Abraham Lincoln: A Life, Volume 1

by Michael Burlingame

  Seward’s admonition was well taken, for he accurately gauged Southern public opinion. But, ironically, he misjudged the mood in his own section. The North, he feared, would shatter into bickering factions once war broke out, making it impossible to restore the Union by force; hence everything must be done to prevent hostilities. Lincoln may have overestimated the depth and extent of Southern Unionism, but he understood Northern opinion better than Seward did.

  Despite Seward’s desperate plea, Lincoln refused to budge on the central issue. On February 1, reiterating his earlier opposition to compromise, he told the New Yorker that “on the territorial question—that is, the question of extending slavery under the national auspices,—I am inflexible. I am for no compromise which assists or permits the extension of the institution on soil owned by the nation. And any trick by which the nation is to acquire territory, and then allow some local authority to spread slavery over it, is as obnoxious as any other. I take it that to effect some such result as this, and to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire is the object of all these proposed compromises. I am against it.” Changing his tone, Lincoln closed with a startling concession: “As to fugitive slaves, District of Columbia, slave trade among the slave states, and whatever springs of necessity from the fact that the institution is amongst us, I care but little, so that what is done be comely, and not altogether outrageous. Nor do I care much about New-Mexico, if further extension were hedged against.”188

  Lincoln’s rather casual statement about New Mexico represented a momentous policy shift. Three weeks earlier Villard had reported that the president-elect “does not approve of the advocacy by certain Republican Congressmen of the scheme of admitting New Mexico as a state with its territorial slave code unimpaired. His faith in the Chicago dogma of the right of Congressional prohibition of slavery in the territories is as firm as ever.”189 Soon thereafter Lincoln softened his opposition to compromise, telling a group of visitors who inquired about plans to restore the 36° 30’ line “that although the recent presidential election was a verdict of the people in favor of freedom upon all the territories, yet personally he would be willing, for the sake of the Union, to divide the territory we now own by that line, if in the judgment of the nation it would save the Union and restore harmony. But whether the acquisition of territory hereafter would not re-open the question and renew the strife, was a question to be thought of and in some way provided against.” When asked if he would recommend the repeal of Personal Liberty Laws, he “replied that he had never read one of them, but that if they were of the character ascribed to them by Southern men, they certainly ought to be repealed. Whether as President of the United States he ought to interfere with State legislation by Presidential recommendation, required more thought than he had yet given the subject.” As for the right of holding slaves in federal dockyards and arsenals, he said “the subject has not entered my mind.” Unconvincingly, he also denied that he had given any thought to the abolition of slavery in the nation’s capital. He added that it “was sometimes better for a man to pay a debt he did not owe, or to lose a demand which was a just one, than to go to law about it.”190

  On January 24, the Illinois State Journal seemed to endorse the admission of New Mexico with its slave code: “if the Southern people fear or believe that the Republican party are opposed to the admission of any more slave States, we are willing that it should be made the law or the Constitution that Territories applying for admission into the Union, shall be admitted with or without slavery, as the people of such Territory, so applying, shall determine.”191 But, the paper counseled, any concession should be accompanied by a demand that the Slave States explicitly renounce the doctrine of secession. A few days earlier Lincoln reportedly told a prominent Illinois politician that the Border States’ propositions “would only be worth noticing in case a proposition for a Constitutional amendment requiring the consent of two-thirds of all the States to any additional acquisitions of territory, should be incorporated.”192

  There were other indications that Lincoln would support compromise measures. In November, a Mississippi planter who spoke with him reported that the president-elect “was opposed to any interference with slavery in the states, or with the inter-state slave trade; that he was opposed to abolishing or interfering with slavery in the district of Columbia; and that he was only opposed to its extension in the territories, but added, ‘that was only an opinion of his.’ ” As for appointing postmasters and other federal officials in South Carolina if it seceded, he “stated that if no one would accept office in that state, of course they could receive no benefits from the government, and the whole expenses for the distribution of the mails would devolve on her own citizens.”193 In late January, the Illinois State Journal spoke of the North’s wish for peace: “There is no intention in the loyal states to invade and conquer the states which have rebelled. They might undoubtedly be subdued by the superior force of the United States, but their forcible subjugation would answer no good end. All that is contemplated is to make them obey the laws relating to foreign intercourse.”194 The Illinois State Register marveled at the Journal’s abrupt turn away from confrontation toward conciliation.

  It is difficult to know why Lincoln shifted his stance on New Mexico. Perhaps he believed that slavery could never take root in that huge territory, which included the later state of Arizona as well as New Mexico. The 1860 census showed that no slaves lived there.

  Lincoln’s change of heart could perhaps have averted bloodshed if Seward had exploited it and if Southern Unionists had accepted the New Mexico scheme. Radicals viewed that as the most dangerous compromise proposal, for it might pass. But nothing came of it, for Seward failed to act on Lincoln’s new position regarding New Mexico statehood. Curiously, Henry Adams later wrote that Seward, Adams, Davis, John Sherman, and other Republican conciliators lobbied hard for the New Mexico plan but were unsuccessful because “the mass of the party hesitated, and turned for the decisive word to the final authority at Springfield. The word did not come.”195 But in fact it did come.

