ference of commissioners from twenty-stands by and sees his house in flames,

and says to himself, 'perhaps the fire will stop before it consumes all.'"*

At last, at the end of the term, a few propositions were passed by which nothing essential was yielded or conceded. The Corwin resolutions were stripped of their important provision of a permanent boundary line for the protection of Slavery; and Mr. Crittenden's Resolutions were lost in the Senate by a single vote. All, in fact, that could be obtained from the Senate or the House, was a recommendation to the States that the spirit of the Constitution should be

one States, sitting at Washington during the month of February. It was held at the instance of Virginia, and was presided over by Ex-President Tyler, who presented to Congress a series of Amendments to the Constitution, similar to the Crittenden Resolutions. Every form of guarantee which could be thought of was agitated, to assure the South of the full preservation of its rights under the Constitution. Beyond this, the majority was not willing to go; nor did it appear that any concession which could be proposed, would satisfy the Southern temper which was sternly bent on independence, and respected, and the laws on the subject of the consequent destruction of the Gov-slavery observed. In consonance with

ernment.

On one of the last days of the session, in a final effort, Mr. Crittenden raised his voice in the Senate, "We are about to adjourn. We have done nothing. Even the Senate of the United States, beholding this great ruin around them, beholding dismemberment and revolution going on, and civil war threatened as the result, have been able to do nothing; we have done absolutely nothing. . . This will make a strange sound in the history of Governments, and in the history of the world. Some are for coercion ; yet no army has been raised, no navy has been equipped. Some are for pacification; yet they have been able to do nothing; the dissent of their colleagues prevents them; and here we are in the midst of a falling country, in the midst of a falling State, presenting to the eyes of the world the saddest spectacle it has ever seen. Cato is represented by Addison as a worthy spectacle, 'a great man falling with a falling State; but he fell struggling. We fall with the ignominy on our heads of doing nothing, like the man who

this willingness to abide by the existing terms of the Constitution, was the joint resolution for an article of amendment to that instrument, providing, "that no amendment shall be made to the Constitution, which will authorize or give Congress power to abolish or interfere within any State with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or servitude by the laws of said State." The passage of this resolution required a two-thirds vote in both houses. It had the full number in the House of Representatives, and two-thirds of those remaining, not of the entire body, of the Senate.

It was decided, however, that the vote of the latter was sufficient, so that when ratified by three-fourths of the legislatures of the several States, the amendment will be part of the Constitution of the United States.

The patience, "the melancholy assiduity," as it was subsequently characterized by Mr. Everett, with which these topics were discussed by the loyal members, in face of the startling evidences of

* Speech in the Senate, March 2, 1861.

RETIREMENT OF SENATORS.

55

revolt which were brought into their lives and fortunes of all her people." midst, could only have been maintained His associate, Stephen R. Mallory, folby the most friendly and earnest desire | lowed in a gentle strain, "mcre in sorto preserve the blessings of peace for the row than in anger," invoking a peaceful whole country. States which had fully separation. determined upon revolt, up to the time of the actual resolve of their Conventions pronouncing the act of secession, were represented in Congress. As word came of the final defection, the members of the revolted States, deliberately and without impediment, took leave of their brethren, in various humors, according to individual tempers, from the pathetic to the defiant. The first of these withdrawals was of the South Carolina delegation of the House of Representatives, on the 21st of December, which was communicated in a brief letter to the Speaker. So far as the occasion admitted, it was courteously worded. A similar announcement was made by the Mississippi members, on the 12th of January. Two days after, her Senator, Albert G. Brown, intimated his resignation. The formal leave-taking of his associate, Jefferson Davis, was delayed by illness till the 21st, when he made the act the occasion of a remarkable declaration of his sentiments.

