CHAPTER XXIV

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN 1860-STATE CONVENTION OF 1861-MR. STUART ONE OF THE COMMITTEE OF THREE APPOINTED TO VISIT PRESIDENT LINCOLN

ARTY feeling was now running high, and the time had arrived to nominate candidates for the Presidency. The friends of the Union were hopelessly divided among themselves. One section of the Democratic party nominated Stephen A. Douglas for President, and Herschel V. Johnson for Vice-President; another section nominated John C. Breckinridge and Joseph Lane for those offices. The American party nominated John Bell and Edward Everett, and the anti-slavery agitators, under the new name of the Republican party, nominated Abraham Lincoln and Hannibal Hamlin. The last named candidates were elected. Lincoln and Hamlin received 180 electoral votes; Breckinridge and Lane 72; Bell and Everett 39; and Douglas and Johnson 12. Of the popular vote Lincoln received 1,857,610 votes, while the combined vote of the other three candidates was 2,804,560. Thus while Lincoln was elected by a majority of the electoral college, he received a million less votes than his opponents, and had a popular majority in only sixteen of the thirty-three States of the Union. The eighteen States carried by him were all north of the Mason and Dixon line.1

As soon as the result of the election was known, the people of the Southern States realized that a most serious crisis. had arisen, and several of those States called conventions to take action to protect their rights. On December 20, 1860, South Carolina passed an ordinance of secession and other States soon followed her example.

1Stephens' History of the United States, page 559.

The last session of Congress under President Buchanan's administration met on the first Monday of December, 1860. The President in his annual message made special reference to the disturbed condition of the Country. He maintained that no State could lawfully withdraw from the Union; but, if any of them did, Congress had no power to coerce them, and he advised concession and conciliation.

At an early day in the session Senator Crittenden offered, as a basis for the settlement of the sectional differences, the Missouri Compromise line of 36° 30' north latitude as a division of the public domain, by which all the territory north of that line was, whenever admitted into the Union, to be free of slavery, and all south of it was to be left for the decision of the people seeking admission to the Union. As the Supreme Court of the United States had decided some years before this time that slavery could not lawfully be prohibited in any of the Territories by act of Congress, this compromise measure of Mr. Crittenden was presented as a constitutional amendment. Senators Jefferson Davis, Robert Toombs, and the other extreme Southern Senators, with Stephen A. Douglas and all the conservative senators of the North, favored this amendment, but all the Northern agitators and every Senator who had voted for Lincoln refused to support it. Mr. Davis and Mr. Toombs, and most of the other Southern Senators then united in a telegram to the people of the Southern States advising them that their only safety was in withdrawing from the Union.1

A large majority of the people of Virginia were opposed to secession. They were in favor of securing their rights in the Union, if possible, and of making further efforts to compromise and adjust the differences between the North and the South. Virginia was situated between the States adhering to the Federal Government, and those States of the South, which had already seceded, or were taking steps to do so, and the time for definite action had arrived.

At this juncture of public affairs Governor Letcher called

1Stephens' History of the United States, page 560.

the Legislature in extra session on January 7th, 1861, to decide what action the State should pursue in regard to the threatened dissolution of the Union. Seven days after that body met, a bill was passed calling for a convention of the people to decide what course should be taken. The Convention consisted of one hundred and fifty-two members, and the election was held on February 4th, 1861. Mr. Stuart, who was a member of the State Senate then in session, was chosen one of the members of the Convention to represent Augusta County, and he was a pronounced Union man. The Convention was composed of many of the ablest men in the State, men of large experience in public affairs, and a majority of them were in favor of preserving the Union, if possible. The Convention assembled in Richmond on February 13th. Mr. Stuart was appointed a member of the Committee on Federal Relations, but asked to be and was excused from serving.

The Legislature was in sympathy with the well-known sentiments of a majority of the people of the State to preserve the Union. With this end in view, on the 19th day of January, it passed a resolution requesting all the States of the Union to send commissioners to a Congress to be held in Washington on the 4th day of February to consider the condition of the country, and to devise some means whereby the Union might be preserved and harmony restored. The commissioners chosen on the part of Virginia were ExPresident John Tyler, William C. Rives, Judge John W. Brockenbrough, George W. Summers and James A. Seddon. Twenty-one States were represented, and John Tyler was elected President of the Congress, afterward known as the Peace Congress. Without undertaking to go into a minute examination of the proceedings of this Congress, it will suffice to state that it failed to accomplish the objects for which it had been called. It did demonstrate, however, that the Republican party did not intend to respect the rights of the South.

Among the delegates was Senator Salmon P. Chase of Ohio. He had been one of the most outspoken of the anti

slavery party, and great interest was felt as to what he would say. On the second day of the Congress he addressed the commissioners, and, among other things, said: "Mr. Lincoln was the candidate of the people opposed to the extension of slavery. We have elected him. After many years of earnest advocacy and of severe trial, we have achieved the triumph of that principle. By a fair and unquestionable majority we have secured that triumph. Do you think we who represent this majority, will throw it away? Do you think the people would sustain us if we undertook to throw it away? I must speak to you plainly, gentlemen of the South; it is not in my heart to deceive you. I therefore tell you explicitly that if we of the North and West would consent to throw away all that has been gained in the recent triumph of our principles, the people would not sustain us, and so the consent would avail you nothing; and I must tell you further that under no inducements, whatever, will we consent to surrender a principle which we believe so sound and so important as that of restriction of slavery within State limits."

This was said in reference to the power on the part of the Federal Government to prevent the people of the Southern States from going into the common territory, that is, where new States were formed with their slaves. The Supreme Court of the United States had decided four years previous to this time that the Federal Government had no right to exercise such power, and yet Chase deliberately stated that the people who elected Lincoln would not yield obedience to that decision.

Moreover, he declared, in regard to that clause of the Constitution concerning fugitives from service:

"The people of the free States, however, who believe that slaveholding is wrong, cannot and will not aid in reclamation, and the stipulation becomes therefore a dead letter."1

1Stephens' History of the United States, p. 591.

Here was a Senator of the United States, who had taken a solemn oath to support the Constitution and laws of the United States, deliberately declaring that he, and those who had elected Lincoln, would do neither, when the Constitution and laws of Congress did not meet with their approval. Entertaining these views of the Constitution and the laws of the United States, President Lincoln deemed Chase a proper person to appoint Secretary of the Treasury in his Cabinet, and later Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.

The commissioners to the Peace Congress made their report to Governor Letcher, who communicated it to the Convention on March 6th. The report briefly stated that an article with seven sections, a copy of which accompanied the report, intended as an amendment to the Constitution, was adopted and submitted to Congress with the request that it should be recommended to the States for ratification, but the plan had failed to receive the support of Congress, and as that body had adjourned, it could take no further action upon it. Thus nothing was accomplished by the Peace Congress toward securing peace and harmony.

In the meantime Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, Texas and South Carolina had passed ordinances of secession, and appointed delegates to a Congress which met at Montgomery, Alabama, on February 4th. Commissioners were appointed by several of the Southern States to visit Richmond and urge the Convention to pass an ordinance of secession and commit Virginia to the Southern Confederacy. Commissioners from Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina appeared and asked permission to be heard orally before the Convention. On February 18th Fulton Anderson, Commissioner from the State of Mississippi, addressed the Convention, and also H. L. Benning, Commissioner from Georgia. The next day John S. Preston, Commissioner from South Carolina, in an eloquent speech urged Virginia to give her aid to the new Confederacy. The Convention, in spite of these strong appeals, and in spite of the fact that the Peace Congress had failed to effect a com