  Seward’s behavior is one of the great mysteries of the secession crisis. If he had informed House and Senate Republicans that Lincoln supported the New Mexico Compromise, they would not have lamented, as John Sherman did on February 9, that “we are powerless here because we don’t know what Lincoln wants. As he is to have the Executive power we can’t go further than he approves. He communicates nothing even to his friends here & so we drift along.”196 (Two weeks earlier Henry Adams observed, “Lincoln’s position is not known, but his course up to this time has shown his utter ignorance of the right way to act, so far as his appointments go. It is said, too, here [in Washington], that he is not a strong man.”)197

  Perhaps Seward feared that Southern Moderates would accept nothing less than a guarantee that slavery be allowed to expand into territory south of 36° 30’. He had good reason to think so, for when the New Mexico Compromise was before the House Committee of Thirty-Three, only two Southern members supported it. But in late January, James Shepherd Pike reported from Washington: “it is now believed that the Secession movement can be arrested there [in Virginia and Kentucky] on the basis of Mr. Adams’s proposition.”198 A month later, the Washington correspondent of the New York Times asserted that the only thing necessary “to secure the loyalty of the Border States, and pave the way for the adjustment of our sectional differences, is the passage of an Enabling act for New-Mexico, authorizing that Territory to form a State Government.” He thought such a measure involved no surrender of principle and would pass.199 On March 1, Democrats supported New Mexico statehood, voting 45–39 against a motion to table a bill granting it. Seward had allegedly been telling stiff-backs that he only paid lip service to schemes like the New Mexico Compromise and “had no idea of bringing them forward” since “there were not three men on our side in the Senate who would support them.”200 But surely if Lincoln’s approval had been made known, many Republicans would have backed a measur
e that he and Charles Francis Adams championed. On December 29, nine of the fifteen Republicans on the Committee of Thirty-Three had voted for it. Seward missed a potential opportunity to effect genuine compromise, for a majority of his party colleagues seemed willing to accept the New Mexico scheme. Lincoln did not again raise the New Mexico plan, which was before the House throughout February. On March 1 the Representatives shelved it, with Republicans voting in favor of the motion to table, 76–26.

  The stunning victories achieved by antisecessionists in Virginia and Tennessee elections in early February led Henry Winter Davis to crow that there the “back of the revolution is broken.”201 (In Virginia, far more Moderates won election to a secession convention than did secessionists; in Tennessee, voters rejected a proposal to hold a secession convention.) With this turn of events, Seward may well have felt that his job was over and that he could calmly await Lincoln’s arrival without further efforts on behalf of compromise. “At least,” said he, “the danger of conflict, here or elsewhere, before the 4th of March, has been averted. Time has been gained.”202 On February 8, Henry Adams reported that “Seward is in high spirits and chuckles himself hoarse with his stories. He says it’s all right. We shall keep the border states, and in three months or thereabouts, if we hold off, the Unionists and Disunionists will have their hands on each others throats in the cotton states. The storm is weathered.”203 Adams later observed that with the Unionist landslide victory in Virginia, “the country began to wake from its despair. Slowly the great ship seemed to right itself, broken and water-logged it is true, but not wrecked.”204 Varying that metaphor, Seward wrote his wife in mid-February as Lincoln’s train wended its circuitous way toward the capital: “I am, at last, out of direct responsibility. I have brought the ship off the sands, and am ready to resign the helm into the hands of the Captain whom the people have chosen.”205 Seward deserves credit, for he, with the help of Charles Francis Adams and Henry Winter Davis, among others, had managed to keep the Upper South in the Union, at least temporarily.

  Not every supporter of compromise thought highly of Seward. When the influential William C. Rives of Virginia, a former senator and minister to France, conferred with him in January, he was dismayed at the New Yorker’s assertion that his “irrepressible conflict” rhetoric was “intended for effect at home, and not designed to reach the ears of the South.” Rives regarded Seward as “a very small man, relying exclusively upon political maneuvering & without the least pretension to true & manly statesmanship.”206 If Seward had been able to work with Rives, the cause of compromise would have been greatly strengthened.

  Others questioned Seward’s statesmanship. Charles Sumner, who was to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee throughout the Civil War, called him “only a cunning contriver of little plots” and “not a true man.” Sumner had good reason to conclude that the New Yorker “was not frank and straightforward.”207 Jefferson Davis was scandalized when Seward told him that his appeals on behalf of blacks “are potent to affect the rank and file of the North.” When Davis asked if he never spoke “from conviction alone,” the New Yorker replied: “Nev–er.”208 Montgomery Blair thought Seward “a most unsafe public man.” Reminiscing after the Civil War, Blair called Seward “the personification of old Polonius’ politician who ‘by indirection found direction out.’ ” Nobody, Blair asserted, “has ever associated long with him, who has not heard him recount by the hour his successful political strategy.” To Seward, politics was nothing more than “a harmless game for power.” Blair could not forget how shocked he was when the senator confided “that he was the man who put Archy Dixon … up to moving the repeal of the Missouri Compromise,” thus ruining Dixon’s reputation.209 James Lyons, a leading member of the Virginia bar and a prominent Whig, was equally scandalized when Seward told him that he had argued against the annexation of Texas on constitutional grounds only because it would become a Slave State. “If you had given us free territory every man of us would have voted for Texas,” he later acknowledged insouciantly, causing Lyons to write Seward off “as a man destitute of all public principle.”210 The Russian minister to the United States, Edouard Stoeckl, was disgusted with Seward, whom he described as an arrogant, vain, small-time politician, and poseur who would listen to advice from no one. Similarly, George G. Fogg was appalled by Seward’s “insolent refusal to even consult on the measures to be adopted” and by the “the lordly bearing” that he maintained “towards all the Republican members of the Senate.”211

