The adoption of any or all of the legislative nostrums which were severally suggested, presupposed a willingness on the part of the South to carry them out and be governed thereby.  The authors of these projects lost sight of the vital difficulty, that if the South refused obedience to laws in the past she would equally refuse obedience to any in the future when they became unpalatable.  It was not temporary satisfaction, but perpetual domination which she demanded.  She did not need an amendment of the fugitive-slave act, or a repeal of personal liberty bills, but a change in the public sentiment of the free-States.  Give her the simple affirmation that slaves are property, to be recognized and protected like other property, embody the proposition in the Constitution, and secure its popular acceptance, and she would snap her fingers at an enumeration of other details.  Fugitive-slave laws, inter-State slave trade, a Congressional slave code, right of transit and sojourn in the free States, compensation for runaways, new slave States, and a majority in the United States Senate would follow, as inevitably as that the well planted acorn expands by the forces of nature into roots, trunk, limbs, twigs, and foliage.  This was what Jefferson Davis formulated in discussing his Senate resolutions of February, 1860,[3] and the doctrine for which Yancey rent the Charleston Convention in twain.  This is what Jefferson Davis would again demand of the Senate Committee of Thirteen; and, knowing the North would never concede it, he would, even prior to the demand, join in instigating and proclaiming secession.

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[1] The following were members of the Committee of Thirty-three: 
Messrs. Thomas Corwin, of Ohio; John S. Millson, of Virginia; Charles
F. Adams, of Massachusetts; Warren Winslow, of North Carolina; James
Humphrey, of New York; William W. Boyce, of South Carolina; James H.
Campbell, of Pennsylvania; Peter E. Love, of Georgia; Orris S. Ferry,
of Connecticut; Henry Winter Davis, of Maryland; Christopher Robinson,
of Rhode Island; William G. Whiteley, of Delaware; Mason W. Tappan, of
New Hampshire; John L.N.  Stratton, of New Jersey; Francis M. Bristow,
of Kentucky; Justin S. Morrill, of Vermont; Thomas A.R.  Nelson, of
Tennessee; William McKee Dunn, of Indiana; Miles Taylor, of Louisiana;
Reuben Davis, of Mississippi; William Kellogg, of Illinois; George S.
Houston, of Alabama; Freeman H. Morse, of Maine; John S. Phelps, of
Missouri; Albert Rust, of Arkansas; William A. Howard, of Michigan;
George S. Hawkins, of Florida; Andrew J. Hamilton, of Texas; Cadwalader
C. Washburn, of Wisconsin; Samuel E. Curtis, of Iowa; John C. Burch, of
California; William Windom, of Minnesota; and Lansing Stout, of
Oregon.—­“Globe,” December 6, 1860, page 22.

[2] Below are brief extracts of the salient points of twenty-one of them; the other two, are given in the text: 

1.  By Eli Thayer, of Massachusetts:  No further acquisition of territory.  No Congressional legislation about slavery.  Presidential electors to be chosen by districts.