Evansville Daily Journal, February 12, 1861

A great number of memorials have been presented to Congress and State Legislatures favoring the adoption of the "Crittenden Compromise," as it is called. It is no compromise at all, but a total surrender of every principle for which the Republicans and Douglas Democrats contended, in connexion with the subject of slavery, during the last Presidential canvass. The Republicans contended that Congress had the power to legislate so as to exclude slavery from the territories, or delegate it to the territorial legislature at its option. The Douglas Democrats contended that Congress had not the power to legislate on the subject, but that the people had the sole right to admit or exclude slavery as they chose; and the Yancey-Breckinridge Democracy contended that the Constitution of itself carried slavery into the territories, and fixed it there beyond the control of Congress or the people. The Crittenden Compromise is nothing more nor less than the Breckinridge platform.—The Yanceyites in the Charleston and Baltimore Conventions contended for the doctrine that the Constitution, as it is, recognizes and protects slavery in the territories.

They know that this doctrine can be sustained judicially so long only as a majority of the judges of the Supreme Court of the United States are capable, from imbecility or corrupt motives, of lending themselves to the purposes of a set of party leaders who are traitors at heart, and who belong to that class of accursed miscreants who would rather rule in hell than serve in heaven. Hence, they want to ingraft upon the Constitution, by way of amendment, the Crittenden Compromise and thus fasten slavery upon all territory now possessed and hereafter to be acquired south of 36° 30' in spite of the people inhabiting such territory. And now, Douglas Democrats are just as busy as the Yanc[e]yites in circulating, and procuring signatures to, memorials favoring this Crittenden Compromise. Among them we find brigadier generals, who adhered to the doctrine of popular sovereignty in the Charleston and Baltimore Conventions even after it was demonstrated, that if they continued to do so, it would result in the destruction of the Democratic party. They knew that if they yielded, their power in the North was at an end, and hoped that by standing firm to the end, in favor of popular sovereignty, they might yet sustain themselves in the North notwithstanding the loss of five or six Southern States. It was a matter of life and death. If they abandoned popular sovereignty death was certain; and they could only die by maintaining it to the end.

Democracy is now dead, and the leaders—even Douglas men who were members of the Charleston and Baltimore Conventions, and are now brigadier generals, colonels &c.—abandon popular sovereignty and favor the Yancey platform, as expressed in the Crittenden Compromise, and exert themselves to delude republicans, union men, and popular sovereignty democrats, into the abandonment of their principles. They have no desire that any compromise shall be made. They are determined to force the republicans to abandon their principles and humbly sue for peace and to this end they are willing to bring the republic to the verge of utter and eternal ruin if necessary. The object is not the welfare of the country but to place the Republican party apparently in the wrong, in the hope that thereby democracy will be enabled again to triumph in 1864.

If the adoption or rejection of the Crittenden Compromise depended upon the votes of the mass of the Douglas Democrats alone, they would unhesitatingly reject it, and it is hoped that they will, ere long, with as little hesitation, discard and consign to deserved infamy, as enemies of their country, the unprincipled political gamblers who would induce them to assume an attitude which would justly subject them to the imputation of yielding, like dastardly cravens, to the insolent and unreasonable demands of the imperious slave-holders of the South; who, having been accustomed from infancy to secure implicit obedience from negroes by force, seem to have persuaded themselves that by the same means the freemen of the north can be made to ignore their honor and their manhood and lick the hand that smites them. If the Douglas Democrats and Republicans do not in this crisis firmly, and regardless of consequences, resist every attempt to fasten slavery upon the territories by constitutional provisions placing it beyond the control of Congress or the people, they are cravens and fit only for slaves.