Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era

by James M. McPherson

“We spit upon every plan to compromise,” wrote one secessionist. “No human power can save the Union, all the cotton states will go,” said Jefferson Davis, while Judah Benjamin agreed that “a settlement [is] totally out of our power to accomplish.”47 On December 13, before any compromises had been debated—indeed, before any states had actually seceded—more than two-thirds of the senators and representatives from seven southern states signed an address to their constituents: “The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union, through the agency of committees, Congressional legislation, or constitutional amendments, is extinguished. . . . The honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people are to be found in a Southern Confederacy.”48 Delegates from seven states who met in Montgomery on February 4, 1861, to organize a new nation paid no attention to the compromise efforts in Washington.