Those were gloomy days when on the first Monday in December, 1860, congress assembled. Not for many years to come was another congress to assemble in Washington with every state represented. The record of the intervening years was to be written in crimson letters upon the battlefields of a divided country, and before the representatives of many of the states then present would in their own persons or those of their successors, again be seated there, a great war would be fought and a veritable saturnalia of thievery be inaugurated in certain of the states under the name of Reconstruction, when the carpetbagger and the "scalawag," combining with the negro just released from bondage and the cotton field, would saddle upon stricken states financial burdens under which they yet stagger though the sun of prosperity has again shone upon them.

When the congress met President Buchanan, beset by such conditions and difficulties as no president before him had known, found himself at sea, the chart and compass of the constitution not affording him apparently a safe way out of the troubles that daily grew around him. The southern states, or certain

of them, made no secret of their intention to secede from the Union. In his message to congress he recognized these conditions, but, while declaring that the right of secession did not exist within the states, he found no authority in the Federal government to prevent it. While it may have added to his fame to have taken a firmer stand against secession, it would not have prevented it. The extreme southern states were determined; their minds had long been made up and they cherished the hope that the border states, such as Kentucky, Missouri and Maryland, would be one with them in the determination to withdraw from the Federal Union.

The message of Mr. Buchanan, in the then inflamed state of the public mind, was the object of bitter attack. Kentucky through her venerable and able senator, John J. Crittenden, ever hopeful of a peaceful solution of the great question at issue, praised the peaceful tone of the message while not wholly approving all of its features. Mr. Crittenden longed for peace, since, with prophetic eye, he saw what war would mean not only to Kentucky but Kentucky but to the whole country. He pleaded for a judicial rather than a passionate

attitude in his efforts to stay the awful storm about to break upon the country, declaring the Union to be worthy of great sacrifices and great concessions. To the senate, he said: "I trust there is not a senator here who is not willing to yield and to compromise much in order to preserve the government and the Union." The sentiment of his speech to the senate is shown in these fragmentary sentences: "I will waive any remarks i might have been disposed to make on the message. I do not agree that there is no power in the president to preserve the Union. To say that no state has the right to secede and that it is a wrong to the Union, and yet that Union has no right to interpose any obstacles to its secession seems to me altogether contradictory."

Subsequently, Mr. Crittenden in a second speech in the senate, showed the depth of his heart interest in the spirit of compromise. He had stood with the illustrious Clay in favor of compromise measures when the storm was gathering, and, now that it was about to break upon the country, he still hoped to avert it and prevent its ravages. On December 18, 1860, he explained his plan to the senate and here McElroy's "Kentucky in the Nation's History" is quoted. Senator Crittenden said: "I have endeavored by these resolutions to meet all these questions and causes of discontent by amendments to the constitution of the United States, so that the sentiment if we can happily agree on any, may be permanent and leave no cause for future controversy. These resolutions propose then, in the first place, in substance the restoration of the Missouri

Compromise, extending the line throughout the territories of the United States to the eastern border of California, recognizing slavery in all the territory south of that line and prohibiting slavery in all the territory north of it; with a proviso, however, that when any territories, north or south, are formed into states, they shall then be at liberty to exclude or admit slavery as they please, and that, in one.

case or the other, it shall be no objection to their admission into the Union.

"I propose also that the constitution shall be so amended as to declare that congress shall have no power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, so long as slavery exists in the states of Maryland and Virginia, and that they shall have no power to abolish slavery in any of the places under their special jurisdiction within the southern states.

"These are the constitutional amendments. which I propose. There are other propositions in relation to grievances and in relation to controversies which I suppose are within the jurisdiction of congress and may be removed by the action of congress. I propose in regard to legislative action, that the Fugitive Slave law, as it is commonly called, shall be declared by the senate to be a constitutional act in strict pursuance of the constitution. I propose to declare that it has been decided by the supreme court of the United States to be constitutional, and that the southern states are entitled to a faithful and complete execution of that law, and that no amendment shall be made hereafter to it which will impair its efficiency.

"I have further provided that the amendments to the constitution which I here propose, and certain other provisions of the constitution itself, shall be unalterable, thereby forming a permanent and unchangeable basis for peace and tranquility among the people."

Turning then to the southern senators, Mr. Crittenden asked: "Can you ask more than this? Are you bent on revolution; bent on disunion? God forbid it! I cannot believe that such madness possesses the American people. This gives reasonable satisfaction. I can speak with confidence only of my own state. Old Kentucky will be satisfied with it and she will stand by the Union and die by the Union, if this satisfaction be given."

