Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 1.djvu/383

Rh that the South should surrender their adjudged right to take slaves in all our territories, provided the North would recognize this right in the territories south of the old Missouri Compromise line. This amendment offered terms to the North far less favorable to the South than their existing rights under the decision of the Supreme Court, and &quot;yielded everything to the North except a mere abstraction.&quot; (Buchanan.) Mr. Crittenden said: &quot; Peace and Harmony and Union in a great nation were never purchased at so cheap a rate as we now have it in our power to do.&quot; In legal effect the Crittenden Compromise proposed to restore and make constitutional the old Missouri Compromise, and in practical operation it turned "over all the vast territories of the United States to perpetual freedom with the single exception of New Mexico.&quot; (Buchanan.) The pitiable treatment in committee and Congress of the pacific propositions of the senior senator demonstrated the irrepressibility of the conflict, and made^the existence of the Confederate States an inevitable event. The five Republican senators on the committee without exception voted down the Compromise. Mr. Toombs and Mr. Davis, from the Cotton States, voted with these five Republican senators because of the rule established by the committee requiring a majority of these five to vote in favor of any proposition to have it embodied in the report. Under this rule the vote of these five would alone have defeated any action of the committee, without the vote either way of the two senators from the extreme South. Mr. Douglas said, &quot;In the committee of thirteen every member from the South, including those from the Cotton States, Messrs. Toombs and Davis, expressed their readiness to accept any proposition of my venerable friend from Kentucky as a final settlement of the controversy if tendered and sustained by the Republican members. Hence the sole responsibility of our disagreement and the only difficulty in the way of an amicable adjustment