James Buchanan, Buchanan's administration on the eve of the rebellion

[173] on his opinion expressed in the ‘Views’ (29th October, 1860), that ‘a smaller evil [than such a civil war] would be to allow the fragments of the great Republic to form themselves into new Confederacies.’

The General, however, in the same letter to Secretary Seward, presents his alternative for. all these evils. He advises Mr. Lincoln's administration ‘to throw off the old and assume a new designation—the Union party; adopt the conciliatory measures proposed by Mr. Crittenden, or the Peace Convention, and my life upon it, we shall have no new case of secession, but, on the contrary, an early return of many if not all of the States which have already broken off from the Union. Without some equally benign measure, the remaining slaveholding States will probably join the Montgomery Confederacy in less than sixty days, when this city, being included in a foreign country, would require a permanent garrison of at least thirty-five thousand troops.’ His advice to adopt the Crittenden Compromise would have been excellent had it been given to his Republican friends in Congress in the previous December, before any State had seceded, and before any fort had been seized, instead of then recommending to President Buchanan to despatch small bands of United States soldiers to each of the forts. This recommendation, had it been followed at the time, would at once have defeated this very Crittenden Compromise, so much desired, and served only to provoke the cotton States into secession. It would have been the stone of Cadmus cast among the armed men sprung from the dragon's teeth, and the signal for immediate fratricidal war and mutual destruction. The advice to President Lincoln was out of season, after both the Crittenden Compromise and the measures proposed by the Peace Convention had been finally rejected by Congress, and whilst the Confederacy of the cotton States was in active existence.

Before we proceed to analyze in further detail the General's report, it is curious to note the reason for its publication. This was a consequence of the publication of his letter to Secretary Seward, which was in its very nature confidential. At this period, in October, 1862, when the rebellion had assumed a formidable aspect, and when his sinister predictions appeared to