1861 (23 page)

Now, though, Corwin had come up with a few words about slavery that he believed might just save the Union. And quite uncharacteristically, they were clear, simple, and far from a fog bank. The Ohioan proposed an amendment to the Constitution—the Thirteenth, if passed and ratified—that would not only bar Congress from ever interfering with slavery (delicately referred to as “domestic institutions”) in any of the states, but also explicitly
forbid the amendment’s own repeal in perpetuity. In effect, it guaranteed slavery’s constitutional protection forever. What more could the South want?
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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.
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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 widow of a laborer killed by a derrick falling from the Capitol’s new
dome—before Vice President Breckinridge banged his gavel and brought the Thirty-sixth Congress of the United States to a close. (By the end of the year, he would have his commission as a brigadier general in the Confederate service.) The senators staggered off to wash, shave, and change their linen for the swearing-in ceremony at noon.
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Several hours earlier, the president-elect had risen in his suite at the Willard and sat down to make a few last-minute changes to his inaugural address. Just before noon, President Buchanan’s open barouche pulled up in front of the hotel to collect him. The two men had little to say to each other as the carriage rolled down Pennsylvania Avenue. The Old Public Functionary, for once, seemed at a loss for pleasantries; the Rail-Splitter gazed down contemplatively
at the floorboards.

A short while later, as they waited inside the Capitol for the ceremony to begin, Buchanan finally drew Lincoln into a corner to offer
a few parting words of wisdom.
John Hay, who stood nearby, strained to listen. “I waited with boyish wonder and credulity,” he later remembered, “to see what momentous counsels were to come from that gray and weatherbeaten head. Every word must have its value at
such an instant. The ex-president said: ‘I think you will find the water of the right-hand well at the
White House better than that of the left.’ ”
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Lincoln’s first inaugural address would be handed down to future generations as one of the greatest pieces of oratory in American history. It was inspired, tactful, perceptive, ageless in its eloquent final paragraph—and, at the time, almost entirely ineffectual. Seward had imposed many alterations and addenda, and although the president-elect made further revisions and polished up the language considerably, much of the New Yorker’s equivocating
spirit remained in the final version. Lincoln’s final additions had been hastily scribbled on several scraps of lined paper and pasted on top of the printed text. By far the longest of these came nearly at the end of the speech. Even today, it is sometimes omitted from published versions. In this passage, Lincoln spoke of his willingness to rewrite parts of the Constitution to accommodate the South—and referred specifically to the amendment that the Senate had passed
nine hours earlier. “I have no objection,” he concluded, “to its being made express and irrevocable.”
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The address very soon became—and remains—one of the most selectively quoted speeches ever given. Moderates liked Lincoln’s assurance that he had neither the intention nor the desire “to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists,” and that he was committed to enforcing the
fugitive slave laws. Hard-liners applauded his pledge “to hold, occupy, and possess the
property and places [in the South] belonging to the Government”—which must include Sumter. Temporizers like Seward appreciated his plea to both North and South that “nothing can be lost by taking time.” There was also something in Lincoln’s words for almost everyone to dislike.
Frederick Douglass called it a “double-tongued document” offering little hope “for the cause of our heart-broken and
down-trodden countrymen”—that is, the slaves. Lincoln, he observed sadly, “has avowed himself ready to catch them if they run away, to shoot them down if they rise against their oppressors, and to prohibit the federal government indefinitely from interfering for their deliverance.” Wigfall, on the other hand, fuming and muttering among the dignitaries at the Capitol as he listened to Lincoln’s remarks about federal property, hurried off to
telegraph Charleston: “Inaugural means war … war to the knife and knife to the hilt.”
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Oddly enough, hardly anyone at the time remarked on the passage
that would become the most quoted of all—the only part of the speech that is still quoted much today. The original words were Seward’s, to which Lincoln applied rhetorical gilding:

But even fewer would note or long remember the words that Crittenden had spoken, just yards away and hours earlier, in the Senate chamber—a room that would soon see half its desks vacant:

