USA > Rhode Island > Rhode Island : three centuries of democracy, Vol. I > Part 101
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The apportionment of representation in the House of Representatives in 1860 on the basis of one representative for 2200 inhabitants or the major fraction thereof, with at least one and not more than twelve for any town, was: Providence, 12; Smithfield, 6; Newport and North Providence, 5 each; Cumberland and Warwick, 4 each; Cranston, 3; Bristol, Cov- entry, Fall River, Johnston, Richmond, Scituate, South Kingstown, and Westerly, 2 each ; Barrington, Burrillville, Charlestown, East Greenwich, Exeter, Foster, Glocester, Hopkinton, Jamestown, Little Compton, Middletown, New Shoreham, North Kingstown, Portsmouth, Tiverton, Warren, and West Greenwich, I each. In the readjustment following the exchange of Fall River for East Providence and Pawtucket, the two representatives apportioned to Fall River were assigned one each to the new towns. The adjustment increased the Senate by one member. It should be noted that Smithfield included Smithfield, Central Falls, North Smithfield, Lincoln, and part of Woonsocket as the towns were further divided; that Cum- berland included part of Woonsocket; that Warwick included West Warwick; and that North Providence included the part of Pawtucket lying west of the rivers.
THE UNION PARTY OF 1860-"God grant that, in my day at least, that curtain may not raise. God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies beyond. When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on states dissevered, discordant, belligerent ; on a land rent with civil feud, or drenched it may be in fraternal blood !" Dead in 1852, Daniel Webster's prayer had been granted; he did not live to see the tragedy which impended. The actual beginning of conflict in arms in the Civil War may be placed in Kansas, or. later with the firing on Fort Sumter. The Dred Scot decision embittered the North; John Brown's raid aroused the South. The conservative element in Rhode Island asserted itself, and William Sprague, 4th, was nominated for Governor by (I) Republicans who had bolted the regular party convention; (2) by the Democratic state convention, and (3) by a "young man's" convention, against Seth Padelford, candidate for the Republican convention. The largest vote cast in a state election to that time, and the largest until 1877, was polled, 23,341,
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and William Sprague was elected as Governor, J. Russell Bullock as Lieutenant Governor, and Walter Burges as Attorney General, the largest majority being 1399 for Governor Sprague. John R. Bartlett as Secretary of State, and Samuel A. Parker as General Treas- urer were reelected without opposition. The coalition elected also a majority of both houses in the General Assembly. Twenty of thirty-two Senators were new; to the House twenty- three towns had sent forty-nine new Representatives. Among the factors that contributed to produce the overturn were (I) doubt as to the wisdom of electing Seth Padelford, who was a radical Republican, in view of the critical situation in the nation; (2) the personal popu- larity of Colonel Sprague, then not thirty years of age; (3) the immense Sprague manufac- turing interests, to the active administration of which Colonel Sprague had succeeded on the death of his uncle, William Sprague, 3d, in 1856.
If the South could find comfort in the fact that Rhode Island in 1860 defeated a Repub- lican candidate for Governor, later events proved that the comfort was false. Two of the candidates for the presidency visited Rhode Island in 1860-Lincoln and Douglas. Abraham Lincoln came March 30, seven weeks before he was nominated in convention, not yet the candidate of the Republican party, but well known throughout the nation because of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which had cost Lincoln election to Congress, and Douglas election as President. Lincoln spoke to a crowd that filled the large room in the railway station, then available for public meetings. Stephen A. Douglas, Little Giant, candidate of the northern wing of the divided Democratic party, came on July 31, and on August I addressed at Rocky Point, after a clambake, a throng estimated at 10,000. In the fall election Rhode Island gave Lincoln a majority of 4537 in a total vote of 19,951. Rhode Island was opposed to slavery. South Carolina adopted the first ordinance of secession, December 20, 1860.
