After fruitless efforts, continued
for some ten days, the Committee determined to report the journal of
their proceedings, and announce their inability to attain any
satisfactory conclusion. This report was made on the 31st of
December--the last day of that memorable and fateful year, 1860.
Subsequently, on the floor of the Senate, Mr. Douglas, who had been a
member of the Committee, called upon the opposite side to state what
they were willing to do. He referred to the fact that they had rejected
every proposition that promised pacification; stated that Toombs, of
Georgia, and Davis, of Mississippi, as members of the Committee, had
been willing to renew the Missouri Compromise, as a measure of
conciliation, but had met no responsive willingness on the part of their
associates of the opposition; and he pressed the point that, as they had
rejected every overture made by the friends of peace, it was now
incumbent upon _them_ to make a positive and affirmative declaration of
their purposes.
Mr. Seward, of New York, as we have seen, was a member of that
Committee--the man who, in 1858, had announced the "irrepressible
conflict," and who, in the same year, speaking of and for abolitionism,
had said: "It has driven you back in California and in Kansas; it will
invade your soil." He was to be the Secretary of State in the incoming
Administration, and was very generally regarded as the "power behind the
throne," greater than the throne itself.
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