The Road to Civil War

Senate Special Committee of Thirteen on the Condition of the Country

A committee formed through a resolution submitted by Mr. Powell on December 6, 1860 and adopted on December 18, 1860. The role of the committee was to examine the conflict between slaveholding and non-slaveholding States and provide solutions and concessions to avoid secession.

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Session 14179: 1860-12-24 00:00:00

Mr. Seward formally enters the Committee and asks that his vote be recorded for previous sessions. Mr. Douglas and Mr. Seward submit Joint Resolutions to amend the Constitution and they are considered. The committee considers separate resolutions presented in the previous session by Mr. Toombs' and Mr. Davis.

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Joint Resolution Proposing Amendments to the Constitution: Douglas Compromise

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JOINT RESOLUTION proponing certain amendments to the Constitution of the United States.

Resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, (two thirds of both houses concurring,) That the following articles be, and are hereby, proposed and submitted as amendments to the Constitution of the United States, which shall be valid, to all intents and purposes, as part of said Constitution, when ratified by conventions of three fourths of the several States:

Sec. 2. The United States shall have power to acquire, from time to time, districts of country in Africa and South America, for the colonization, at expense of the federal Treasury, of such free negroes and mulattoes as the several States may wish to have removed from their limits, and from the District of Columbia, and such other places as may be under the jurisdiction of Congress.

Sec. 6. In addition to the provision of the third paragraph of the second section of the fourth article of the Constitution, Congress shall have power to provide by law, and it shall be its duty so to provide, that the United States shall pay to the owner who shall apply for it, the full value of his fugitive slave, in all cases when the marshal, or other officer whose duty it was to arrest said fugitive, was prevented from so doing by violence or intimidation; or when, after arrest, said fugitive was rescued by force, and the owner thereby prevented and obstructed in the pursuit of his remedy for the recovery of his fugitive slave, under the said clause of the Constitution, and the laws made in pursuance thereof; and in all such cases, when the United States shall pay for such fugitives, they shall have the right, in their own name, to sue the county in which said violence, intimidation, or rescue was committed, and to recover from it, with interest and damages, the amount paid by them for said fugitive slave. And the said county, after it had paid the said amount to the United States, may, for its indemnity, sue and recover from the wrongdoers or rescuers by whom the owner was prevented from the recovery of his fugitive slave, in like manner as the owner himself might have sued and recovered.

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