After his impassioned appeal to his brother southern senators, Mr. Crittenden might well

have turned to the extremists among the northern senators and asked them, too: "Can you ask more than this? Are you bent on revolution; bent on disunion?" From them had they answered from the depths of their hearts, that answer would have been that they welcomed dissolution and disunion, could they by these destroy slavery. By no means does the burden of the war rest upon the south. For years there was a party in the north bent upon the destruction of slavery by whatever means, and it hailed the day when it had goaded the south into armed opposition to its methods and its studied incentives to the conflict which followed the election and inauguration of Mr. Lincoln.

The Senate "Committee of Thirteen" raised on motion of Senator Lazarus W. Powell, of Kentucky, to consider measures of compromise and pacification, comprised among its members both the Kentucky senators, an unusual but a deserved honor. To this committee, Mr. Crittenden presented his resolutions as above outlined. Most of the Democratic senators thought that they saw in them an opportunity for the successful adjustment of the pressing sectional differences, but the Republican members considered them as yielding too much to the south and they were rejected. The day for concessions, for compromises, indeed for statesmanship had passed; the day for the mailed hand of the soldier was dawning, and not all the senates that have sat from the beginning of constitutional government, could avert the strife about to burst upon our country.

It is idle now to speculate upon the answer of the country to the Crittenden Compromise, had it been submitted to the people. Rhodes in his "History of the United States" declares: "No doubt can now exist and but little could have existed in January, 1861, that if the Crittenden Compromise plan had been submitted to the people, it would have carried in the northern states by a great major

ity; that it would have obtained the vote of almost every man in the border states, and that it would have received the preponderating voice of all the cotton states but South Carolina."

Perhaps these conclusions of Mr. Rhodes are correct and that the Republican senators who opposed the Crittenden Compromise, knew the conditions to be as he describes them, and therefore opposed the compromise in the Committee of Thirteen.

The Cincinnati Enquirer of July 3, 1861, declares that "the whole south, save South Carolina, would have adopted Crittenden's Compromise. It is written down in stern and inexorable history that the Republican party would not accept these propositions." President Buchanan's friends are said to have attempted to persuade Mr. Lincoln to approve Mr. Crittenden's compromise proposals. Mr. Lincoln is said to have replied: "I am for no compromise which asserts or permits the extension of the institution (of slavery) in soil owned by the nation."

The resolutions of Mr. Crittenden, when presented to the senate, were rejected by a majority of thirteen. On the 8th of January, 1861, the anniversary of the battle of New Orleans, ever since 1815 known in Kentucky as "Jackson's Day," a convention of Constitutional Union men, made up of representatives of both the leading parties in Kentucky, met in Louisville and endorsed the Crittenden Compromise, deploring the existence of a Union which could only be held together by armed power. Nine days later the state legislature was convened in extraordinary session by a call from Governor Magoffin. On . assembling, a resolution was adopted inviting a national convention to consider measures of peace and conciliation. The legislature also declared "the unconditional disapprobation of Kentucky of the employment of force in any form against the seceding states."

At a later date, when resolutions had given

way before the stern demands of arms, men who had together voted for the adoption of these resolutions, met each other on the field of battle wearing the uniforms of the opposing forces.

On January 25th, the general assembly adopted a resolution calling upon congress to call a national convention to consider amendments to the federal constitution in acordance with the fifth article of that instrument. On the 29th of the same month, they appointed six commissioners to a Peace Conference to be held in Washington February 4th. This convention assembled, remained in session twenty-three days and adjourned without having reached any results looking towards peace.

Kentucky had done her part in every effort, to that end. Crittenden and Powell in the United States senate; the leading men of all parties in convention at Louisville; the general assembly at Frankfort; the Peace Commissioners at the Kentucky Peace convention of twenty-one states, at Washington, all these had vainly sought for peace; had offered from their wisdom and from their hearts, every concession possible to be made to avert the horrors of civil war, and all without avail. There was not a man of those Kentuckians who had given their best efforts in the interests of peace who did not recognize what war would mean to Kentucky; they knew that families would be sundered; that father would oppose son upon the field; that brother would meet brother in hostile array and that for these reasons, the usual horrors of war would be a thousand-fold intensified for Kentucky. Hence they sought peace by offering compromise; they sought peace by offering everything save honor, and when the die was cast, when war had come, Kentucky's sons made their choice and going with the colors of their hearts, won new honors and renown upon a thousand battlefields which they hallowed by their blood; and today, Kentucky, proud of her soldier

sons, regardless of the uniforms they wore, holds them in grateful remembrance and like the heroic mother of old, points proudly to them, saying: "These are my jewels.”