Few, too, throughout the years ahead, would remember much about the month that followed Lincoln’s inauguration. Even at the time it seemed as though many Americans were in a trance, a fugue state, as they awaited whatever was to come. The president made hundreds of patronage appointments, adjudicated a hard-fought dispute over the postmastership of Bloomington, Illinois, and dutifully forwarded copies of the Corwin amendment to each state—including the
seceded ones—for ratification.
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His cabinet met for the first time and the subject of Fort Sumter did not come up. Crittenden packed up his few belongings at the National Hotel, announced his retirement from public life, and returned to his farm in
Kentucky. John Tyler, having adjourned the Peace Conference, returned hastily to
Richmond, where
secession was still under debate. That very night he gave a speech on the steps of the Exchange Hotel, denouncing his own convention’s
final compromise plans as “poor, rickety, and disconnected” and exhorting Virginians to “act promptly and boldly in defense of the state sovereignty.”
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(In Montgomery several days later, Tyler’s sixteen-year-old granddaughter was given the honor of raising the first Confederate flag over the rebel Capitol.)
In Washington, in the same newspapers reporting Lincoln’s inauguration, Mr.
G. Mason Graham of Louisiana advertised that he was in town to purchase several dozen healthy Negroes, and that “any person
having such to dispose of” might write to him care of the District of Columbia post office. From Charleston, Major Anderson wrote to tell the president that he and his men had only enough provisions left to last six weeks at most.
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Even far away from Washington, Richmond, and Charleston, those were strange and discordant days.
In Ohio, an electrical charge seemed to hang in the air, a sense of possibility and impending revolution that expressed itself in unexpected ways. All bets were off; everything was subject to reinvention; anything could be proposed. Garfield introduced a bill in the senate to abolish the death penalty, and
drafted a report arguing, with erudite references to practices among the ancient Greeks and Saxons, that the sovereign state of Ohio ought to adopt the metric system. The legislature received a petition to abolish any infringement of constitutional rights based on sex, and in an unprecedented gesture,
women’s rights activists—including
Abby Kelley Foster—were allowed onto the floor of the
senate chamber to give speeches advocating their cause.
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Yet no matter how many or how various their preoccupations, the legislators could not help returning, time and again, to the one topic on everybody’s mind. “A debate started on a bill to protect sheep from dogs,” one newspaper complained, “would turn on the all-absorbing question of Slavery.”
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Democrats baited
Republicans with a bill that would outlaw interracial marriage and sexual relations; Republicans responded with reminders that a Democratic vice president in the 1830s,
Richard Mentor Johnson, had had a black common-law wife. That “amalgamation” bill passed; only Garfield and a handful of other senators dared vote against it at the risk of being thought to favor miscegenation. On almost everything else—the
fugitive slave laws, the expansion of state militia, the stockpiling of arms—deadlock prevailed.

But in Columbus, like everywhere else in the country, each day’s news brought fresh intimations that the momentary stasis could not last much longer. Headlines in the
Ohio State Journal
told of the worsening confrontation in
Charleston Harbor, as well as another at
Fort Pickens in Florida, also surrounded by Confederate troops. Which
side would break the
standoff—and would it concede peace or embrace war?

On April 13, a gray Saturday morning, the Ohio senate was in session as usual. A few spectators were in the gallery, including some
women’s rights advocates, still pressing their case. Today, however, the senate would be distracted from progressive aspirations and mundane matters alike. It had just managed to pass legislation authorizing the payment of bounties for killing blackbirds in Ottawa County—and was preparing, in
desultory fashion, for the fortieth ballot on a bill locating a proposed state penitentiary—when a senator came rushing in from the lobby with a message for the chair. “Mr. President,” he exclaimed, “the telegraph announces that the secessionists are bombarding Fort Sumter.”

The legislators stood in stunned silence, absorbing the news. But the hush was shattered when, from the spectators’ gallery, came a woman’s fierce whoop of joy. The men looked up, startled—almost, one later remembered, as if the enemy themselves were in their midst.

It was
Abby Kelley Foster. “Glory to God!” she cried.
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