On the 3d of March, 1861, the Thirty-sixth Congress had reached the prescribed period of its existence, and had died a constitutional death. Its last session of three months had been spent in full view of an awful public calamity, which it had made no effort to avert or to mitigate. It saw the nation compassed round with a frightful danger, but it proposed no plan either of conciliation or defence. It adjourned forever, and left the law precisely as it found it.

In his message to Congress, President Buchanan had said: "Congress alone has power to decide whether the present laws can or cannot be amended so as to carry out more effectually the objects of the Constitution." With Congress rested the whole responsibility of peace or war, and with them the message left it. But Congress behaved like a body of men who thought that the calamities of the nation were no special business of theirs. The members from the extreme South were watching for the proper moment to retire; those from the middle slave States were a minority which could only stand and wait upon the movements of others; while the great and all-powerful Northern party was what the French minister called "a mere aggregation of individual ambitions." They had always denied the possibility of a dissolution of the Union in any conjuncture of circumstances; and their habit of disregarding the evidence was too strong to be suddenly changed. In the philosophy of their politics it had not been dreamed of as a possible thing. Even when they saw it assume the shape of a fixed and

terrible fact, they could not comprehend its meaning. They looked at the frightful phenomenon as a crowd of barbarians might look at an eclipse of the sun : they saw the light of heaven extinguished and the earth covered with strange and unaccountable darkness, but they could neither understand its cause nor foresee its end, they knew neither whence it came nor what it portended. The nation was going to pieces, and Congress left it to its fate. The vessel, freighted with all the hopes and all the wealth of thirty millions of free people was drifting to her doom, and they who alone had power to control her course refused to lay a finger on the helm.

Only a few days before the convening of this Congress the following letter was written by Hon. Joseph Holt, Postmaster-General, afterward Secretary of War, under Buchanan :

WASHINGTON, Nov. 30, 1860.

MY DEAR SIR, I am in receipt of yours of the 27th inst., and thank you for your kindly allusion to myself, in connection with the fearful agitation which now threatens the dismemberment of our government. I think the President's message will meet your approbation, but I little hope that it will accomplish anything in moderating the madness that rules the hour. The indications are that the movement has passed beyond the reach of human control. God alone can disarm the cloud of its lightnings. South Carolina will be out of the Union, and in the armed assertion of a distinct nationality probably before Christmas. This is certain, unless the course of events is arrested by prompt and decided action on the part of the people and Legislatures of the Northern States; the other slave States will follow South Carolina in a few weeks or months. The border States,

now so devoted to the Union, will linger a little while; but they will soon unite their fortunes with those of their Southern sisters. Conservative men have now no ground to stand upon, no weapon to battle with. All has been swept from them by the guilty agitations and infamous legislation of the North. I do not anticipate, with any confidence, that the North will act up to the solemn responsibilities of the crisis, by retracing those fatal steps which have conducted us to the very brink of perdition, politically, morally, and financially.

There is a feeling growing in the free States which says, "Let the South go!" and this feeling threatens rapidly to increase. It is, in part, the fruit of complete estrangement, and in part a weariness of this perpetual conflict between North and South, which has now lasted, with increasing bitterness, for the last thirty years. The country wants repose, and is willing to purchase it at any sacrifice. Alas for the delusion of the belief that repose will follow the overthrow of the government!

I doubt not, from the temper of the public mind, that the Southern States will be allowed to withdraw peacefully; but when the work of dismemberment begins, we shall break up the fragments from month to month, with the nonchalance with which we break the bread upon our breakfast-table. If all the grave and vital questions which will at once arise among these fragments of the ruptured Republic can be adjusted without resort to arms, then we have made vast progress since the history of our race was written. But the tragic events of the hour will show that we have made no progress at all. We shall soon grow up a race of chieftains, who will rival the political bandits of South America and Mexico, and who will carve out to us our miserable heritage with their bloody swords. The masses of the people dream not of these things. They suppose the Republic can be destroyed to-day, and that peace will smile over its ruins

to-morrow. They know nothing of civil war: this Marah in the pilgrimage of nations has happily been for them a sealed fountain; they know not, as others do, of its bitterness, and that civil war is a scourge that darkens every fireside, and wrings every heart with anguish. They are to be commiserated, for they know not what to do. Whence is all this? It has come because the pulpit and press and the cowering, unscrupulous politicians of the North have taught the people that they are responsible for the domestic institutions of the South, and that they have been faithful to God only by being unfaithful to the compact which they have made to their fellow-men. Hence those Liberty Bills which degrade the statute-books of some ten of the free States, and are confessedly a shameless violation of the federal Constitution in a point vital to her honor. We have presented, from year to year, the humiliating spectacle of free and sovereign States, by a solemn act of legislation, legalizing the theft of their neighbors' property. I say theft, since it is not the less so because the subject of the despicable crime chances to be a slave, instead of a horse or bale of goods.

From this same teaching has come the perpetual agitation of the slavery question, which has reached the minds of the slave population of the South, and has rendered every home in that distracted land insecure. This is the feature of the irrepressible conflict with which the Northern people are not familiar. In almost every part of the South miscreant fanatics have been found, and poisonings and conflagrations have marked their footsteps. Mothers there lie down at night trembling beside their children, and wives cling to their husbands as they leave their homes in the morning. I have a brother residing in Mississippi, who is a lawyer by profession, and a cotton planter, but has never had any connection with politics. Knowing the calm and conservative tone of his character, I wrote him a few weeks since, and implored him to exert his influence in allaying the frenzy of

the popular mind around him. He has replied to me at much length, and after depicting the machinations of the wretches to whom I have alluded, and the consternation which reigns in the homes of the South, he says it is the unalterable determination of the Southern people to overthrow the government as the only refuge which is left to them from these insupportable wrongs; and he adds: “On the success of this movement depends my every interest, the safety of my roof from the firebrand, and of my wife and children from the poison and the dagger."

I give you his language because it truthfully expresses the Southern mind which at this moment glows as a furnace in its hatred to the North because of these infernal agitations. Think you that any people can endure this condition of things? When the Northern preacher infuses into his audience the spirit of assassins and incendiaries in his crusade against slavery, does he think, as he lies down quietly at night, of the Southern homes he has robbed of sleep, and the helpless women and children he has exposed to all the nameless horrors of servile insurrections?

I am still for the Union, because I have yet a faint, hesitating hope that the North will do justice to the South, and save the Republic, before the wreck is complete. But action, to be available, must be prompt. If the free States will sweep the Liberty Bills from their codes, propose a convention of the States, and offer guaranties which will afford the same repose and safety to Southern homes and property enjoyed by those of the North, the impending tragedy may be averted, but not otherwise. I feel a positive personal humiliation as a member of the human family in the events now preparing. If the Republic is to be offered as a sacrifice upon the altar of American servitude, then the question of man's capacity for self-government is forever settled. The derision of the world will henceforth justly treat the pretension as a farce; and the blessed hope which for five