4
REPUBLICANS SEEMED TO HAVE real reason to celebrate the results of the November 1860 elections. Many had feared that no candidate would receive a majority of the electoral vote. Lincoln’s chance of being selected by the House of Representatives would have been practically nil, for only a minority in that body bore the Republican party label. Even the most optimistic prophets in the party did not predict such an overwhelming number of electoral votes, especially since their candidate polled only 39.9 percent of the popular vote. Ironically, Douglas, who received the second largest popular vote, came in fourth in the electoral vote tally.
After Republican celebrants emptied their casks and wore out their voices, they became seriously concerned with reports that Southern states were taking steps to secede. If the slave states left the Union it would be a hollow election victory indeed! Republican bigwigs exchanged views and discussed policy. Some gave a more positive endorsement to coercion with each passing week.1 Several party regulars visited President-elect Lincoln in Springfield to strengthen his “backbone.” Some Republican editors, on the other hand, still seemed to approve of peaceful secession, but the qualifications they added confused the issue. Although Horace Greeley changed his mind about letting the “erring sisters” go in peace, other editors still thought it would be in the best interests of the nation to get rid of South Carolina troublemakers. “If she [South Carolina] will,” stated the editor of the Chicago Tribune, “let her go, and like a limb lopped from a healthy trunk, wilt and rot where she falls.”2
Most Democrats continued to hope for some kind of compromise. Vallandigham stated his opposition to both secession and coercion, yet if he had to take one or the other, it would be peaceable secession.3 Democrats hoped that they could force Republicans to accept some compromise plan and avert catastrophe. “With the United States Senate and the House of Representatives [in Democratic hands], and not less than one million of the majority of the popular vote against Lincoln,” wrote one observant Democrat, “we hope to make him do right in spite of the fanatical creed of the party who elected him.”4
When Vallandigham left for Washington early in December to attend the second session of the Thirty-sixth Congress, he felt a heavy weight upon his shoulders. Conservative Democrats, he believed, held the only hope for compromise and peace. Southern radicals talked of secession. Northern radicals talked more openly of coercion.
Vallandigham was sitting in his seat in the House of Representatives when the Speaker’s gavel called that body to order at noon on December 3, 1860. He heard the white-haired chaplain, the Rev. Thomas H. Stockton, offer a solemn and impressive prayer. Then followed the calling of the roll, the swearing-in of a few new members, and adjournment. The rest of the afternoon was spent in speculation and in wondering what the future held.
Before he retired that evening, C.L.V. wrote a letter to his wife in which he expressed his fears and mentioned a duty he had assigned to himself. “I have just witnessed the assembling of the last Congress of the United States at its last session,” he wrote with considerable feeling. “It was a solemn scene, although not appreciated as it will be viewed by posterity. Most of the Republicans look upon it as the beasts look upon the starry heavens—‘with brute unconscious gaze.’ All Southern men and Democrats sat with hearts full of gloom.” He described the day as one of “tribulation and anguish,” and concluded by stating, “When the secession has taken place, I shall do all in my power first to restore the Union, if it be possible; and failing in that, then to mitigate the evils of disruption.”5
Both the House and the Senate set up committees to consider “the perilous conditions of the country”: the Senate, a Committee of Thirteen; the House, a special Committee of Thirty-three. Not a single Midwestern Democrat who had supported Douglas gained a place on either committee. John A. McClernand, a congressman from Illinois and a devoted disciple of Douglas, pointed out that discrimination had been practiced to sabotage compromise efforts. Vallandigham seconded McClernand’s protest, insisting that “a most important segment” of the Democratic party had been ignored and insulted.6
A controversy developed over the appointment of a Florida congressman, George S. Hawkins, to the Committee of Thirty-three. Hawkins, a secessionist, begged to be excused; he said he expected no “fair and honest concessions” from the Republicans. The Speaker refused to accept Hawkins’s request, and Vallandigham rose to express his opinion. It was wrong, he said, to force a man to serve against his will. Coercion should not be practiced in the House. The Speaker ignored Vallandigham’s comments, still refusing to excuse Hawkins. The Florida congressman nevertheless nullified the appointment by failing to attend any of the committee sessions.7
