRESIDENT'S ANNUAL MESSAGE—THE “CRITTENDEN COMPROMISE”—STRANGE COURSE OF THE NEW YORK “TRIBUNE”—SPECIAL MESSAGE OF JANUARY 8, 1861.

It is now necessary to turn to what took place in Congress upon the recommendations of the President’s annual message. There were but two courses that Congress could pursue in this most extraordinary emergency. It must either preserve the Union by peaceful measures, or it must provide the President and his successor with the military force requisite to secure the execution of the laws and the supremacy of the Constitution. It was plain that in this, as in all similar cases of threatened revolt against the authority of a regular and long established government, mere inaction would be a fatal policy. After the State of South Carolina should have adopted an ordinance of secession, it would be too late to accomplish anything by merely arguing against the constitutional doctrine on which the asserted right of secession depended. That right was firmly held by multitudes of men in other States, and unless the Government of the United States should, by conciliatory measures, effectually disarm the disposition to exercise it, or effectually prepare to enforce the authority of the Constitution after secession had taken place, it was morally certain that the next two or three months would witness the formation of a Southern Confederacy of formidable strength. To the Executive Department it appropriately belonged to suggest the measures of conciliation needful for one of the alternatives of a sound and safe policy, and to execute the laws by all the means with which the Executive was then or might thereafter be clothed by the legislature. But the Executive could not in the smallest degree increase the means which existing laws had placed in his hands.

There was all the more reason for prompt action upon the President’s pacific recommendations, in the fact that the Government of the United States was wholly unprepared for a civil war. The nature of such a war, the character of the issue on which it would have to be waged, and the natural repugnance of the people of both sections to have such a calamity befall the country, all tended to enhance the duty of preventing it by timely concessions which would in no way impair the authority of the Constitution. It is true that potentially the Government had great resources in its war making power, its taxing power, and its control over the militia of the States. But inasmuch as a sudden resort to its ultimate powers, and to their plenary exercise was at this moment fraught with the greatest peril, there can be no question that the duty of conciliation stood first in the rank of moral and patriotic duties incumbent upon the representatives of the States and the people in the two houses of Congress. Next in the relative rank of these duties, to be performed, however, simultaneously with the first of them, stood the obligation to strengthen the hands of the Executive for the execution of the laws and the preservation of the public property in South Carolina, which was manifestly about to assume the attitude of an independent and foreign State. Whether either of these great duties was performed by the Congress, to which President Buchanan addressed his annual message and his subsequent appeals; what were the causes which produced a failure to meet the exigency; on whom rests the responsibility for that failure, and what were the consequences which it entailed, must now be considered. Mr. Buchanan has said that this Congress, beyond question, had it in its power to preserve the peace of the country and the integrity of the Union, and that it failed in this duty.[102] Is this a righteous judgment, which history ought to affirm?

Footnote 102:

Buchanan’s Defence,