  Old Gentlemen’s Convention

  By early February, Seward may have felt that the initiative for compromise could now be assumed by the Peace Conference, which Virginia had summoned to meet in Washington. He hoped that the conclave, which opened on February 4, would last for weeks and thus postpone any violent sectional clash. All states were invited to send delegates to consider a peaceful solution to the crisis, based on a variation of the Crittenden Compromise.

  When the invitation to send delegates to the Peace Conference arrived at Springfield, Lincoln suggested that the legislature take no immediate action. Employing morbid imagery yet again, he said “that he would rather be hung by the neck till he was dead on the steps of the Capitol, before he would buy or beg a peaceful inaugeration.”212 The Illinois State Journal was equally emphatic: “She [Virginia] says to us, ‘unless you see fit to comply with our terms, we will lead our people to the commission of treason, and compel you to coerce us to obedience to the laws.’ She proposes to us that we should adopt the Breckinridge platform as a basis of settlement. Not only this; but she insists that in all territory that may hereafter be acquired, slavery shall be protected by constitutional amendment. That is the proposition. And we can scarcely consider it with that degree of patience its importance would seem to demand. The character of the proposition can find a parallel only in the demand, that Mr. Lincoln, having been constitutionally elected, shall resign, and allow tra[i]tors and rebels to fill the offices, which the people have decided, shall be filled by Republicans the next four years.… We do not like the idea of buying the right to control the offices which the people have given the Republicans.” To all Southern states urging compromise and concession, the Journal declared, “we are not aware of having done any wrong to them or their people,” and “we do not propose to make either concession or compromise—if in doing so we are required to yield up any essential principle of Republican faith.”213

  Lincoln submitted draft resolutions to his friends calling for the governor to appoint representatives to the Peace Conference and making it clear that such action was not to be construed as endorsing any form of the Crittenden Compromise. In addition, the delegates were to be guided by instructions from the legislature. When Norman B. Judd advised that it would be premature to submit those resolutions to the General Assembly, Lincoln agreed. After Ohio and New York decided to send delegates, the Illinois Legislature followed suit, passing Lincoln’s resolutions in order to help keep weak-kneed appeasers from dominating the convention. To that end, Governor Richard Yates chose five Republicans as delegates: Stephen T. Logan, former Lieutenant-Governor Gustave Koerner, Burton C. Cook, ex-Congressman Thomas J. Turner, and ex-Governor John Wood, most of whom were Lincoln’s friends. Koerner, thinking no good could come of the conclave, declined and recommended that John M. Palmer be named in his stead. Yates took that advice. When Lincoln received a protest against the appointment of Turner, who allegedly had “neither ability or respectability,” he replied that he “did not think any objection to Turner of enough importance to have a squabble over.”214 The president-elect told Orville H. Browning that “no good results would follow the border State Convention … but evil rather, as increased excitement would follow when it broke up without having accomplished any thing,” and that “no concession by the free States short of a surrender of every thing worth preserving, and contending for would satisfy the South, and that Crittenden’s proposed amendment to the Constitution in the form proposed ought not to be
made.”215

  In fact, the Peace Conference deliberated for weeks before recommending a variation on the Crittenden Compromise, which Congress rejected. During their deliberations, Republican leaders in Washington awaited Lincoln’s arrival impatiently. An Indiana delegate to the Peace Conference explained that he and his fellow Republicans “have thus far done all in our power to procrastinate, and shall continue to do so, in order to remain in Session until after the 4th of March, for after the inauguration we shall have an honest fearless man at the helm, and will soon know whether the honest masses of the People desire to preserve and perpetuate our Government.”216

  Struggling with cabinet selections and compromise schemes, Lincoln suffered agony as Buchanan allowed the Cotton States to seize federal forts, arsenals, custom houses, post offices, and courthouses. In late December, upon hearing a rumor that the president would surrender Fort Moultrie in Charleston harbor, Lincoln snapped: “If that is true, they ought to hang him!”217 A visitor reported that Lincoln’s “Kentucky blood is up, he means fight. He says he has not yet had time to examine the list of vessels in our navy suitable for the purpose, but he intends to use them all if necessary, for blockading the ports in every seceding State, & the Army to garrison every fort on the coast, from Savannah to New Orleans.”218 He intended to preserve “the integrity of the Union if it costs blood enough to fill Charleston harbor,” according to Horace White.219