While congressmen expressed opinions concerning compromise and coercion, Vallandigham took a hurried trip to Richmond, Virginia, to deliver an address at a forum sponsored by the Young Men’s Christian Association. In Richmond he heard reports that South Carolina would soon secede. As a congressman from a Northern state, he knew that every word he uttered would be reported in the Virginia press. He used the occasion to speak out for compromise and to caution Virginians against precipitous action. Virginia blood flowed in his veins—it was the land of his fathers. He had “the fondest feelings of filial affection” for the state. Since fanatical men, North and South, had created the crisis, all sensible and conservative men must turn their energies to quash radicalism and effect a compromise. He hoped that Virginia, in the days ahead, would not “shut the doors against her exiled children, or their descendents of her own kind and blood.”8
After arriving back at his Washington hotel on December 18—two days before the secession of South Carolina—Vallandigham received a call to attend a meeting of the Ohio delegation to Congress. The Honorable Thomas Corwin, senior member of the state’s congressional delegation and chairman of the Committee of Thirty-three, had called the caucus, hoping to solicit a strong antisecession statement. Vallandigham, tired from his trip to Richmond, showed little sympathy for Corwin’s efforts or ideas. The two had often disagreed in previous years. While Vallandigham had earnestly supported the Mexican War in the Ohio legislature, Corwin had vigorously and rather vitriolicly opposed it as a United States senator. Most Democrats and many Whigs, in fact, had regarded Corwin’s antiwar views as traitorous. Later, when Vallandigham had spoken out for the principle of popular sovereignty, Corwin had advocated the abolition of slavery in the territories. While Vallandigham had campaigned for Douglas, Corwin had spoken out for Lincoln.
When Vallandigham arrived at the meeting and learned its purpose, he declared it irrelevant and unnecessary. The seceding state, God, and history alone, he said, were qualified to judge whether a cause for secession existed. Several of Vallandigham’s Democratic colleagues, including the ubiquitous George E. Pugh, rebuked him and thought he ought to speak out for the Union and against secession. But Vallandigham, tenacious once he had seized upon an idea, refused to retreat. As a congressman he would oppose coercion and civil war. Unrepentant and defiant, C.L.V. tossed all caution to the winds. No armed force heading south to suppress secession would march through the Third District except over his dead body!9 Then, to show his scorn for Corwin, and with his Democratic colleagues still gasping, he stalked out of the room and headed back to his hotel. Time would tell whether the threat was mere rhetoric, whether he exaggerated for effect, or whether he intended to implement his threat.
Two days later, the telegraph wires carried word of the secession of South Carolina. Moderates intensified their efforts for compromise. Corwin’s Committee of Thirty-three found itself hamstrung by the extremists, North and South. Secessionist leaders, already committed to disunion, contended that compromise was hopeless and that the South could not expect justice from a Republican administration. Radical Republicans also took steps to block all schemes of conciliation—they dared not give way on the one plank (no slavery in the territories) which held the diverse factions of the Republican party together. Vallandigham, looking through partisan spectacles, blamed the Republicans rather than the Southern secessionists for lack of progress in the arena of compromise. “I see no hope of peace,” he wrote to his wife in late December, “much less of adjustment of difficulties. Every day proves still more clearly that it is the fixed purpose of the Republican party not only to refuse all compromise, but to force a civil war.”10
Vallandigham’s supposition that Republicans intended to coerce states which had seceded or would, seemed to be borne out by House action on a measure introduced by the Hon. Roger Pryor, a representative from Virginia. Pryor, a close personal friend of the Ohioan, offered a resolution stating that it was both “impractical” and “destructive of republican liberty” to use force to restore the Union. Every Republican member of the House voted to table Pryor’s resolution. Vallandigham was one of the fifty-five who voted in favor of the measure.11
