Lincoln’s optimism rested not only on the information derived from visitors and newspapers but also on his interpretation of the election results. In the Slave States, John C. Breckinridge, whose candidacy was widely interpreted as pro-secession (although the nominee himself repudiated disunionism), received only 44 percent of the vote. Together, Bell and Douglas, who opposed secession, won 110,000 more Southern votes than Breckinridge. Bell carried Virginia with 44 percent of the ballots cast, Tennessee with 48 percent, Kentucky with 45 percent, and nearly won North Carolina with 47 percent, Maryland with 45.15 percent (to Breckinridge’s 45.92%), and Missouri with 35.3 percent (to Douglas’s 35.5%). In those states, as Henry Adams colorfully put it, old Whigs “had grown up to despise a Democrat as the meanest and most despicable of creatures” and “had been taught in the semi-barbarous school of southern barbecues and stump harangues, gouging and pistol shooting, to hate and abhor the very word Democrat with a bitterness unknown to the quieter and more law-abiding northerners.” For them, “the idea of submitting finally and hopelessly to the Democratic rule, was not to be endured.”65
In the months following the election, Lincoln took heart from the strong Unionist sentiment in the Upper South states of Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas, and Tennessee, as well as the Border States of Kentucky, Missouri, Delaware, and Maryland, where slaves were less numerous and Whiggish sentiments and organizations more persistent than they were in the Deep South. The white population of the Slave States was pretty evenly divided among the Deep South (2,629,000), the Upper South (2,828,000), and the Border States (2,589,000.) Unionists doubted that economic benefits were to be gained by joining a Southern confederacy, regarded leading secessionists as delusional conspirators irresponsibly frightening their neighbors, feared that Southern misunderstanding of Northern intentions might lead to hostilities, and thought that the Republicans could end that misunderstanding. A few of these men, including Andrew Johnson of Tennessee, were Unconditional Unionists, whose loyalty to the nation depended on no concessions by the Republicans; most of them were Conditional Unionists, who would eschew secession as long as the federal government took no aggressive action against the seceders and as long as the Republicans demonstrated sufficient willingness to compromise.
Lincoln was not unrealistic in imagining that the Upper South and Border States might remain in the Union. After all, the Deep South had threatened to secede in 1832–1833, in 1850–1851, and yet again in 1856; as recently as 1859–1860, secessionists in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi had failed to win support for disunion. William B. Campbell, ex-governor of Tennessee, warned hotheads in the Lower South that secession was “unwise and impolitic” because it would hasten “the ruin and overthrow of negro slavery” and put at risk “the freedom and liberty of the white man.” Campbell, who blamed cynical politicians for frightening the Deep South into secession, predicted that Kentucky and Tennessee could not be “dragged into a rebellion that their whole population utterly disapproved.”66 A Louisianan expressed puzzlement at the Upper South’s reluctance to join the Cotton States in seceding: “Is it not strange, when the border states suffer so much more from Northern fanaticism, from actual loss in their property, and these same states equally interested in slavery, that a feeling of antagonism to the North, should be so much stronger [in the Deep South].”67 The highly respected legal scholar Bartholomew F. Moore of North Carolina predicted that secession would intensify antislavery agitation, extinguish Southern claims to the western territories, dash hopes of expansion into the Caribbean and Central America, and cause a hemorrhage of runaway slaves.
