1861_ The Civil War Awakening - Adam Goodheart [76]
The Thirty-sixth Congress would officially adjourn on inauguration morning, March 4. Its months of windy torpor ended with a spasm of activity. For weeks, Corwin’s compromise had languished in the shadow of Crittenden’s. But in the final days of the session, it began suddenly to gain ground. On February 28, it passed the House of Representatives, squeaking through by a single vote. As the old mahogany clock in the Capitol corridor ticked each minute away, the Senate wrangled on. At 7 p.m. on inauguration eve, a Sunday, the session was called to order one last time: Congress had never done business on the Lord’s day, but the legislators reasoned that the Lord cared more about preserving the Union than about keeping the Sabbath. Senator Crittenden was to speak, offering a final entreaty on his plan’s behalf. Visitors packed the galleries, pushing and shoving for seats and even spilling onto the sanctum of the Senate floor itself before the sergeant at arms stepped in. Some accounts say that Lincoln himself slipped into the chamber, as discreetly as he could, to join the spectators. Whether this happened or not, it has a certain poetic plausibility, since he was known to love the theater, and here was the last scene of play that had been by turns tragedy and farce.
Standing in the center aisle, his deathly head more haggard than ever, Crittenden spoke for an hour and a half. Some who had known the senator in his prime were saddened as he stumbled wearily and haltingly through the familiar patriotic formulae like an old man trying to recall some half-forgotten story from his youth. “We are about to adjourn,” he rasped. “We have done nothing. Even the Senate of the United States, beholding this great ruin around them, beholding dismemberment and revolution going on, and civil war threatened as the result, have been able to do nothing; we have done absolutely nothing.”
Debate continued. At midnight, the galleries were still full of spectators. Senators laid their heads on their desks; a lucky few claimed the sofas at the back of the chamber, where they sprawled, snoring, to be awakened by doomsday or the vote, whichever came first.
Somewhere in the small hours, Senator Wigfall of Texas—whose state had seceded a month before but who malingered in Washington, unwelcome as the last drunken guest after a dinner party—rose, wobbly with bourbon, and sarcastically offered some “few, little, conciliatory, peace-preserving remarks” about abolitionists, free blacks, New Englanders, rail-splitters, flatboat pilots, Plymouth Rock, and the American flag. This stream of vitriol dribbled out for more than an hour. Finally, at four o’clock in the morning, the Corwin proposal came up for a vote, and passed by the necessary two-thirds margin required for a constitutional amendment. “No amendment,” it read, “shall ever be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.” Having now passed both houses, the measure had only to be ratified by the states. Congress was ready to condemn itself, as well as the Negro, to a kind of perpetual bondage.95
This climax still did not cause the Senate to adjourn. As the windows began to glow with the pale gray light of dawn, the body turned to more routine matters: the incorporation of the Metropolitan Gas Company, the legal status of the Pacific guano islands, and a land grant to a small college in Kansas. Crittenden succeeded in one thing, at least—securing a $400 stipend to the