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unavailing prayer that that body would adopt and urgently submit them for ratification by the states of the Union. During the presence of Omolds

STEPHEN R. MALLORY.

Secretary of the Navy of the Confederacy.

this special Congress in Washington I met several, ff not all, of the members from Virginia, notably the venerable President, Mr. Tyler, Judge John W. Brockenborough of the U. S. District Court, and Mr. Seddon, afterward Confederate Secretary of War. All impressed me as animated by an earnest desire to preserve the Union intact, but as, also, well-nigh hopeless of that result because of the spirit of sectional hostility which they had encountered in certain Republican members of mark in that body and of great influence at home.* A

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* Mr. Tyler on the 7th of February not only invoked by telegram an influential personage at Montgomery to exert himself to avert collision with the Federal authorities, but, on the same day,

"Peace Congress" by name, yet more scenes than one took place and many words were uttered during its sessions which breathed rather of sectional rancor than of fraternal peace. Of one of these inauspicious incidents I remember hearing a graphic description by a Virginia member a few hours after its occurrence.*

A New England member, a Senator, had said in debate that if the Southern states persisted in secession they should be coerced back into the Union. Immediately Commodore Stockton, one of the members from New Jersey, springing to his feet, advanced directly up to the militantly speaking member and declared, in effect, with his extended finger almost in the other's face: "If it be war that you and your people want, war you shall have-but war much nearer your own homes than any of the Southern states, should you attempt to pass across the State of New Jersey with an armed force to make war on the Southern states!"

Mr. Crittenden, of Kentucky, having adopted as his own measure the amendments to the Constitution proposed by the "Peace Congress," made an eloquent speech in the Senate in support of them, but they fell still-born, or failed to bridge the ever-widening chasm between the sections.

appealed to Governor Pickens in these impressive words: "Can my voice reach you? If so, do not attack Fort Sumter. You know my sincerity. The Virginia delegation earnestly unite." Again, on the 9th of February, he urged forbearance by South Carolina, and, yet again, nine days later. (Reb. Recs., series i., vol. i.. pp. 253-54-57.) It may further help toward reaching the truth of history here to contrast the spirit which pervaded and animated the fervent appeals of Mr. Tyler for such courses at Montgomery and Charleston as might make it yet possible to re-establish the Union without bloodshed with that of the implacable war-to-the-knife school of politicians of whom Senator Chandler was the exemplar.

* Another juxtaposition of the different feelings which swayed men at the epoch in question I would fain believe to be of historical use and worth here: Those rabid politicians at Washington who habitually scouted all ideas of compromise or of any fraternal settlement of the fretting and clashing relations of the states, regarded the proceedings of the "Peace Congress" with undisguised contempt, and blatantly proclaimed the Union to be like Hamlet's thoughts, "bloody or be nothing worth." As a class, however, these men kept out of battle-fields and never fought for the flag or the Union to which they rendered a perennial lip-service that has known no abatement. On the other hand, those accomplished, intrepid soldiers, such as Anderson and Foster and Crawford, with their comrades in Sumter, when affronting danger like heroes upholding the flag of their country, were anxiously watching the proceedings of the Peace Congress" with the ardent hope that they would bring forth a re-established fraternal union of the states. These men, each of whom could say, without affectation, of their country

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felt and uttered great satisfaction at the prospect of a peaceful solution of existing political difficulties. "The cheering news from Washington of the action of the Peace Conference and of the House of Representatives gave us great satisfaction," wrote that resourceful engineer, Captain John G. Foster, to his chief, General Totten, on the 2d of March, 1861. (Reb. Recs., series i., vol. i., p. 189)

At this time of political chaos and uncertainty few men in the country were so solicitously watching the dreary, misguided course of events as the officers of the regular army from the Southern states, not only at Washington but wheresoever there was a military post on our wide frontier. To them disunion and war constituted the most vital of possible questions. For the most part educated, from boyhood, in the service of the Union, and deeply attached to that service, disunion imposed upon them the choice between the sundering of all family ties and relations with those among whom they had been born, on the one hand, and the summary termination of life-long professional associations with the service of the Union. And more than this, disunion exposed them in the near future to a mortal con flict with men embattled under a flag which for years it had been their own highest pleasure also to serve under side by side with these same men since manhood. To this class of Americans generally all these days were a period of concern and inquietude naturally known to the same degree to none others of their countrymen; while to some, however, it was a period of great incertitude, as I may illustrate :