Some North Carolina Unionists feared that their state, after an initial reluctance to follow their immediate neighbor’s lead, would ultimately secede. “We the Union men will make a firm resistance,” predicted Thomas K. Thomas, “but the bad element in our State will overcome us—sooner or later.”68
Lincoln assumed that reasonable people understood that nothing had occurred, including his election, to justify secession. The Southern grievance most often cited was insufficiently rigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act. But very few slaves escaped from the South; in 1860, there were only 803 runaways, constituting less than one-fiftieth of 1 percent of the slave population, and most of those fled from the Border States, not the Deep South, where disunionist sentiment prevailed. Privately, Southerners acknowledged that in practical terms, a Northern state’s Personal Liberty Bill, designed to hinder enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, was insignificant. To them the psychological cost was greater than the economic. “The loss of property is felt, the loss of honor is felt still more,” said influential Virginia Senator James M. Mason.69
Lincoln pointed out to a group of Kentuckians that during the nullification controversy of 1832–1833, “the South made a special complaint against a law of recent origin [i.e., the tariff of 1828]—Now they had no new law—or new interpretation of [an] old law to complain of—no specialty whatever, nothing but the naked desire to go out of the Union.”70 If secessionists were to await passage of such a statute before acting, or for any other “aggressive” action, “they would never go out of the Union,” he predicted.71
Many Northerners shared Lincoln’s skepticism about the prospects of Southern secession. In September, Seward had declared that “the slave power.… rails now with a feeble voice, instead of thundering as it did in our ears for twenty or thirty years past. With a feeble and muttering voice they cry out that they will tear the Union to pieces. They complain that if we will not surrender our principles, and our system, and our right, being a majority, to rule, and if we will not accept their system and such rulers as they will give us, they will go out of the Union. ‘Who’s afraid?’ Nobody’s afraid.”72 Long John Wentworth called the secession threat “the old game which has been used time and time again to scare the North into submission to Southern demands and Southern tyranny.”73 John Bigelow advised an English friend that the South’s threats were uttered “with the faint hope of frightening Lincoln into a modification of the Republican policy and the concession of a Cabinet Minister to the Fire Eaters.”74 In 1856, James Buchanan had observed to a fellow Democrat: “We have so often cried ‘wolf,’ that now, when the wolf is at the door, it is difficult to make the people believe it.”75
Northerners tended to regard secessionists as spoiled children in need of discipline. “Our stock of quieting sugar plums, in the shape of compromises, is about exhausted, and the fretful child is as insubordinate as ever,” remarked the Evansville, Indiana, Journal scornfully. If “the little rebel” (South Carolina) did not calm down but remained “insubordinate,” then “a well-administered spanking may be productive of good.”76 Another Hoosier recommended that the Palmetto State be “sunk out of sight—and a dead Sea cover the place where she stood.”77 William M. Reynolds, president of Illinois University, felt that it was “not now a question whether the South shall extend negro slavery down to the Isthmus, but whether the freemen of the North are to be mere vassals & tools to register their decrees.”78
Appeasement Proposals
Not everyone in the North agreed with this assessment. Commercial interests in New York eagerly sought to appease the South, lest they suffer economically. In the month after the election, as legislatures in the Deep South authorized secession conventions, some influential Republican editors in New York, including Henry J. Raymond, James Watson Webb, and Thurlow Weed, recommended conciliatory gestures. On November 14, Raymond urged Congress to compensate slaveholders for runaways escaping to the North; later he recommended repealing of Personal Liberty Laws, toughening enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, and allowing slavery to expand. Webb’s New York Courier and Enquirer endorsed the restoration of the Missouri Compromise line. Weed also ran editorials questioning the need for Personal Liberty Laws and asking “why not restore the Missouri Compromise Line? That secured to the South all Territory adapted, by Soil and Climate, to its ‘peculiar institution.’ ”79 Weed doubtless spo
ke for Seward, who had consulted with him on November 15.
