The _Times_ was as firmly against a compromise as the _Evening Post_. Stand by the Union and the Constitution first, wrote Raymond; when their safety is assured, then only can we talk of guarantees for the South. “We would yield nothing whatever to exactions pressed by threats of disunion....” So was the _World_, which said that “It is of no use to mince matters; this rampant cotton rebellion will haul in its horns or we shall have civil war.” The _World_ had its own plan of restoring harmony by extinguishing sectional spirit. It proposed, first, to divest the Federal executive of its overgrown patronage--the office-seekers were always pandering to sectional prejudice; second, to improve the navigation of the Mississippi; third, to construct levees to prevent Mississippi floods; and fourth, to build a Southern Pacific railway. It naïvely said that if these public works “could be adopted as a preventive instead of a remedy, their cost would probably be less than the cost of a civil war.” The _Tribune_ also had a pacification scheme. It suggested that the Federal Government begin the purchase of all the slaves of Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Arkansas, Texas, and Louisiana, about 600,000 in all; to pay not more than $100,000,000, or less than $200 each, for them; and to complete the transaction in, say, 1876.
A petition for the Crittenden compromise circulated by William B. Astor found 140 signatures at the _Herald_ office. By now, indeed, Bennett’s _Herald_ was expressing opinions which seem madness.
After appealing to Lincoln to beg the South to return; after appealing to the Republican Party to repudiate its Chicago platform; after appealing to Congress to pass the Crittenden resolution or submit it to the States, the _Herald_ appealed to the South. On Jan. 4, railing at the imbecility of Congress and the indifference of President-elect Lincoln, it proposed that the Southern States arrange a Constitutional Convention for their own section alone. Let this body adopt amendments to the Constitution embodying guarantees of the return of fugitive slaves, of the validity of the Dred Scott decision, and of universal tolerance of opinion respecting slavery as a social institution. “Let them submit these different amendments to the different Northern States, earnestly inviting their acceptance of them, and assigning a period, similar to that which was appointed for the ratification of the Constitution of 1787, when all States which should have agreed to their proposition should be considered as thenceforth forming the future United States of America.” The whole nation, said the _Herald_, would join such a Union, save New England. Probably the Yankee States would stay out. Good riddance to them. The rest of the country is sick and tired of New England. It has had too much “of the provincial meanness, bigotry, self-conceit, love for ‘isms,’ hypercritical opposition to anything and everything, universal fault-finding, hard bargaining, and systematic home lawlessness ... which are covering their section of the country with odium.”