In the Senate the venerable John J. Crittenden tried to don the mantle worn so long by Henry Clay. On December 18 he introduced a set of six propositions intended as amendments to the Constitution. The “Crittenden propositions” would restore the Missouri Compromise line and extend it, guarantee the protection of slavery in the District of Columbia against congressional action, prohibit Congress from touching slavery in the states where it existed, and enhance enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850.12 Republican opposition to most of the compromise proposals caused Crittenden and Samuel S. Cox, one of Vallandigham’s Ohio colleagues, to form a “committee” late in December to revise the six propositions in hopes of making them more palatable to Lincoln and his Republican cohorts. Crittenden and Cox spent a good portion of New Year’s Day reworking the propositions, but could not satisfy the radicals of the two sections.13 For his own part, Vallandigham favored the original Crittenden resolutions rather than the watered-down version, and he stated his views quite forthrightly on the floor of the House. “Anything less than a complete, final, and irrepealable adjustment, right now, of the question of slavery,” stated the dogmatic Daytonian, “would be idle and mischievous.”14
While congressmen quibbled over the wording of the Crittenden propositions, Ohio Democrats tried to create a grassroots movement for conciliation and compromise. Democrats in the state legislature, meeting in caucus, asked for a national convention to amend the Constitution and thus effect compromise.15 Dayton Democrats circulated a petition which asked Congress to adopt the Crittenden propositions without further delay.16 Samuel Medary, known as the “Old Wheelhorse of Ohio Politics,” hitched himself to the compromise cause. He returned from Kansas, where he had served as territorial governor, to establish the Crisis in Columbus in order to shape Democratic policies, to work for “a peaceable solution,” to war on Republicanism, and to save the country from the politicians. Medary feared “a fraternal war” and he believed the masses favored compromise and were entitled to have their say.17
Efforts to stir Congress to action on the Crittenden propositions came to naught. The weeks of January passed in review. More Southern states seceded and their congressmen left Washington to return home. Republicans adamantly held to their party principles, pushing would-be compromisers back in line. Vallandigham still blamed the Republicans rather than the secessionists for the failure of compromise. He expressed his hopelessness to his wife. “I am able to do no good here—no man can,” he wrote late in January, “so I sit, and am obliged to sit, quiet and sorrowful, as one who watches over the couch of his beloved mother slowly dying with consumption, to see my country perish by inches, and without power to save it.”18
February 4 proved to be a fateful day in American history. On that day representatives of six Southern states met in Montgomery, Alabama, to organize their own confederacy. On that day, too, the Crittenden compromise proposal in Congress emitted a dying gasp. And on that day representatives of twenty-one states met in Washington at the call of Virginia. The so-called National Peace Convention sought to accomplish what Congress had failed to do—achieve reunion and peace. There was little likelihood, however, that the convention could breathe life into the compromise movement when old John Tyler pounded the gavel to bring the session to order. None of the states of the Deep South sent representatives. Three Northern states, firmly in Republican hands, refused to send delegates, and many “stiff-backed” Republican delegates had promised their governors they would not violate any plank of the party platform. Some of the delegates and many conservatives deceived themselves into thinking the convention was more than gesture.
Despite his apparent despair over the state of the nation, Vallandigham decided upon a new tack. Like John C. Calhoun, he devised a scheme to protect a minority section from the tyranny of the majority. The scheme took the form of three amendments to the Constitution, and he waited for an opportunity to lay his proposals before the House. The opportunity came on February 7, a windy and wintry day. Having obtained the floor, he proposed his three amendments as the means to save the nation from civil war.
Vallandigham’s proposed thirteenth amendment had its basis in Calhoun’s “concurrent minority” doctrine, espoused in his “Discourse on the Constitution and Government of the United States,” an essay found among his papers after his death. Calhoun believed that liberty could only be preserved under a government by “concurrent” rather than absolute majorities. There was need for an organic change to assure the “weaker section” protection from the stronger, for the equilibrium between sections had been permanently destroyed. This change could be effected through a constitutional amendment, such as one providing for a dual executive: two presidents, one elected by each section (North and South) and each president possessing a veto.
