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| Winfield Scott in 1865. |
March 3, 1861. |
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in Virginia, and President of the Convention, was an advocate of the treason of the South Carolina politicians in 1832-33, and is fully on record as a co-worker with Wise and others against the life of the Republic so early as 1856.1 On the adjournment of the Peace Convention he hastened to Richmond, where he and Seddon (afterward the so-called Secretary of War of Jefferson Davis) were serenaded, and both made speeches.
In his address at the close of the Convention he had just left, Tyler said:--“I cannot but hope and believe that the blessing of God will follow and rest upon the result of your labors, and that such result will bring to our country that quiet and peace which every patriotic heart so earnestly desires. . . . It is probable that the result to which you have arrived is the best that, under all the circumstances, could be expected.
So far as in me lies, therefore, I shall recommend its adoption.”
Thirty-six hours afterward he was in Richmond, and in the speech alluded to he cast off the mask, denounced the Peace Convention as a worthless affair, declared that “the South” had nothing to hope from the Republican party;2 and then, with all his might, he labored to precipitate Virginia into the vortex of revolution, in which its people suffered terribly.
There were many persons of influence extremely anxious for peace, and preferring a dissolution of the Union (which they hoped would be temporary) to war, who were ready to consent to the secession of the fifteen Slave-labor States in order to secure this great desire of their hearts.
Influential Republican journals expressed this willingness;3 and Lieutenant-General Scott, who knew what were the horrors
of war, seems to have contemplated this alternative without dread.
In a letter addressed to Governor Seward, on the day preceding Mr. Lincoln's inauguration,
he suggested a limitation of the President's field of action in the premises to four measures, namely:--1st, to adopt the Crittenden Compromise; 2d, to collect duties outside of the ports of “seceding States,” or blockade them; 3d, to conquer those
1 This fact was established by letters found when our army moved up the Virginia Peninsula, in 1862.
2 Telegraphic dispatch from Richmond, dated the evening of “Thursday, February 28, 1861,” quoted by Victor, in his History of the Southern Rebellion, page 490.
3 “ Whenever a considerable section of our Union shall deliberately resolve to go out, we shall resist all coercive measures designed to keep it in. We hope never to live in a Republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets.” --New York Tribune, November 7, 1860. When, in June, 1865, Alexander H. Stephens applied to President Johnson for pardon, he alleged that, among other reasons for espousing the cause of the rebellion, was the fact that the utterances of the Tribune, one of the most influential of the supporters of the Republican party, made him believe that the separation and independence of the Slave-labor States would be granted, and that there could be no war.
On the 22d of January, 1861, Wendell Phillips, the great leader of the radical wing of the Anti-slavery party, in an address in Boston, on the “Political lessons of the hour,” declared himself to be “a disunion man,” and was glad to see South Carolina and other Slave-labor States had practically initiated a disunion movement. He hoped that all the Slave-labor States would leave the Union, and not “stand upon the order of their going, but go at once.” He denounced the compromise spirit manifested by Mr. Seward and Charles Francis Adams, with much severity of language.--Springfield (Mass.) Republican, January 23, 1861.
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