Peace Conference of 1861

• 1. Introduction

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  The Peace Conference of 1861 opened its doors on the 4th of February 1861 at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C., and at the very moment John Tyler was delivering his opening remarks inside, his granddaughter was in Montgomery, Alabama, ceremonially hoisting the Confederate flag. Two gatherings, in two cities, on the same day, pulling the nation in opposite directions. That symmetry tells you almost everything you need to know about what the peace conference was up against.

  One hundred and thirty-one leading American politicians had gathered, representing fourteen free states and seven slave states. Among them were six former cabinet members, nineteen ex-governors, fourteen former senators, fifty former representatives, twelve state supreme court justices, and one former president. The press called it the Old Gentleman's Convention, not warmly. The seven states of the Deep South had already seceded and refused to send anyone at all. The purpose of this meeting was to persuade the remaining eight upper and border South slave states not to follow them out of the Union.

  What brought so many senior figures to a hotel in February, with so little time left? And why, after three weeks of deliberation, did the conference produce almost nothing? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. Congress Tries First

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  In December 1860, the final session of the Thirty-sixth Congress convened with the Union visibly fracturing. Republican President Abraham Lincoln had won the 1860 election, and many pro-slavery Southerners, especially in the Lower South, had concluded that the new Republican government intended to abolish slavery where it already existed. State by state, elections were held to select delegates to special secession conventions.

  Congress responded with two parallel efforts. In the House, Ohio Republican Thomas Corwin led the Committee of Thirty-Three, one member from each state, tasked with finding a workable compromise. In the Senate, former Kentucky Whig John J. Crittenden, now elected as a Unionist, submitted what became known as the Crittenden Compromise. It proposed six constitutional amendments and four resolutions designed to guarantee the permanent existence of slavery in the slave states. Hopes ran high in the border states that the lame-duck Congress could settle matters before Lincoln took office.

  The Senate debated the proposal through a Committee of Thirteen. Its central provision would extend the Missouri Compromise line dividing free and slave territories all the way to the Pacific Ocean. That put it on a direct collision course with the 1860 Republican platform and with Lincoln himself, who had already made his objections known. The committee rejected the compromise on the 22nd of December by a vote of 7-6. Crittenden brought it back as a national referendum proposal, but the Senate rejected that too, on the 16th of January, by 25-23.

  A second, modified Crittenden plan followed. An ad hoc committee of fourteen congressmen from the lower North and the upper South met several times between December 28 and January 4, chaired again by Crittenden. It included Unionists such as John A. Gilmer of North Carolina, Robert H. Hatton of Tennessee, J. Morrison Harris of Maryland, and John T. Harris of Virginia. The House rejected their work on January 7. A third avenue emerged when the House's Committee of Thirty-Three reported a majority agreement on a constitutional amendment to protect slavery where it existed, paired with the immediate admission of New Mexico Territory as a slave state, which would have extended the Missouri Compromise line for all existing territories by other means. None of these tracks reached the finish line.

• 3. Virginia Steps In

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  Former President John Tyler, now a private citizen of Virginia, had been appointed as a special state envoy to President James Buchanan. His charge was to urge Buchanan to maintain the status quo toward the seceded states. Tyler was also an elected delegate to the Virginia convention weighing whether to follow the Deep South out of the Union.

  On the 17th of January 1861, Tyler published a document calling for a convention of six free and six slave border states. He believed one final collective effort, outside Congress, might still hold the country together. Virginia's Governor John Letcher had already made a similar appeal to the state legislature, and Letcher agreed to sponsor the convention. As the invitation went out to all states, Thomas Corwin agreed to hold off any final vote on his House compromise plan until the conference had finished its work.

  The Willard Hotel in Washington was chosen as the venue. Tyler was selected to head the proceedings. But the Deep South did not wait. Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Texas had all passed ordinances of secession by the time the conference opened, and they were preparing to form a new government in Montgomery. They sent no delegates. Arkansas, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Oregon also stayed away. What assembled on February 4 was a partial gathering of a fracturing country.

• 4. The Delegates and the Divisions

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  Fourteen free states and seven slave states took their seats at the Willard: Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia on the slave-state side. The free states stretched from Maine to Kansas. Among the delegates were James A. Seddon and William Cabell Rives from Virginia; David Wilmot from Pennsylvania; Francis Granger from New York; Reverdy Johnson from Maryland; William P. Fessenden and Lot M. Morrill from Maine; James Guthrie and William O. Butler from Kentucky; David S. Reid from North Carolina; Stephen T. Logan from Illinois; Alvan Cullom from Tennessee; and Thomas Ewing and Salmon P. Chase from Ohio. Even Louisiana, which sent no official delegation, had a presence: Representative John Edward Bouligny, the only member of the state's congressional delegation not to have resigned his seat, participated in the proceedings.

  Many delegates arrived believing that a solution was within reach. Many others came purely as watchdogs for their sectional interests, with no genuine intention of compromising. That division in purpose shaped everything that followed. On February 6, the convention formed a committee charged with drafting a formal proposal, one member per state, headed by James Guthrie of Kentucky.

  The three weeks of deliberation produced a proposed seven-point constitutional amendment. Its substance differed very little from the Crittenden Compromise that the Senate had already rejected. The core section, addressing slavery in the territories by extending the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific, passed by a 9-8 vote of the states, each casting a single vote. The margin was as narrow as it could be.

• 5. What the Amendment Proposed

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  The seven-point amendment the convention sent to Congress covered ground well beyond the Missouri Compromise line. Future territorial acquisitions would require the approval of a majority of both the slave states and the free states, a double-veto structure that neither side could override alone. Congress would be barred from passing any legislation affecting the status of slavery where it currently existed. State legislatures could not pass laws that interfered with the capture and return of fugitive slaves.

  The foreign slave trade would face a permanent prohibition. On the other side of the ledger, any slaveholder whose fugitive slave was freed through illegal mob action or through intimidation of the officials responsible for administering the Fugitive Slave Act would receive full, 100 percent compensation. The most sensitive sections of the amendment could be altered only by unanimous concurrence of all states, an effectively insurmountable bar.

  The amendment's architecture reflected the political logic of the border states: protect slavery where it existed, give slave states a veto over future expansion, and offer slave owners legal recourse when Northern mobs obstructed federal law. What it did not do was satisfy either committed Republicans or committed Southern secessionists. And the absence of any provision governing newly acquired territories left a gap that neither side could ignore.

• 6. Failure and Aftermath

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  The Senate voted on the conference's proposed amendment and rejected it 28-7. It never came to a vote in the House at all. With the final congressional session running out of time, the Committee of Thirty-Three submitted the Corwin Amendment instead, a narrower measure that simply protected slavery where it already existed. Congress passed it. Lincoln and most members of both parties already held that view to be covered by the existing Constitution, so the Corwin Amendment offered little that was new.

  A bill for New Mexico statehood, which would have extended the Missouri Compromise line in practice, was tabled by a vote of 115-71, with Southern Democrats and Republicans joining to block it. Robert H. Hatton, the Tennessee Unionist who had served on the ad hoc compromise committee before the conference, wrote in the final days of Congress that the effort was going badly and that he feared it would break without anything being done. He added that God would hold some men to a fearful responsibility. Hatton would later change sides.

  After Lincoln's inauguration, Congress was no longer part of the equation. Whatever hope remained lay in informal negotiations between Unionist Southerners and the incoming Republican administration. A final planned convention limited to the slave states still in the Union, scheduled for June 1861, never happened. The events at Fort Sumter foreclosed it.