Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Peace Conference of 1861 was a meeting of 131 leading American politicians held in February 1861 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. It was convened to persuade the eight upper and border South slave states that had not yet seceded to remain in the Union, following the election of Republican President Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
Former President John Tyler, acting as a special Virginia envoy, published a call for the conference on the 17th of January 1861. Virginia Governor John Letcher had made a similar proposal and agreed to sponsor the convention. Tyler was selected to head the proceedings when the conference opened.
Fourteen free states and seven slave states attended: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia on the slave-state side. The seven Deep South states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas) had already seceded and did not attend, nor did Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, or Oregon.
The conference produced a proposed seven-point constitutional amendment. Its key provision extended the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean. Other provisions required majority approval from both slave and free states for future territorial acquisitions, barred Congress from legislating on existing slavery, prohibited the foreign slave trade, and guaranteed 100 percent compensation to slaveholders whose fugitive slaves were freed by illegal mob action.
The Senate rejected the conference's proposed amendment 28-7, and it never came to a vote in the House. The amendment failed to satisfy most Republicans because it did not limit the expansion of slavery into new territories, while it also failed to address the core grievance of Southern secessionists. The conference's work was completed with only a few days left in the final session of Congress.
Congress passed the narrower Corwin Amendment instead, which only protected slavery where it already existed. A bill for New Mexico statehood was tabled 115-71. A final planned convention of the remaining slave states in the Union, scheduled for June 1861, never occurred because the events at Fort Sumter intervened.