Radical Republicans frowned on Weed’s proposals. After interviewing Lord Thurlow, a Connecticut journalist described him as “the most dangerous foe to Liberty that lives in the country. He is either scared to death or a bought traitor.… Seward is a Jesuit. He will keep his record tolerably clean—probably, but is hand & glove with Weed of course, & I sincerely believe secretly encourages a compromise though they will not give it that name. They call it making up a good record against secession. They do not expect to prevent secession.”80
In response to such compromise trial balloons, Lincoln expressed surprise that “any Republican could think, for a moment, of abandoning in the hour of victory, though in the face of danger, every point involved in the recent contest.”81 When a Virginia newspaper argued that he should quiet the Southerners’ fears by letting them take bondsmen into the territories, Lincoln said he was reminded of a little girl who wanted to go outside and play. Her mother refused permission. When the youngster begged and whined insistently, she exhausted the patience of her mother, who gave the child a sound thrashing. “Now, Ma, I can certainly run out,” exclaimed the girl.82 From Springfield, Henry Villard reported that the “true motives of the voluntary backsliding of certain New York journals are … well understood out here. The throbs of Wall street are known to have produced certain sudden pangs of contrition. But Mr. Lincoln is above bulling and bearing. Although conservative in his intentions, and anxious to render constitutional justice to all sections of the country, he is possessed of too much nobleness and sense of duty to quail before threats and lawlessness. He knows well enough that the first step backward on his part, or that of his supporters, will be followed by a corresponding advance on the part of the cotton rebels, and he knows that for every inch yielded, a foot will be demanded.”83
Those journalistic peace feelers ignited a debate that exacerbated tension within the Republican Party between the Conservatives, who favored some kind of compromise, and the “stiff-backed” Radicals, who believed that “[t]o be frightened by threats of war, & bloodshed is the part of children.”84 A leading Radical, Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens, said: “I do not blame the gentlemen from the South … for the language of intimidation, for using this threat of rending God’s creation from the turret to the foundation. All this is right in them, for they have tried it fifty times, and fifty times they have found weak and recreant tremblers in the North who have been affected by it, and who have acted from those intimidations.”85 In Congress’s upper chamber, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts echoed that view, arguing that disunion threats had been able to “startle and appal[l] the timid, make the servility of the servile still more abject, [and] rouse the selfish instincts of … nerveless conservatism.”86 Two weeks after the election, Horace Greeley declared that most Southerners had no desire to break up the Union: “They simply mean to bully the Free States into concessions which they can exult over as neutralizing the election of Lincoln.”87 The Chicago Tribune also suspected that secessionists were bluffing and predicted that when they finally realized that the North could not be browbeaten into compromising its principles, “they will probably return to their fealty to the Union.”88
Some stiff-backs did not quail at the prospect of war. “Without a little blood-letting, this Union will not, in my estimation, be worth a rush,” wrote Michigan Senator Zachariah Chandler in February.89 Chandler had earlier insisted that “we are men of Peace but will whip disunionists into Subjection, the moment the first overt act of treason is perpetrated. Halters & not compromizes are now needed & like certain very pungent medicines, a very little will answer.”90 He would “rather see every master in South Carolina hanged & Charleston burned, than to see one line from Mr Lincoln to appease them in advance of his inaugural.”91 A leading Republican activist in Freeport, Illinois, told his congressman that if a “collision must come, let it; if blood must flow, it is better that it should, better, ten fould better that a million lives be sacrificed … than self government and free society be an admitted failure.”92 To Frank Blair, it seemed that “we must either accept the Southern slaveholders as our masters or dispute the point on the field of battle, and for my part I do not hesitate to embrace the last alternative. Their arrogance has become intolerable.”93
Gustave Koerner asserted that the “spilling of blood in a civil war often cements a better Union. History is full of such examples.”94 Koerner told Lincoln that if the South seceded, “he should call into the field at once several hundred thousand militia” and pointed out that when a few cantons of Switzerland had recently seceded and mustered 40,000 troops, the government had met the challenge with 100,000 soldiers, whose numbers overawed the disunionists and led to a bloodless restoration of national unity.95 In central Illinois, William Herndon reported that the watchword was: “War bloody and exterminating rather than secession or Disunion.”96 In 1857, Herndon had written that if “the South will tap the dinner gong and call the wild, bony, quick, brave Peoples to a feast of civil war, and make this land quiver and ring from center to circumference,—then I can but say,—‘the quicker the better.’ ”97
