The Old Gentlemen's Convention

THE OLD GENTLEMEN'S CONVENTION Robert G. Gunderson Atdawn in thenation's capital on February 4, 1861, a stirring drumbeat roused "a host of night-capped heads" unaccustomed to the cacophony of reveille as executed on E Street by Company K of the Second Artillery just recently arrived to forestall what Radical Republicans described as a Southern conspiracy to seize the government. Fearing a "season of riot and assassination," jittery citizens braced themselves for "a day ofimportant events."1 Across the Potomac, Virginians went to the polls to select delegates to a state convention, and Washington editors speculated about a Unionist or Secessionist victory. At the Capitol, Senators John Slidell and Judah P. Benjamin of Louisiana were scheduled to deliver "Valedictory Addresses."2 Telegraphic dispatches to newspapers in the hinterlands told of Washington women who were turning politicians, crowding Congressional galleries, and adding to the hubbub in public parlors.3 Dispatches from two unusual political gatherings, however, raised more editorial dust than the fulmination on Capitol Hill. In Montgomery , Alabama, representatives of six of the seven seceded states assembled to form a Confederacy. Texas had passed its ordinance of secession four days earlier and promised to be present forthwith; but the course of the eight additional slave states was still in doubt. Amid their immediate preoccupation with establishing a new government, Confederate leaders conjured with the perhaps even more important problem of precipitating secession in the Upper South. Above all, if only for prestige, they needed Virginia. But representatives of the Old Dominion were gathering at Willard's Robert Gray Gunderson of the Department of Speech and Theatre, Indiana University, is the author of The Log-Cabin Campaign, a history of the presidential canvass of 1840. This article on the Peace Conference is taken from a comprehensive study which the University of Wisconsin Press will shortly publish. ? Washington Evening Star, Feb. 2, 4, 1861.2 /^.( Feb. 4, 1861. 3 Madison (Wis. ) Argus à- Democrat, Jan. 29, 1861. 6 BOBEBT G. GUNDEBSON Dancing Hall at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Pennsylvania Avenue for a widely heralded Peace Conference called by its General Assembly "in an earnest effort" to adjust "unhappy controversies" and to afford the people of "slaveholding States adequate guarantees for the security of their rights."4 Commissioners from eleven states were already on hand in Washington, and still more were en route, though bitter legislative battles continued to rage in several Northern states over the dispatch of delegates. The previous afternoon a special Baltimore and Ohio train had brought many Western members, and the Willard brothers' hostelry housed a majority of them. "Probably," speculated the editor of the Washington Evening Star, "there were never before collected at one time together under a single roof so many men of note."5 Of the 132 delegates who eventually arrived from twenty-one states, some owed their appointments to their respective governors, others to their legislatures. But all held official credentials duly certified by administrative authorities in the several states. Included on the roll were a former President of the United States, six former Cabinet members, nineteen former governors, fourteen former United States senators, fifty former congressmen, five former ministers or ambassadors , ten circuit judges, and twelve state supreme court justices. One hundred and three were lawyers; sixty-one had once served in their state legislatures; many were prominent old-line Whigs. Eleven members had served with Lincoln in the Thirtieth Congress, and five of the Southern delegates had sat with him on the Whig side of the aisle. Heading the list were septuagenarians scarred by a lifetime of acrimonious political warfare. The center of attraction was the seventyone -year-old former President, John Tyler, who had retired to his plantation , Sherwood Forest, on the banks of the James River in the Virginia Tidewater on his departure from the Presidency in 1845. Mrs. Tyler confided that her husband's "superiority over everybody else is felt and admittedby all. Everybody says he is looked to to save the Union."8 Friendly observers noted his "animal vigor," his "keen and gentle eyes," and pictured him as "well preserved," bearing his "great age with remarkable grace." "He is," said the Louisville Democrat, "the same slim...