The idea that there could be a war in this country with Kentucky out of it, had something of the grotesque about it. As if to emphasize this fact, Major Robert Anderson, born in Jefferson county about ten miles from Louisville, was ordered to the command of the United States forces at Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor in November, 1860. Subsequent events brought this officer into command at Fort Sumter when the first gun of the war was fired; thus Kentucky, which had sought immunity from war through her plea for neutrality, was actually one of the important participants in the very first action of the war she vainly hoped to escape. "It is Fate" says the mystic of the Far East, when trouble encircles him, and the people of Kentucky, loving the union of their fathers and the south of their kindred, might well be pardoned if in this extremity, they had folded their arms and, with the stoicism of the savages whom they had evicted from their original homes, had declared: "Let Fate do its worst; we will follow the dictates of our hearts and consciences."

History was made rapidly in those days. December 27, 1860, Major Anderson spiked the guns at Fort Moultrie, burned the inner works of the fort, and transferred the garrison to Fort Sumter on an island at the mouth of Charleston harbor. In response to an inquiry from the secretary of war as to why this movement was made, Major Anderson replied: "I abandoned Fort Moultrie because I was certain that if attacked, my men must have been sacrificed and the command of the harbor lost. If attacked, the garrison would never have surrendered without a fight." McElroy, falling into the unsupported charges against John B. Floyd, secretary of war in the cabinet of Mr. Buchanan, says that Floyd at

this time "was using his high office in the interest of the cause of disunion." It is easy to make such charges as this, but more difficult to establish them. McElroy makes no effort to prove the correctness of this claim and one is left to believe or disbelieve it, as his sympathies may be with the people of the south or with the Union. In the absence of anything beyond mere assertions written years after the incidents involved, one may be excused from subscribing to the correctness of the charges of which there is no substantial proof.

While commissioners from South Carolina were in Washington seeking in vain for a conference with Mr. Buchanan, the possibie fate of the Crittenden Compromise measures was causing suppressed excitement in Kentucky. The people of the state, regardless of past political affiliations, thought, very justly, that at such a crisis as now confronted the Union, these measures should come out of committee and be openly debated in the senate. They believed, as they had a right to believe, that they were entitled to know who favored and who opposed this effort to save the Union intact and thus evade the horrors of an internecine war. Perhaps a majority of the Perhaps a majority of the people, while believing abstractly in the right of secession, were too ardently devoted to the Union of their fathers to vote for a separation from that Union. Mr. Justice Harlan, of the supreme court of the United States, one of Kentucky's most distinguished sons, who had commanded a regiment of troops in the Federal army, said at a later period: "I confidently assert that there was no moment during the war when a decided majority of the people of Kentucky were not unalterably opposed to a dissolution of the Union under all circumstances and whatever might be the result to the institution of slavery."

Notwithstanding this statement from one of her sons, who has for so many years honored his native state upon the highest judi

cial tribunal in the world, it is nevertheless a fact that when the people of Kentucky sought at the polls to register their will, they were confronted with bayonets and paid the penalty of a free expression of their will, in arrest and imprisonment.

The historian of today is impressed with conflicting emotions typical of the conditions of the period of which he writes. The views of Mr. Justice Harlan, entitled to the highest respect, have just been stated. Gen. George B. Hodge, of the Confederate army, a Kentuckian, says of this period and of the people of the state: "Their loyalty was nearly akin to the religious faith which is born in childhood, which never falters during the excitements of the longest life and which at last, enables the cradle to triumph over the grave. The mass of them did not reason about it. The Union was apotheosized. The suggestion of its dissolution was esteemed akin to blasphemy, to advocate or speculate about it was to be infamous."

But before an appeal to arms, Kentucky, schooled by Henry Clay, who sought by compromise to bring the dissonant sections of the Union to agreement, and whose successor, Mr. Crittenden, endeavored by the same efforts to prevent a dissolution of the Union-Kentucky would have every effort to that end put to the test. In the Crittenden resolutions, the people of the state believed they saw a peaceable and an honorable solution of the great questions confronting them. It was not the men who had voted for Bell and Everett or for Douglas and Johnson who alone hoped for this consummation. The men who had supported Breckinridge and Lane were as profoundly interested as those who had opposed that ticket. These men knew that if the supreme test of war came they would find themselves in the ranks of one of the armies as soldiers confronting their own kindred in the opposing army. No other state had so serious, so poignant a question to decide. The