Soon after my arrival at Washington I called at one of the leading hotels to deliver to the wife of an officer, my junior in my own staff department of the army, a message from her aunt, the wife of an officer of high rank on duty in Oregon at the time. Soon the conversation turned upon the one absorbing topic of the hour for army people. Perforce, I was led to say I felt that but one course was open to me—that of following the fortunes of the State of Virginia. The lady in question, a soldier's daughter, born at a military post, sharply arraigned me for entertaining such a thought. With a woman's latitude of speech she reminded me that I had taken an "oath" which, she asserted confidently, would be violated were I to resign and enter the service of the seceding states. In this position her husband, in more guarded terms or with studious courtesy of manner, coincided. Such indeed was her warmth regarding the binding force of an officer's oath at this juncture that I was forced, in order to stop the subject, to say: That it was a question each one of us must settle with his own conscience, and that I certainly should not suffer any one to decide it for me. And yet the husband, though born in Maryland, and his wife was of New England and New York origin, resigned before I did, and was commissioned in the Confederate service before I left Washington.*

* One day as I was about to enter the western door of the War Department, on my way to the Quartermaster-General's office, about the 21st of April, 1861, I met this same officer coming out, and who, extending his hand, said: "Good-by, Jordan; what shall I say for you at Montgomery?" At Montgomery? I echoed, with an air of interrogation. "Yes," he rejoined, "I am off for Mont

How far the minds of the leaders of the Republican party were from crystallization into any definite policy with which to meet and deal with the secession movement, even so late as the 18th of January, when it had taken such proportions as to embrace 244,146 square miles, or how absolutely foreign to them was the idea of employing the national army and navy if need be for the restoration of the integrity of the Union, is made apparent in the explicit words of Mr. William H. Seward on the floor of the Senate on the 12th of January. "The Union," he declared, " is not worth preserving at the expense of a civil war." That is to say, that great chief of his party, on the eve of becoming the Premier of the incoming Federal Administration, tersely enunciated the same idea acting upon which, just a month before, the Cabinet of Mr. Buchanan had advised against any effort on the part of the outgoing President to increase the military force in Charleston harbor.* Moreover, as is notorious, immediately after the election of Mr. Lincoln, the acknowledged leader of Republican journalism, the most authoritative exponent of Republican political sentiments, aims and aspirations in the country, Mr. Greeley, through the Tribune of the 9th of November, 1860, declared, with characteristic precision and force of language: "Whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep her in. We hope

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gomery; I have resigned." Resigned? I again echoed, in sheer wonderment, recollecting his vious position and that of his wife. "Yes," he answered, "I was ordered to go to Annapolis as Quartermaster to Butler's column, and I could not serve on such duty and therefore resigned." I was too much surprised at the suddenness of his change of views to say more than that I was pleased by his course, and we parted with a shake of the hands.

* I must here mention as a part of the history of the times, previously overlooked in this narrative, that on the 14th of December, 1860, Mr. Lewis Cass availed himself of the opportunity of this decision of Mr. Buchanan's Cabinet, to parry future responsibility for the course of that administration in this particular, by resigning his high office of Secretary of State. Weighed in the scales of history, this action is not to be reconciled with his immediately anterior approval of Mr. Buchanan's declaration, in his annual message, that there was no constitutional power under the Federal compact to coerce a state to remain in the Union against the clear wishes of the people. If the Federal authority could not be constitutionally exerted to keep South Carolina from quitting the Union and setting up a government disassociated with that of the United States (which in effect Mr. Cass had accepted as sound doctrine), certainly no legitimate or moral end was to be served or attained by holding fortified places within her boundaries, supported by ships of war anchored in her waters. As for the crotchet which found expression in some quarters, at the time that the Federal authorities, while not using the national army and navy to coerce South Carolina to remain federally associated, might, however, lawfully use such abnormal or extra-constitutional appliances to collect revenues from foreign merchandise landed in Charleston harbor-when no longer a part of the United States-it serves to show of what nebulous ideas and chaos of incidents the War of Secession was finally born-leading to:

"Red ruin and the breaking up of laws."

never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue. by bayonets." Somewhat later the New York Herald, with remarkable accuracy of statement, said to its large audience: "Each state is organized as a complete government, holding the purse and the sword, possessing the right to break the tie of the Confederation as a nation might break a treaty, and to repel coercion as a nation might repel invasion. Coercion, if it were possible, is out of the question." And although he had been urgently recommending that the fortresses on the Atlantic seaboard should be strongly occupied by Federal troops, nevertheless, General Scott not only on January 14, 1861, disclaimed all idea of proposing an invasion of the seceded states, but as late as March 3d, 1861, addressed Mr. Seward, already announced as Secretary of State in Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet, in these terms:

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JOHN R. REGAN. Postmaster General of the Confederacy.

JUDAH P. BENJAMIN.
Attorney General of the Confederacy.

**** "adopt the conciliatory measures proposed by Mr. Crittenden or the Peace Convention, and, my life upon it, we shall have no new case of Secession; but on the contrary an early return of many, if not of all the states which have already broken off from the Union. Without some equally benign measure, the remaining slave-holding states will probably join the Montgomery Confederacy in less than sixty days when this city, being included in a foreign country, would require a permanent garrison of at least thirty-five thousand troops, to protect the government within it."

The alternatives to this proposition as the soldier-statesman concisely depicted them were, first:

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