1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [51]
A crowd of admiring devotees surrounded the ancient buffer Tyler, another crowd surrounded that other ancient buffer Crittenden. Ye Gods, what are we, when mortals no bigger—no, damn it, not so big as—ourselves, are looked up to as though their thunder spoke from the real original Olympus. Here is an old Virginia politician, of whom by good rights, no one ought ever to have heard, reappearing in the ancient cerements of his forgotten grave—political and social—and men look up to him as they would at Solomon, if he could be made the subject of a resurrection.
In another letter, Adams spoke for many Americans—especially those not on the Douglases’ guest list—when he predicted of the Peace Conference, “I suppose they will potter ahead until no one feels any more interest in them, and then they may die.”65
Out in the expanses of the Republic, beyond the Douglas mansion and Willard’s Hotel, troubling omens could be perceived on all sides. The states of the far Northwest—Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan—refused even to send delegates to the Peace Conference. “We have fed the [Southern] whiners with sugar plums long enough,” one Michigan newspaper declared. A paper in Minnesota framed its position in more alarming terms: “Before this rampant fever of disunion will abate, THERE MUST BE BLOOD-LETTING!”66
Public opinion was shifting throughout the North; newspapers that only weeks earlier had been frantic for compromise now mocked the Peace Conference as “the old gentlemen’s convention.” The New-York Tribune, for all its perceived radicalism, had been a staunch advocate of reaching an accord with the South. Now each morning’s edition bore the motto no compromise! no concessions to traitors! The Constitution As It Is.67 Yet the idea that anything could remain “as it is” for very much longer seemed dubious at best. The familiar, if not quite comfortable, old Union was making way for something new—even if no one was at all sure what this would be.
In the White House, President Buchanan rarely even ventured downstairs anymore, let alone tried to intervene in the secession crisis; he was hard at work settling diplomatic issues with Venezuela and Paraguay regarding some valuable guano deposits, finalizing a treaty with the Delaware Indians, and resolving a disputed water boundary in the San Juan Islands. When a deputation of Peace Conference members paid him a courtesy visit—marching to the White House “with the solemnity of a funeral procession,” one would later recall—they found the president “advanced in years, shaken in body, and uncertain in mind.” To their embarrassment, he physically embraced each of the men, many of them complete strangers, as he begged them each to save the country from “bloody, fratricidal war.”68
At the Capitol, meanwhile, Senator Wigfall was telling his colleagues: “It is the merest balderdash—that is what it is—it is the most unmitigated fudge for any one to get up here, and tell men who have any sense, who have brains, that there is any prospect of two-thirds of this Congress passing any amendment to the Constitution, that any man who is white, twenty-one years old, and whose hair is straight, living south of Mason and Dixon’s line, will be content with.”69
And just down Pennsylvania Avenue, as the Peace Conference of 1861 entered its second day, as Mr. Tyler was exhorting his colleagues to courageously take up “the great work of conciliation and adjustment,”70 a Negro named Willis went to the auction block and was duly sold to an unknown bidder for an unrecorded sum.
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*As late as 1931, a Florida congressman named R. A. Green introduced a bill in the House that would have paid reparations to former slaveholders and their descendants for the loss of their human “property.”
CHAPTER THREE
Forces of Nature
The old forms rattle, and the new delay to appear.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON,
“Natural Religion” (lecture,