The outcome was disheartening.  Douglas had firmly believed that conciliation, or concession, alone could save the country from civil war.[905] When the committee first met informally[906] the news was already in print that the South Carolina convention had passed an ordinance of secession.  Under the stress of this event, and of others which he apprehended, Douglas had voted for all the Crittenden amendments and resolutions, regardless of his personal predilections.  “The prospects are gloomy,” he wrote privately, “but I do not yet despair of the Union. We can never acknowledge the right of a State to secede and cut us off from the ocean and the world, without our consent. But in view of impending civil war with our brethren in nearly one-half of the States of the Union, I will not consider the question of force and war until all efforts at peaceful adjustment have been made and have failed.  The fact can no longer be disguised that many of the Republican leaders desire war and disunion under pretext of saving the Union.  They wish to get rid of the Southern senators in order to have a majority in the Senate to confirm Lincoln’s appointments; and many of them think they can hold a permanent Republican ascendancy in the Northern States, but not in the whole Union.  For partisan reasons, therefore, they are anxious to dissolve the Union, if it can be done without making them responsible before the people.  I am for the Union, and am ready to make any reasonable sacrifice to save it.  No adjustment will restore and preserve peace which does not banish the slavery question from Congress forever and place it beyond the reach of Federal legislation.  Mr. Crittenden’s proposition to extend the Missouri line accomplishes this object, and hence I can accept it now for the same reasons that I proposed it in 1848.  I prefer our own plan of non-intervention and popular sovereignty, however."[907]

The propositions which Douglas laid before the committee proved to be even less acceptable than the Crittenden amendments.  Only a single, insignificant provision relating to the colonizing of free negroes in distant lands, commended itself to a majority of the committee.[908] All hope of an agreement had now vanished.  Sad at heart, Douglas voted to report the inability of the committee to agree upon any general plan of adjustment.[909] Yet he did not abandon all hope; he was not yet ready to admit that the dread alternative must be accepted.  He joined with Crittenden in replying to a dispatch from the South:  “We have hopes that the rights of the South, and of every State and section, may be protected within the Union.  Don’t give up the ship.  Don’t despair of the Republic."[910] And when Crittenden proposed to the Senate that the people at large should be allowed to express their approval, or disapproval, of his amendments by a vote, Douglas cordially indorsed the suggested referendum in a speech of great power.