The two representatives of Alabama, Clement C. Clay and Benjamin Fitzpatrick next took their leave. Clay spoke for his colleague and himself in an harangue steeped with bitterness, the burden of which was the invasion by the North of the rights of slavery. He mentioned no other ground of difference. "It is now nearly forty-two years," said he, "since Alabama was admitted into the Union. She entered it, as she goes out of it, while the Confederacy was in convulsions, caused by the hostility of the North to the domestic slavery of the South. Not a decade or scarce a lustrum has elapsed since her birth, that has not been strongly marked by proofs of the growth and power of that antislavery spirit of the northern people, which seeks the overthrow of that domestic institution of the South, which is not only the chief source of her prosperity, but the very basis of her social order and State polity." The indignant speaker then presented this fearful bill of indictment, all the items of which, it will be observed, have but one source

It was a notable day in the Senate as the representatives of three States, Florida, Alabama, and Mississippi, pro-and issue. "It (the anti-slavery spirit) nounced their farewells. David L. Yulee of Florida, led the way in a few temperately expressed remarks, in which he assigned sectional aggrandizement as the cause of the defection of his State. "She sees fast rising above all others," said he, "the great issue of the right of the people of the States to sovereignty and self-government within their respective territorial boundaries; and in such an issue she is prepared to devote the

denied us Christian communion, because it could not endure what it styles the moral leprosy of slaveholding; it refused us permission to sojourn, or even to pass through the North, with our property; it claimed freedom for the slave if brought by his master into a northern State; it violated the Constitution and treaties and laws of Congress, because designed to protect that property, it refused us any share of lands acquired mainly by our

diplomacy and blood and treasure; it the separation of his State, by her own

act, from the Union; he expressed his approval of the measure, and reminded the members that he had in that house, in their presence, for many years, advocated the doctrine of secession, as an essential attribute of State sovereignty."

refused our property any shelter or security beneath the flag of a common government; it robbed us of our property and refused to restore it; it refused to deliver criminals against our laws, who fled to the North with our property or our blood upon their hands; it threat-It might be inferred, that assuming the ened us, by solemn legislative acts, with right, he would give some adequate reason ignominious punishment if we pursued for its exercise. It could hardly be supour property into a northern State; it posed that one who had held such high murdered southern men when seeking offices under the government, could be the recovery of their property on nor- ignorant of the import and responsibility thern soil; it invaded the borders of of the measure he had in hand. An exsouthern States, poisoned their wells, planation was certainly due from him for burnt their dwellings, and murdered his course. He gave it in these words :their people; it denounced us by delib-"It has been a conviction of pressing erate resolves of popular meetings, of necessity, it has been a belief that we party conventions, and of religious and even legislative assemblies, as habitual violators of the laws of God and the rights of humanity; it exerted all the moral and physical agencies that human ingenuity can devise, or diabolical malice can employ, to heap odium and infamy upon us, and to make us a by-word of hissing and of scorn throughout the civilized world." Yet this climax, virulent and intolerable as it would seem, might, said Mr. Clay, have been endured some time longer, but for the republican platforms of 1856 and 1860, and the election of a President who promised "to disregard the judgments of your courts, the obligations of your Constitution, and the requirements of his official oath, by approving any bill prohibiting slavery in the Territories of the United States."

are to be deprived in the Union of the rights which our fathers bequeathed to us, which has brought Mississippi into her present decision." Simply the notion or fear that "we are to be deprived." For three score and ten years and more the government of the United States had performed its functions with paternal kindness, without one single imputed act of trespass upon the privileges or prerogatives of any one of the States, and now, on the mere supposition that she may at some unknown time, in some unknown way, do otherwise, an act of withdrawal constituting a child of the household, from whom love, honor and obedience might be challenged, an alien, is avowed and justified.

This senator, whose words are made more memorable by his subsequent posiAfter a few words from Mr. Fitzpat- tion, proceeded: "I find in myself, perrick, Jefferson Davis closed the melan-haps, a type of the general feeling of my choly procession of departing senators. constituents towards yours. I am sure I With calmness, with courtesy, with an feel no hostility to you, senators from the approach even to the language of tender- North. I am sure there is not one of ness, he informed his brother senators of you, whatever sharp discussion there may