1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [38]
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