From Washington.
[special Correspondence of the Dispatch.] Washington, Dec. 17, 1860.
This is the great day. Every hour is pregnant with events which must affect the happiness of ourselves and our most distant posterity.
The South Carolina Convention meets just at this hour; the Crisis Committee have just gone to their room — the Southern members of it determined to bring matters to a test at once; Wade speaks in the Senate; the House galleries are almost empty.
Suspense is throned over all the land.
If, as stated in my letter of yesterday, Corwin & Co. will yield all the South asks, (and it turns out that my informant is on intimate terms with him,) then there will be a pause.
But South Carolina and Gulf States members say there is little hope for the Union from any postponement.
Last night we had new rumors.
Gen. Scott had resigned, and bets were made that the President would follow suit before this week is ended.
Mr. Breckinridge was said to be busy all day Sunday, preparing to assume the duties of the Executive, &c., &c. So we go. Everything is caught up and devoured with greedy credulity — nothing that could happen being too preposterous for these revolutionary times.
It was stated very confidently that Senator Crittenden had determined to take ultra Southern ground.
Not he. The old man has grown up in the Union.
Its roots are wound round his very heart.
He cannot abandon it.
Some say Wade will make a violent and abusive abolition speech.
Others contend that he will be gagged by other Republicans, and confine himself to a defence of Lincoln.
He is a fiery old fellow, with a bitter tongue, which he has never taught himself to control.
He is. withal, brave--one of the few Republicans of either House who will show fight promptly.
He is no duelist; but at the time of the Brooks-Sumner affair, he dared the Southern Senators singly or en masse to a fist and skull battle, then and there on the Senate floor.
Judge Hawkins, since his refusal to serve on the Crisis Committee, has received dozens of threatening letters, some of them containing pictures of daggers and the word "Beware!"
The position taken by the Whig and Gov. Wise, of "fighting in the Union," though it sounds mightily like "fighting in peace," is excellently well chosen, as a means of impressing the North with the fact that if they expect to hold the Capitol in any event, they are laboring under a gross delusion.
As I came up the Avenue this morning, I overheard two workmen talking, one of whom said that a million of men can be concentrated on the South in less than three weeks, and, if the South does not accept the terms offered by the North, this army of a million of unemployed workmen will be precipitated upon Virginia and Maryland.
I give this merely to show the feeling among the lower classes.
Gov. Hicks is working up to a sense of the existing dangers.
He will this week issue a proclamation for a special meeting of the Maryland Legislature.
Geo. Sanders, formerly Consul to Liverpool, proposes that if the two sections can't come to terms, and the Crisis Committee break up, (of which there is little prospect, as I hear, this morning,) then let Congress authorize the Southern States to go out if they choose, taking with them all the forts and arsenals belonging to the United States, and holding them till the 4th of July, 1861, by which time it can be ascertained certainly what the real feeling of the Northern people may be with respect to granting the amendments and other guarantees necessary to reassure the South.
From expressions let fall just now by one of the Virginia delegation, I am more and more impressed with the belief that a temporary pause is about to take place; and it so, she friends of the Union are hopeful of stopping the Revolution.
Zed. 