[Sidenote] Ibid.

The House refused to excuse the several objecting members from serving on the committee; and the temper in which they proceeded to the discharge of their duty is perhaps best illustrated by the remarks of Representative Reuben Davis, of Mississippi.  He said he could “but regard this committee as a tub thrown out to the whale, to amuse only, until the 4th of March next, and thus arrest the present noble and manly movements of the Southern States to provide by that day for their security and safety out of the Union.  With these views I take my place on the committee for the purpose of preventing it being made a means of deception by which the public mind is to be misled and misguided; yet intending honestly and patriotically to entertain any fair proposition for adjustment of pending evils which the Republican members may submit.”

On Wednesday, December 12, the morning hour was by agreement set apart for receiving all bills and resolutions to be submitted to the Committee of Thirty-three.  They were duly read and referred, without debate, to the number of twenty-three.[2] They came principally from Northern members, though all four parties of the late Presidential campaign were represented, the attitude of which they mainly reflected.  In substance, therefore, they embodied the same medley of affirmations and denials, of charges and countercharges, of evasions and subterfuges which party discussion had worn threadbare.

These twenty-three propositions, which were by subsequent additions increased to forty or fifty, exhibit such a variety of legislative plans that it is impossible to subject them to any classification.  They give us an abstract of the divergent views which Members of Congress entertained concerning the cause of the crisis and its remedy.  They range in purport from a mere assertion of the duty of preserving and administering the government as then existing, in its simple form and symmetrical structure, to proposals to destroy and change it to a complex machine, fantastic in proportion and impracticable in its workings.  They afford us evidence of the bewilderment which beset Congress as well as the outside public, and not so much the absence of reasonable political principles as the absence of a simple and direct political will, which would resolutely insist that recognized principles and existing laws should be respected and obeyed.

  [Sidenote] “Globe,” Dec. 12, 1860, p. 77.

  [Sidenote] Ibid., p. 78.

Among the propositions submitted then and afterwards were several wild and visionary projects of government.  Thus Mr. Jenkins, a Virginia member, proposed an arrangement requiring separate sanction of the slave-holding interest to each and every operation of government; a dual executive; a dual senate, or dual majority of the senate, or other advisory body or council.  Mr. Noell, of Missouri, proposed to abolish the office of President, create an executive council of three members, from districts of contiguous States, give each member the veto power, and establish equilibrium between the free and the slave-States in the Senate by voluntary division of some of the slave-States.