When the Rhode Island General Assembly met in January, 1861, the crisis was at hand. Among the measures adopted by this General Assembly were: (1) An act repealing the "personal liberty" law of 1848; (2) resolutions appropriating $5000 for apportionment to military companies, to equip them for active and immediate service; $1200 for the Provi- dence Light Infantry, $100 for rent for a drill room for the Second Brigade of Rhode Island Militia, and $1262 for repairs on arsenal and armories, repainting a field battery and other expenses of the Quartermaster General; (3) requesting the Governor, as Commander-in- Chief, to report "the number and efficiency of the force under his command, with the condi- tion of its arms and equipment, and what legislation, if any, is necessary to augment the said force as to render it more effective, with the view of placing it upon a proper footing to respond to any call which may be made upon it, in any probable contingency to aid in the execution of the laws of the United States"; (4) authorizing the Governor to appoint five commissioners to meet in Washington at a conference called by Virginia "to consider the practicability of agreeing on terms of adjustment of our present national troubles." The Rhode Island commissioners were appointed "to consider, and if practicable, agree upon some amica- ble adjustment of the present unhappy national difficulties, upon the basis and in the spirit of the Constitution of the United States." Governor Sprague appointed Honorable Samuel Ames, Honorable William W. Hoppin, Honorable Samuel G. Arnold, Alexander Duncan, Esq., and George H. Browne, Esq.
THE PEACE CONFERENCE OF 1861-The conference met at Washington, February 4, and continued to February 27, ex-President John Tyler presiding and twenty-one states repre- sented. The conference proposed an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, for- bidding slavery in any territory of the United States north of latitude 36° 30', the line estab- lished by the Missouri Compromise of 1820, and recognizing slavery as permissible south of the line, new states south to be admitted with or without slavery as their constitutions might direct. The Rhode Island commissioners justified their support of the proposition in a lengthy report, parts of which follow :
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STATE AND NATIONAL POLITICS BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
As this partition of territory was not disadvantageous, at least to the free states, as it disposed of the agitation consequent upon a recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States upon a celebrated case, and followed a precedent which had given peace to the country upon this most dangerous subject of controversy for upwards of thirty years, your commissioners gave their assent to it as the best practical solution of all difficulties growing out of the territorial question. . . . In a great practical matter of this sort your commissioners deem these results of far more importance than strict adhesion to any thcory, how- ever plausible in the abstract and especially than to any party declaration of principles of a sectional cast, however vehemently argued, or numerously adopted on either side. They could not ignore the fact that seven states had separated themselves from the others and set up a federal government of their own; and that these were ceaselessly agitating the people of the remaining southern states by inflammatory speeches and writings, skillfully addressed to their interests and sympathies, to induce them to join in this new movement. They could not doubt the assurances given to them by able and patriotic men from the states of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri, that these attempts upon the loyalty of the people of their states had met at least with partial success; nor, indeed, blind themselves to the evi- dences of this found in the speeches and votes of individual commissioners from these very states. Above all, they could not be insensible to the touching appeals of men, venerable in years, distinguished in public service, and whose reputation for ability and patriotism was national, to give them something in the shape of a constitutional security with which to allay the startled fears of their constituents, beat back the attacks of their enemies and ours, and even bring again to their duty thousands of men in the states of the extreme South, who had been led astray by the popular fears and impulse of the hour, and who, with the loyal but overborne, might well look to them for support, since no other had been afforded them in the reign of terror under which they were suffering. . . It is true, in this view of their duty your commissioners stood in the main alone amongst the commissioners from the northern states, and ranged themselves by the side of the central states of the union, upon whom the weight of the civil strife must come, if come it must ; they need not assure you that no dastardly fears, no feelings of base compliance, dictated the position thus taken by them. Such motives to action neither became them nor those whom they represented. It was because of gen- erous faith and earnest sympathy, of ties which no distance of time or space, and no difference of institutions can weaken, which in our fathers' days and our own led our