Vallandigham, however, went far beyond Calhoun in developing his own “concurrent minority” system. In the first place, his suggested thirteenth amendment listed four “geographical sections:” North, South, West, and Pacific. A majority of the electors in each of the four sections would be “necessary to the choice of the President and vice-President.” The amendment also changed the president’s term to six years with reelection possible only if the incumbent received a two-thirds majority of the electoral vote in each of the four sections. Furthermore, controversial measures introduced in Congress needed the approval of the majority of the senators of each of the four sections: “On demand of one-third of the Senators of any one of the sections on any bill, order, resolution or vote (except on questions of adjournment) . . . a vote shall be had by sections, and a majority of the Senators from each section voting shall be necessary to the passage of such bill, order, or resolution, and to the validity of every such vote.”
Vallandigham’s proposed fourteenth amendment sanctioned the principle of secession. No state could secede, however, unless every other state within its “geographical section” gave its approval. His final amendment (“Article XV”) guaranteed equal rights in the territories to all citizens, Southern slaveholders as well as Northern freemen. The principle of popular sovereignty would govern territories seeking statehood; the people would decide whether they wanted slavery or not and would put their wishes into the state constitution they drafted.
The Dayton congressman asked his colleagues to be kind enough to read and consider his propositions “with candor.” Since procedural rules did not give him an opportunity to present a prepared speech in defense of his proposed amendments, he stated he would speak at some later date.19
He had to wait until February 20 for the opportunity to explain his rather bizarre four-section scheme. It was evident that he had borrowed from Edmund Burke as well as Calhoun. The Daytonian, like Burke, believed in the organic nature of the state. It was constantly necessary to adapt institutions to circumstances, but change should be evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Again, like Burke, he stressed social order and toleration, and again he defined order in terms of individual freedom.
In that earnest appeal of February 20, Vallandigham asked his colleagues to face the hard facts of American life. A “great and terrible REVOLUTION” threatened to wreck the nation, bringing “a permanent dissolution.” Again he laid much of the blame for the crisis upon the Republican party, built upon the tripod of sectionalism, antislavery, and intolerance. He scolded Republicans for speaking of a higher law than the Constitution and for developing the legend of “an irrepressible conflict.”
Finished with his scolding, Vallandigham then recommended his four-section scheme as the solution for the times. His propositions, he insisted, looked solely toward the “restoration” and “maintenance” of the Union, now and forever.20 These proposed amendments, he added, were intended “to maintain the existing Union, or ‘nationality,’ forever, by dividing or arranging the States into sections within the Union, under the Constitution, for the purpose of voting in the Senate and electoral college.”21
Republicans generally ridiculed and misrepresented Vallandigham’s clumsy and unworkable four-section scheme. The garbled telegraphic reports that came out of Washington represented the proposal as a means to destroy rather than save the Union. Republican editors viewed the proposals as an attempt to set up four separate and independent confederacies, splitting one nation into four. Certainly it nullified the principle of majority rule practiced in a democracy. Horace Greeley thought it a device to plunge the country into civil war. William Dean Howells, then an editorial writer for the Ohio State Journal, branded it “pure and simple treason.” William F. Comly of the Dayton Journal specialized in sarcasm and caustic comments. Yes, the so-called scheme was “the brightest idea of the age” and Vallandigham “the biggest fool in America.” Would Vallandigham call the residents of his “four republics” “quarteroons”?22
Because of the confusing and dishonest telegraphic reports, even Vallandigham’s Ohio friends misunderstood the scheme, believing it a four-republic proposal. The Dayton congressman therefore felt obligated to write long letters to editors to correct misimpressions and to reexplain his system.23 But Republicans who read his explanations scorned them. Editor Comly, a master of editorial ridicule, blasted his neighbor with both barrels. “We think the explanation,” wrote the sarcastic scribe, “more sensible than the thing explained.” Perhaps Vallandigham believed the old legend that “the hair of the dog would cure his bite.” And wouldn’t it be reasonable for Vallandigham to give Irish names to each of his four sections? Did he borrow the idea from the ancient constitution of the Irish nation?24
While Vallandigham was still busy trying to explain his proposed amendments to his Ohio friends and foes, Republican congressmen took steps to discard all the compromise proposals and to widen the gap already existing between North and South. By admitting Kansas as a free state, Republicans helped doom compromise efforts, and by advocating passage of the Morrill Tariff, a “new Bill of Abominations,” they drove in the final wedges of separation.
