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By Root 1863 0

much too fast, and when many of the strangest reports were the ones that turned out to be true. In Washington, there was talk of an impending coup d’état against the federal government, a popular uprising against the “official imbecility” that was letting the nation drift toward the brink of catastrophe. Hastily formed militia units drilled by night in the remoter reaches of the District, pledging that they would sooner reduce the entire capital to ashes than permit the inauguration of a Black Republican president.41 In New York, Mayor Fernando Wood declared his support for secession: not just of the South but also of his own city, which was to become an independent trading republic. (One presumes that the mayor himself would have become its president.) Wood even had a name for his imaginary nation: “Tri-Insula,” since it would consist of Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island. New York’s city council endorsed the idea, as did a number of leading businessmen. “I would have New York a free city,” one of them wrote, “not a free city with respect to the liberty of the negro, but a free city in commerce and trade.”42

The national disaster seemed to have unleashed all manner of explosive energies, sending the planets spinning out of their accustomed orbits. Every day brought fresh astonishments. One morning in late January, Northern readers opened their newspapers to discover support for Southern secession coming from the very last place they would have expected. At a Boston abolitionist meeting, Wendell Phillips had rejoiced at the slave states’ departure and the Constitution’s demise. “The Covenant with Death is annulled—the Agreement with Hell is broken to pieces,” he cried. “The chain which has held the slave system since 1787 is parted.” The closing words of his speech seemed calculated to provoke howls of rage—and did: “All hail, then, Disunion!”

Telegraphic dispatches brought Phillips’s speech to readers across the North, most of whom—even those who spared no sympathy for slaveholders—branded him a traitor. (“THE UNHOLY ALLIANCE,” screamed a typical headline in the usually staid and solidly Republican New York Times. “The Abolitionists Giving the Right Hand of Fellowship to the Disunionists.”) Less than a week later, when Phillips again stepped onto a public stage at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, several hundred rough-looking characters—clearly not dues-paying members—packed the balconies. As soon as he tried to speak, they drowned him out with hisses, jeers, foot-stomping, barnyard noises, cheers for Crittenden and the Union, and even a sarcastic chorus or two of “Dixie.” Next, no less a luminary than Ralph Waldo Emerson stepped up warily with a sheaf of lecture notes in hand, only to be hooted and heckled off the speakers’ platform. At last, after the mayor of Boston ordered the hall cleared to avert a full-on riot and abolitionists scattered in all directions, several hundred infuriated demonstrators chased Phillips back to his house on Essex Street, waving brickbats and howling “Carve him out!” as policemen struggled to restrain the mob. For weeks afterward Phillips was a virtual prisoner, with bodyguards standing vigil outside his front door and Boston toughs prowling nearby, vowing vengeance.43

Back in Washington, however, Crittenden’s cause—despite such warm support in the North—was growing more and more desperate. Time and again he took to the Senate floor with his latest armload of petitions. He hosted a dinner party for thirty people at the National Hotel—hospitality that stretched the limits of his modest pocketbook—including such potential allies as General Scott and the justices of the Supreme Court, as well as influential senators and congressmen from both parties. When that availed him little, he made an unprecedented proposal: Congress, instead of voting on the compromise package, should submit it to a nationwide popular referendum. Finally, to render his legislative ideas yet more alluring to the South, he added two new constitutional amendments that had originally