APTER XXVI

SEYMOUR AND THE PEACE DEMOCRATS

1860-1861

While the contest over secession was raising its crop of disturbance
and disorder at Washington, newspapers and politicians in the North
continued to discuss public questions from their party standpoints.
Republicans inveighed against the madness of pro-slavery leaders,
Democrats berated Republicans as the responsible authors of the perils
darkening the national skies, and Bell men sought for a compromise.
Four days after the election of Lincoln, the Albany _Argus_ clearly
and temperately expressed the view generally taken of the secession
movement by Democratic journals of New York. "We are not at all
surprised at the manifestations of feeling at the South," it said. "We
expected and predicted it; and for so doing were charged by the
Republican press with favouring disunion; while, in fact, we simply
correctly appreciated the feeling of that section of the Union. We
sympathise with and justify the South, as far as this--their rights
have been invaded to the extreme limit possible within the forms of
the Constitution; and, if we deemed it certain that the real animus of
the Republican party could become the permanent policy of the nation,
we should think that all the instincts of self-preservation and of
manhood rightfully impelled them to resort to revolution and a
separation from the Union, and we would applaud them and wish them
God-speed in the adoption of such a remedy."[633]

[Footnote 633: Albany _Argus_, November 10, 1860. On November 12 the
Rochester _Union_ argued that the threatened secession of the slave
States was but a counterpoise of the personal liberty bills and other
measures of antagonism to slave-holding at the North. See, also, the
New York _Herald_, November 9.]

This was published in the heat of party conflict and Democratic
defeat, when writers assumed that a compromise, if any adjustment was
needed, would, of course, be forthcoming as in 1850. A little later,
as conditions became more threatening, the talk of peaceable secession
growing out of a disinclination to accept civil war, commended itself
to persons who thought a peaceful dissolution of the Union, if the
slave-holding South should seek it, preferable to such an
alternative.[634] But as the spectre of dismemberment of the nation
came nearer, concessions to the South as expressed in the Weed plan,
and, later, in the Crittenden compromise, commended itself to a large
part of