Both Vallandigham and Douglas warned their colleagues that the “iniquitous tariff bill” affected all compromise measures adversely. It was sheer hypocrisy for a man to favor the high, high protective tariff and yet hope for compromise. Furthermore, the protective tariff policy enriched New England and robbed the West, basically an agricultural section. “Such oppressive taxation for the benefit of the few,” wrote James J. Faran of the Cincinnati Enquirer, “is almost sufficient to drive any people into revolution”—Western as well as Southern. The pro-Western editor of the Stark County Democrat produced an editorial tirade against the Morrill Tariff, concluding with the supposition that “the crazy descendents of Plymouth Rock” were “as bloodless as the Rock.”25
The protariff Republicans ignored the protests of Vallandigham, Douglas, and the border state congressmen. They seemed more willing to appease the manufacturing interests than to make concessions to the South, thereby driving a stiletto into the dying compromise hopes. On March 2, the last day of the second session of the Thirty-sixth Congress, the House of Representatives passed the tariff bill. The Dayton congressman cast one of the votes against the measure and announced, perhaps for political effect, that he intended to introduce a repeal proposal in the opening days of the next session.26
After Congress adjourned, most members tarried in Washington to witness the inauguration of the nation’s first Republican president. Vallandigham also stayed over and joined the crowd on March 4 to hear Lincoln’s inaugural address. Many Democrats, including Stephen A. Douglas, expressed satisfaction with the tone and contents of the president’s speech. Neither Vallandigham nor Samuel Medary of the Crisis, on the other hand, found the message satisfactory. Medary said the message gave the president too much elbow room—to steer for any port. He would judge the new president by what he did rather than by what he said.27 Vallandigham was even less kind. For him, the address lacked the direct and straightforward, statesmanlike language one had the right to expect from “the plain, blunt, honest man of the Northwest.” Furthermore, Vallandigham added, the new president left thirty million people in doubt whether he wanted war or peace.28
Conservative Democrats were generally far more critical of Lincoln’s selection of cabinet members than of his inaugural address. William H. Seward, the new secretary of state, had previously endorsed the “higher law doctrine,” speaking occasionally like an abolitionist. Salmon P. Chase, newly named secretary of the treasury, had defied federal law when he was governor of Ohio. Simon Cameron, named secretary of war, was a Pennsylvanian who brazenly wore his radical stripe on his sleeve. Many Democrats perhaps expected to see Seward, Chase, and Cameron decide policy for the new president. Seward was an able man, a shrewd and experienced politician. He might well be the power behind the throne, perhaps greater than the throne itself.29
When Vallandigham returned to Dayton he found antiwar sentiment everywhere. His friend, J. Frederick Bollmeyer, who edited the Dayton Empire talked like a true peace man.30 So did James J. Faran of the Cincinnati Enquirer and Samuel Medary of the Crisis. Even Douglas continued to plump for peace, advocating “an amicable settlement.” Douglas gave a notable speech on March 15 in which he maintained his opposition to coercion and war: “War is disunion. War is final, eternal separation.”31 Clement L. Vallandigham shouted, “Amen!”
