Had the Senators and Representatives from the seceded States only retained their seats in Congress, they could easily have insured the adoption of the measures recommended by this ‘Peace Congress,’ and substantially embodied in the Compromise bill which bore the name of its author, Mr. Crittenden of Kentucky; and the guarantees thus secured to it would have given slavery a fresh lease of life and power. They included the admission of slavery1 to the Territories south of latitude 36° 30′; forbade Congress to abolish the institution in places under its exclusive jurisdiction, and made it virtually perpetual in the District of Columbia; prohibited interference with the inter-State slave trade; required the United States to compensate the owner of any fugitive slave rescued from his clutches ‘by violence or intimidation’ in the free States; empowered them to sue the county in which the rescue occurred, and the county in turn to sue the individual rescuers; and forbade that any future amendment of the Constitution should modify these stipulations or affect the fugitive-slave and three-fifths representation clauses of the original instrument.
Even without the votes of the seceding Senators, the Crittenden Compromise commanded 19 votes in the Senate to 20 in opposition;2 and the parallel propositions submitted by the Peace Congress having been also dismissed, the following amendment to the Constitution, proposed by Thomas Corwin, was adopted by the requisite two-thirds majority in both houses of Congress, a large number of Republicans voting in its favor:3
