NEWS OF 150 YEARS AGO
January/February 1861
From The Missouri Democrat, Wednesday, January 23, 1861.
The Corwin Compromise.
We give on the outside the majority report of the Crisis Committee of the House of Representatives, of which Mr. Corwin, of Ohio, is Chairman. We invite thinking men of all parties to give it careful perusal, for it is a document of great intrinsic as well as extrinsic importance. The difficulties of the time are examined in it with a serene intelligence which clears them of all misapprehension, while the remedies prescribed are, in our humble opinion, equally simple and potential. We venture to predict that no compromise or peaceable readjustment is possible if this of Corwin’s shall prove to be unacceptable. We state its principal points correctly when we say that it provides for giving the slave States the amplest guarantees for the security of their slave property, and a larger share of the public domain than they are entitled to by virtue of their population. Yet it involves no surrender of the great principle that slavery shall not be extended over another square mile of free soil. Of the territory now owned by the United States, the Corwin Compromise proposes to give the slave States more than the Crittenden Compromise proposes to give them, for the northern boundary of New Mexico is coincident with a higher parallel than the line of 36° 30’. But slavery being established in all the country south of that higher parallel by local law and the tacit assent of Congress; being established, in fact, by virtue of the compromise of 1850, a part of which compromise was the organic act of New Mexico, that Territory is not open to the application of a rule which was established no earlier than the 6th of November last. The same considerations that would restrain Congress from abolishing slavery in other places and localities within its exclusive jurisdiction, must necessarily restrain it from intervention to New Mexico and Arizona. Conceding that region to the South, the area of slave States and Territories is, in round numbers, 1,100,000 square miles. The ratio of population to surface is 9 7-10 to the square mile. The area of free States and Territories is 1,648,779, and the ration of population 11 5-10 to the square mile. Thus it is unquestionable that the South, under Corwin’s Compromise, will have more territory in proportion to its actual population than the North. The next decennial census will increase the inequality of ratios between the two sections. In 1870 the North in proportion to its population will not have as many square miles of territory as the South. The territorial question must therefore be considered in process of a final adjustment. An enabling act for New Mexico, puts an end to the question of slavery in the territories. No candid person, however zealous in behalf of slavery, can pretend to deny that the Indian Territory, New Mexico and Arizona, is as much the South can possibly expect. The Crittenden Compromise gives the South less. Why not, then, accept the Crittenden Compromise, it will be asked? The following paragraph from Mr. Corwin’s report gives one sufficient answer to the question:
“From the beginning of our deliberations it was apparent that the disposition of that portion of our territory lying north of the parallel of 36° 30’ was the main subject of difficulty. The settlement of that question was, however, complicated with a provision much insisted on for territory hereafter to be acquired. This did not seem to the committee properly to belong to belong to [sic] the subject. The committee did not think proper to extend their considerations of the embarrassments arising out of the occupation of territory now within our possession to territory which might, or might not, hereafter be acquired. It seemed to them improper, if not absurd, while our government was threatened with overthrow by an angry controversy touching the disposition of our present territorial possessions, to employ our time in arranging for a partition among ourselves of the territorial dominions of neighboring nations, looking to a future which, when it shall come, will probably bring with it circumstances and conditions which could not now be foreseen, and which, therefore, should be left to the judgments of those whose duty it may become to consider and act upon them.”