In December, Iowa Senator James W. Grimes predicted that “war of a most bitter and sanguinary character will be sure to follow in a short time.… This is certainly deplorable, but there is no help for it. No reasonable concession will satisfy the rebels.”98 In Indiana, the Terre Haute Wabash Express believed that “if this Union is not worth fighting for, it is not worth having.” When South Carolina seceded, Hoosier Republicans were urged to “ ‘whip her into the traces’ if she commits any ‘overt act.’ The ‘appeal’ of gun powder and cold steel is the kind to make to disunion traitors.”99 Said the Indiana American, “we are heartily tired of having this [secession] threat stare us in the face evermore. If nothing but blood will prevent it, let it flow.”100 An Ohio Democrat announced that he would rather “see a Civil war, a Fratricidal war, engaged in and fought out than to see the government converted into a supple pro-slavery bloodhound.”101
Less sanguinary Moderates disagreed about which concessions to offer the South. Some were out-and-out appeasers, willing to abandon the Chicago platform by allowing slavery to expand into the territories. On December 18, the chief spokesman for this approach, John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, the 72-year-old Nestor of the U.S. senate, introduced a comprehensive package of six irrevocable constitutional amendments and four supplementary resolutions. They included a variation on Weed’s suggestion that the Missouri Compromise line be extended to California; under Crittenden’s plan, slavery would be protected south of 36° 30’ during the territorial stage, and any further states would be admitted to the Union with or without slavery as its people saw fit. This would apply to existing territories and to any that might be acquired later. Other amendments stipulated that Congress could not abolish slavery in federal facilities; nor could it do so in Washington without the consent of the voters, without compensation to owners, and as long as the peculiar institution persisted in Virginia and Maryland; nor could Congress outlaw the interstate slave trade or the transportation of slaves across state lines; owners whose slaves successfully fled to the North would be compensated for their losses; and finally, no future amendments could undo these protections for slavery. Of the ten items in the package, only one was a concession to the antislavery forces.
Most Republicans understandably thought this represented “no compromise at all, but a total surrender of every principle for which the Republicans and Douglas Democrats contended, in connexion with the subject of slavery, during the last Presidential canvass,” as an Indiana newspaper put it.102 Iowa Senator James W. Grimes thought the Crittenden Compromise asked Republicans “to surrender all of our cherished ideas on the subject of slavery, and agree, in effect, to provide a slave code for the Territories south of 36° 30’ and for the Mexican provinces, as soon as they shall be brought within our jurisdiction. It is demanded of us that we shall consent to change t
he Constitution into a genuine pro-slavery instrument, and to convert the Government into a great slave-breeding, slavery-extending empire.”103 (In fact, Southern expansionists in the 1850s had dreamed of establishing a Caribbean slave empire and undertook freebooting missions to carry out that scheme.) Grimes’s colleague Charles Sumner said that his Massachusetts constituents would rather “see their State sink below the sea & become a sandbank before they would adopt those propositions.”104 One of those constituents, Henry Adams, opined that Crittenden “does not seem to suppose that the North has any honor” and suggested that Republicans with a modicum of self-respect could well view the Kentuckian’s compromise proposal as insulting.105 Other Bay State residents called the Crittenden Compromise a “scheme of abominations” to which “no true Republican can accede” and which “would result in accepting all of Mexico and Central America as Slave States.”106 Alexander K. McClure predicted to a fellow Republican that the “Crittenden proposition would demoralize us utterly.… Even the Border States seem determined to humiliate the Republican forces. They come with proffers of peace but with the condition annexed that we must incorporate into the Constitution a political platform against which four-fifths of the people voted in November last; and they all come with secession as their alternative if we fail to accede.”107 Another Pennsylvanian observed that the Crittenden plan “is a virtual declaration of a purpose to filibuster for the acquisition of more territory, with the direct design of extending slavery. The Republicans will under no circumstances agree to this exaction, come what may.”108 It was “outrageous to foist on the country demands never made during the late election,” fulminated Maryland Congressman Henry Winter Davis.109
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