Lincoln_, Vol. 3, p. 288.]

Upon the failure of the Crittenden compromise, Seward, on the part of
the Republicans, offered five propositions, declaring (1) that the
Constitution should never be altered so as to authorise Congress to
abolish or interfere with slavery in the States; (2) that the fugitive
slave law should be amended by granting a jury trial to the fugitive;
(3) that Congress recommend the repeal by the States of personal
liberty acts which contravene the Constitution or the laws; (4) that
Congress pass an efficient law for the punishment of all persons
engaged in the armed invasion of any State from another; and (5) to
admit into the Union the remaining territory belonging to the United
States as two States, one north and one south of the parallel of 36 deg.
30', with the provision that these States might be subdivided and new
ones erected therefrom whenever there should be sufficient population
for one representative in Congress upon sixty thousand square
miles.[688] Only the first of these articles was adopted. Southern
Democrats objected to the second on principle, and to the third on the
ground that it would affect their laws imprisoning coloured seamen,
while they defeated the fourth by amending it into Douglas' suggestion
for the revival of the sedition law of John Adams' administration.[689]
This made it unacceptable to the Republicans. The fifth failed because
it gave the South no opportunity of acquiring additional slave lands.
On December 28, therefore, the committee, after adopting a resolution
that it could not agree, closed its labours.

[Footnote 688: Journal of the Committee of Thirteen, pp. 10, 13.]

[Footnote 689: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 484.]

This seemed to Jefferson Davis, who, in 1860, had assumed the
leadership laid down by John C. Calhoun in 1850, to end all effort at
compromise, and, on January 10, 1861, in a carefully prepared speech,
he argued the right of secession. Finally, turning to the Republicans,
he said: "Your platform on which you elected your candidate denies us
equality. Your votes refuse to recognise our domestic institutions
which pre-existed the formation of the Union, our property which was
guarded by the Constitution. You refuse us that equality without which
we should be degraded if we remained in the Union. You elect a
candidate upon the basis of sectional hostility; one who, in his
speeches, now thrown broadcast over the country, made