Ohioans’ fears of a civil war had a half-dozen different bases. In the first place, ties of blood and friendship linked many “Buckeyes” to residents of the slave states. Mrs. Vallandigham’s family, for example, lived in Cumberland, Maryland, and C.L.V.’s great-uncles had left Pennsylvania to live in North Carolina and Kentucky. Many of the so-called “Butternuts,” residents of Ohio’s backwoods area, had left behind many friends and relatives when they moved from the Southern uplands to find new homes in the upper Midwest.32
Economic ties also linked many Ohioans to the South. Hundreds of commercial houses had a vested interest in the Mississippi River trade. Southern bonds underwrote some of the paper money circulating in the upper Middle West. A portion of the farm surplus of Ohio moved southward, either to a consumers’ market or to the New Orleans outlet. A dozen Cincinnati industries depended, in large measure, upon Southern buyers. Washington McLean, one of the owners of the Cincinnati Enquirer, also owned several boiler-plate factories which served the South. Small wonder then, that this friend of C.L.V. conducted a constant campaign for peace and compromise.33
Western sectionalists who feared the triumph of industrialism and the predominance of New England foresaw that a civil war could transform them into “slaves and serfs of New England.”34 They recognized that the closing of the competitive Mississippi River system would put them at the mercy of the Great Lakes shipping interests and the east-west railway trunk lines, owned mainly by New York and Boston capital. Some astute Midwesterners feared that New England industry and Northeastern capital would exploit their section through the Republican party.35 The upper Midwest may have been partially bound to the Northeast by “hoops of steel,” railroads and canals, as well as credit and culture, but Midwestern sectionalists still wished to play balance-of-power politics between the Northeast and the South. Vallandigham and Samuel Medary, both Western sectionalists and conservatives, frequently appealed to the nascent anti-New England sentiment which existed in many sections of the region lying north of the Ohio River.36
Western conservatives who preferred evolutionary change and compromise to revolutionary change and civil war spoke of the lessons of history. European civil wars had invariably ended in dictatorships: Oliver Cromwell had set up a military dictatorship at the close of the Puritan Revolution in England, while in France, Napoleon Bonaparte emerged as the end product of the French Revolution. Midwestern conservatives also saw a lesson in the change Louis Napoleon had effected in their own generation; he had transformed the Second French Republic into the Second Empire within a four-year period. A civil war in America might mean the end of representative government. “We are embarking upon a course,” predicted James J. Faran of the Cincinnati Enquirer, “that will produce some Cromwell or Napoleon who will crush beneath his iron heel the Democratic legacy we have so long enjoyed.”37 Lincoln most surely was an unknown quantity, so conservatives in the upper Midwest felt they had reason to fear for the future. Adamantly against coercion, Vallandigham mistrusted both Lincoln and the future.
Midwestern conservatives noted that President Lincoln seemed to vacillate in his policy regarding Fort Sumter. In mid-March, when it looked as if he would withdraw federal troops from Sumter, they endorsed his course. Vallandigham and his Dayton friends favored the surrender of Forts Sumter and Pickens “as the best means to keep peace, avoid a civil war, and finally to bring back the seceded States, and upon just compromise, reconstruct the Union.”38 They deceived themselves with false hopes and wishful thinking, misjudging the force of the independence movement in the South and the intensity of Southern radicalism. Facing the past and fearing the future, however, Vallandigham reiterated Douglas’s statement: “War is disunion. War is final, eternal separation.”
1 Entries of 13, 14, 18, 27 November 1860, Medlar, “Journal.”
2 11 October 1860.
3 Entry of 14 November 1860, Medlar, “Journal.”
4 Ibid., entry of 8 November 1860.
5 3 December 1860, published in part in Vallandigham, Vallandigham, p. 144. Although James L. Vallandigham’s biography of his brother is a study in hero-worship, it is still invaluable because letters now lost or destroyed are frequently quoted or incorporated into the text.
6 McClernand to Charles H. Lanphier, 10 December 1860, Charles H. Lanphier Papers, Illinois State Historical Library, Springfield; Congressional Globe, 36 Cong., 2 sess., p. 39.
7 Congressional Globe, 36 Cong., 2 sess., p. 36.
8 Richmond Daily Enquirer, 18 December 1860. The editor of the Enquirer wrote: “The lecture was one of great ability and eloquence, and was received by the audience with evident satisfaction. There is no man in the Congress of the United States who has at all times and under all circumstances maintained the rights and interests of his own section with such full justice to all the rights of the South, as Mr. Vallandigham.”
9 Dayton Daily Journal, 22 December 1860.
10 24 December 1860, published in part in Vallandigham, Vallandigham, p. 150.
11 Congressional Globe, 36 Cong., 2 sess., p. 220. The vote on the measure was 98 to 55.
12 Ibid., p. 114.
13 Samuel S. Cox, Three Decades of Federal Legislation, 1855-1885: Personal and Historical Memories of Events (New York, 1885), p. 28. Cox’s role in the compromise game is ably treated in David Lindsey, “‘Sunset’ Cox, Ohio’s Champion of Compromise, in the Secession Crisis of 1860-1861,” Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Quarterly 62 (October 1953): 348-67.
