1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [41]
By the age of twenty-five, Wigfall had managed to squander his considerable inheritance, settle three affairs of honor on the dueling ground, fight in a ruthless military campaign against the Seminoles, consume a small lakeful of bourbon, win an enviable reputation in whorehouses throughout the South, and get hauled before a judge on charges of murder. Three years after that, he took the next logical step and went into Texas politics. Of all the Southern fire-eaters in the Senate, Wigfall was the most flamboyant—and inflexible. He scorned the very idea of compromise, openly relished the prospect of spilling Yankee blood, and crowed the war would end only after Southern troops had cut a swath of destruction across the North, with the final capitulation signed in Faneuil Hall.33
Just before Christmas, when Crittenden first unveiled his proposal before the full Senate, a respectful calm fell over the chamber for the first time in weeks. Everyone knew that he had been laboring over a plan. When the senior senator rose, he began neither a philippic against secession nor a sentimental paean to the Union. Instead, he set forth his series of amendments as dryly as if he were introducing a bill to adjust domestic postage rates. Then he turned to the widening chasm over slavery. In such controversies, he assured his colleagues philosophically, “all the wrong is never on one side, or all the right on the other. Right and wrong, in this world, and in all such controversies, are mingled together.” Finally, he called on his countrymen, of every state and party, to set aside their differences in the name of the Constitution, of the flag, of the memory of Washington. Why consign all these to oblivion, he asked, when the alternative was “a comparative trifle”: simply drawing across the national map a perpetual “line of division between slavery and freedom” that would ensure a lasting peace? Hearing Crittenden’s peroration from the back of the chamber, one young Democratic congressman was deeply impressed. The old man spoke, he later wrote, “as if the muse of history were listening to him.”34
Would anyone besides Clio listen, though? Crittenden had no sooner sat down than John P. Hale, Republican from New Hampshire, sprang to his feet to praise “the purity of his motive, the integrity, the disinterestedness, and the fervor of his patriotism.” Surely Crittenden winced. After forty years in this chamber, he knew that such praise was only ever spoken as a kind of legislative eulogy. And in fact, Hale’s next words were like the coffin lid slamming shut: “Everybody accords to him that [much], whatever may be thought of the value or the practicability of the remedy he proposes, and I do not propose to discuss it.” The honorable body then fell back into bickering over the four-year-old Dred Scott case. Crittenden’s six amendments were respectfully lowered into the deep, dark grave known as a special bipartisan committee. The next morning’s newspapers confirmed his compromise dead and buried already. “There is no gleam of sunshine, no ray of hope,” began a typical report, in the New York Herald. The newspaper went on to suggest that the only chance for peace was a well-timed smallpox epidemic to wipe official Washington off the map.35
Soon enough, though, despite the dismissive pronouncements of journalists and politicians, many Americans would be calling for a resurrection of the Crittenden Compromise. Two days after the bill had been declared dead, news came from Charleston that South Carolina had seceded. Six days after that, Major Anderson—Crittenden’s friend and fellow Kentuckian36—moved his troops into Fort Sumter. Suddenly war felt like a much more imminent and real prospect than it had