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By Root 1866 0

a week earlier, when it had seemed to many merely a phantasm of congressional bluster. The senator’s “comparative trifle” of safeguarding slavery might indeed be a bargain price for peace. So while Crittenden’s plan languished in the oblivion of the special bipartisan committee, his name became a rallying cry for people across the country. Each day, larger and larger bundles of mail arrived in the Capitol post office: sheaves of individual letters at first, and then parcels bound up in twine and brown paper, some of them quite bulky. The first of these mass petitions was from the citizens of Harrisburg and Carlisle, Pennsylvania, conservative towns in the southern part of the state. Before long, others were arriving from Philadelphia, from Illinois, even from New England. New York City’s two petitions bore 63,000 names. The appeal from St. Louis filled ninety-five pages of foolscap paper and came wrapped, literally, in the American flag. The one from Massachusetts—hit hard by the first economic shocks of the crisis—was a scroll so massive that it had to be rolled like a cartwheel onto the floor of the House. One particular petition especially pleased Crittenden: it was signed by 14,000 women in states from Vermont to North Carolina. (“I hope their interposition may have some influence upon the sterner nature of man,” he told the Senate.) So many entreaties eventually arrived that it required four pages of small type in the Senate Journal simply to list the names of all the towns and cities. Elsewhere massive outdoor rallies were held despite the January cold. On a snowy night in Philadelphia, six thousand “workingmen” gathered outside Independence Hall and unanimously endorsed Crittenden’s plan with throaty cheers.37

Part of the reason for such an outpouring is that people were starting to grasp the potential costs—the literal costs—of war. The first warning came from the stock market, which began to falter and then plunge in the first weeks after Lincoln’s election. Few ordinary citizens owned shares in those days, but when wealthy bankers like August Belmont began reporting that their investments were down as much as 30 percent, more democratic misery seemed certain to follow. Textile manufacturers and their shareholders panicked at the prospect of losing the South’s cotton shipments; by January, their stocks had fallen 40 percent from what they were a year earlier. Western merchants and steamboat lines faced the possibility that the entire lower Mississippi might be closed to commercial shipping indefinitely. And would secession mean that all the debts owed by Southern planters—many of them mortgaged up to their eyebrows—would become uncollectable? Demand for new goods plummeted, and soon enough factories began laying off workers by the tens of thousands. “Boston streets to-day are full of discharged workmen,” reported the Boston Courier. “Our laboring population have a dreary winter before them.”38 Ads that began appearing in the major New York newspapers did not exactly help matters:

In consequence of the

PANIC! PANIC! PANIC!

We are determined to offer our very large stock of fall importations for the balance of the season at such prices as will command an immediate sale.

E. WILLIAMS & CO.

Owing to the troublesome times into which our country has fallen we have made a

FURTHER REDUCTION

in our prices, in order to convert our goods into cash before the

UNION GOES TO PIECES!

W.J.F. Dailey & Co.39

One day in early January, when a rumor reached Wall Street that “the compromise measures proposed by Mr. Crittenden had been agreed to unanimously,” stocks shot instantly back up, only to drop again when the report proved erroneous. In the weeks that followed, as grassroots support for the Crittenden plan surged, the market began gradually rising once more. “ ‘It is said’ and ‘perhaps’ are quite sufficient to give stocks a lift,” noted the editor of one commercial newspaper.40

It was a month of hearsay, anonymous leaks, and contradictions; a month when everything seemed to be happening