14 Congressional Globe, 36 Cong., 2 sess., pp. 279-80.
15 George S. Converse to Samuel S. Cox, 11 January 1861, Samuel S. Cox Papers (microfilm), Hayes Memorial Library, Fremont, Ohio. The original Cox Papers are in the Brown University Library, Providence, R.I.
16 Dayton Daily Journal, 18 January 1861.
17 Crisis (Columbus), 31 January 1861. Medary’s role as editor and critic is treated in Clarence C. Broskney, “Samuel Medary, A Peace Democrat” (Master’s thesis, Ohio State University, 1931), and Helen P. Dorm, “Samuel Medary: Politician, Statesman, and Journalist, 1801-1864” (Master’s thesis, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio, 1938).
18 27 January 1861, published in part in Vallandigham, Vallandigham, p. 152.
19 Congressional Globe, 36 Cong., 2 sess., pp. 794-97. Vallandigham offered his three proposals as an amendment to a resolution introduced by John Cochrane of New York. Cochrane’s resolution asked for a popular referendum on the Crittenden compromise proposals. Vallandigham’s controversial “Article XIV” read as follows: “No State shall secede without the consent of the Legislatures of the States of the section to which the State proposing to secede belongs. The President shall have power to adjust with seceding States all questions arising by reason of their secession; but the terms of adjustment shall be submitted to the Congress for their approval before the same shall be valid.”
20 Ibid., p. 1067 and Appendix, pp. 237-42.
21 Vallandigham to editor of the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 18 December 1862, published 23 December.
22 New York Tribune, 9 March 1861; Ohio State Journal (Columbus), 9 February 1861; Dayton Daily Journal, 9, 12 February 1861.
23 Vallandigham to editor of the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 14 February 1861, published 19 February.
24 Dayton Daily Journal, 22 February, 4, 23 March 1861.
25 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 12 February 1861; Stark County Democrat (Canton), 9 January 1861; Crisis, 4, 28 April 1861.
26 Congressional Globe, 36 Cong., 2 sess., p. 4321.
27 Crisis, 14 March 1861.
28 Congressional Globe, 37 Cong., 1 sess., p. 57.
29 Dayton Daily Empire, 7 March 1861; entries of 4, 16 March 1861, Medlar, “Journal.”
30 Dayton Daily Empire, 28, 29 March 1861.
31 Quoted in Crisis, 2 May 1861 and by Vallandigham in Congressional Globe, 37 Cong., 2 sess., pp. 1460-61.
32 Richard L. Power, Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and Yankee in the Old Northwest (Indianapolis, 1953) is an admirable study. The student of Ohio migration trends should also consult: John D. Barnhart, “The Migration of Kentuckians across the Ohio River,” Filson Club Historical Quarterly 25 (January 1951): 24-32; Henry C. Hubbart, “Pro-Southern Influences in the Free West, 1840-1865,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 20 (June 1933): 42-62; and David C. Schilling, “The Relation of Southern Ohio to the South during the Decade Preceding the Civil War,” Quarterly of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio 8 (January 1913): 3-19.
33 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 28 December 1860, 29 January, 5, 12 February, 30 March 1861. The economic ties that bound Cincinnati and the South are explored in scholarly fashion in Charles R. Wilson, “Cincinnati, a Southern Outpost in 1860-61?” M.V.H.R. 24 (March 1938): 373-82.
34 Crisis, 31 January, 2 April 1861.
35 Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, 12 February 1861.
36 The “hoops of steel” metaphor appeared in the New York Tribune, 14 April 1861. Albert H. Kohlmeier, The Old Northwest as the Arch of the American Federal Union: A Study in Commerce and Politics (Bloomington, Ind., 1938) reveals the economic ties of the upper Midwest and the Northeast.
37 22 January 1861. Medary expressed a similar fear in Crisis, 31 January 1861.
38 Entry of 16 March 1861, Medlar, “Journal.”