heroes to hazard all for all, and at Guilford Courthouse, and Eutaw, and at Erie, with desperate valor to snatch victory for our common country out of the very lap of defeat ; it was because our little state, with a warm heart and a ready hand, has never failed in counsel or deed to stand with the whole country in all dangers and in extremest disasters, that your com- missioners conceived that they best represented her by averting danger from those with whom they knew she would hasten to share it. If it be true that the time has arrived when our sympathy for an alien and a subject race has extinguished all sympathy for our own, and has hidden from us the ties of a common origin, common interests and of a common glory, then indeed are we separated from our brethren, and the curse of slavery has fallen upon us as well as upon them .* . . Among the measures strenuously enforced by some of the commissioners, in lieu of that adopted by a majority, was the calling of a general convention. To this measure your commissioners oppose their most earnest and determined resistance. As a measure of peace, if for no other reason, because of the long delay which it implied, it would be utterly fruitless. But the pos- sible danger of exposing a Constitution, framed and adopted in the earlier and more conservative days of the Republic, to be torn to pieces in these times of lawless irreverence and change,t is too great for any wise man willingly to encounter. The very equality of the states in the Senate, which was won by the revolutionary sacrifice and valor of the smaller states, now almost forgotten, would, in the judgment of your commissioners, be thereby greatly endangered; and your commissioners earnestly represent to your honorable body that under no circumstances should this state consent to a measure which might lead to her own extinction. The Constitution of a great country, adopted as it was on account of diversity of interests and views, with great difficulty, should be sacred. It may and should from time to time be amended to suit a change of circum- stances, but never exposed to the danger of being uptorn. It is the symbol of our strength, because the liga- ment of our union. It has collected about it the reverence of three generations of our people. It is the only rallying point now for the loyalty of the remaining states; the only hope of the restoration of the states which have left us; and, in its main features, it should be, as it was designed to be, perpetual. At no time
*Compare Lincoln's second inaugural address.
+How like the twentieth century !
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RHODE ISLAND-THREE CENTURIES OF DEMOCRACY
should a general convention be invited to invade it; and, of all times, this, in the judgment of your commis- sioners, would be the most dangerous.
The peace conference had failed; within two months after it adjourned South Carolina had fired on Fort Sumter, and President Lincoln had called for troops to suppress insurrec- tion. Meanwhile, Rhode Island had made four offers of assistance to the federal government : (1) Governor Sprague offered the Rhode Island militia to President Buchanan for the defence of Washington against threatened capture by Southerners as an initial coup d'état; the Presi- dent, with characteristic indecision, hesitated. (2) Secretary of State Bartlett made a similar offer to Secretary of War Holt, who had replaced Floyd; the offer was ignored, no acknowl- edgment of Secretary Bartlett's letter being received. (3) Senator Anthony and Major Wil- liam Goddard, by request and direction of Governor Sprague, offered the Rhode Island soldiers to General Scott, and the offer was declined, with obvious reluctance, for want of authority to accept it. (4) The Governor offered to furnish a garrison for Fort Adams to protect the military property and stores of the United States. Governor Sprague was reelected in 1861 with a slightly increased majority, and again in 1862 without opposition. The Sprague Union party carried both congressional districts in 1861, electing William P. Sheffield and George H. Browne. Governor Sprague was elected as United States Senator for the term beginning March 4, 1863, resigning as Governor. Lieutenant Governor Arnold was elected as United States Senator for the unexpired term of Senator Simmons, who resigned in 1862. The Republican party returned to power with the retirement of Governor Sprague on his election to the Senate.
When the way was cleared for action by President Lincoln's call for troops, Rhode Island's War Governor moved so promptly, so rapidly and so efficiently that Rhode Island placed the first fully armed and equipped soldiers in Washington. Rhode Island entered the Civil War with unrestrained enthusiasm, guided by a Governor with a magnetic and restless personality. The way for harmony had been prepared by a distaste for slavery manifested early in the history of the colony and state, and a love for the union that knew no bounds once Rhode Island had ratified the Constitution. Governor Sprague succeeded in enlisting men of all parties in a common enterprise; for the time being there were no partisan politics in Rhode Island. The nation was in danger, and there are no Democrats and no Republicans when the call issues to defend the Union and the Flag.
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