a distinct
declaration of war upon our institutions.... What boots it to tell me
that no direct act of aggression will be made? I prefer direct to
indirect hostile measures which will produce the same result. I prefer
it, as I prefer an open to a secret foe. Is there a senator upon the
other side who to-day will agree that we shall have equal enjoyment of
the territories of the United States? Is there one who will deny that
we have equally paid in their purchases, and equally bled in their
acquisition in war? Then, is this the observance of your contract?
Whose is the fault if the Union be dissolved?"[690]

[Footnote 690: _Congressional Globe_, pp. 308, 309.]

The country looked to Seward to make answer to these direct questions.
Southern States were hurrying out of the Union. South Carolina had
seceded on December 20, Mississippi on January 9, Florida on the 10th,
and Alabama on the 11th. Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas were preparing
to follow. The people felt that if a settlement was to come it must be
made quickly. "Your propositions would have been most welcome if they
had been made before any question of coercion, and before any vain
boastings of powers," Davis had said. "But you did not make them when
they would have been effective. I presume you will not make them
now."[691]

[Footnote 691: _Ibid._, p. 307.]

If the position of the New York senator had been an embarrassing one
at the Astor House on December 22, it was much more difficult on
January 12. He had refused to vote for the Crittenden compromise.
Moreover, the only proposition he had to make stood rejected by the
South. What could he say, therefore, that would settle anything? Yet
the desire to hear him was intense. An eye-witness described the scene
as almost unparalleled in the Senate. "By ten o'clock," wrote this
observer, "every seat in the gallery was filled, and by eleven the
cloak-rooms and all the passages were choked up, and a thousand men
and women stood outside the doors, although the speech was not to
begin until one o'clock. Several hundred visitors came on from
Baltimore. It was the fullest house of the session, and by far the
most respectful one."[692] Such was the faith of the South in Seward's
unbounded influence with Northern senators and Northern people that
the Richmond _Whig_ asserted that his vote for the Crittenden
compromise "would give peace at once to the country."[693]

[Footnote 692: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vo