Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (53 page)

Winfield Scott to make ready to collect the customs and defend federal forts in seceded states, or to retake them if they had been given up before his inauguration. In Springfield the
Illinois State Journal
, quasi-official spokesman for Lincoln during this period, warned that "disunion by armed force is treason, and treason must and will be put down at all hazards. . . . The laws of the United States must be executed—the President has no discretionary power on the subject—his duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution."
³⁷

Republicans preferred to distinguish between "coercion"—which had a harsh ring—and enforcement of the laws. "It is not making war upon a State to execute the laws," insisted the
Boston Advertiser
. But to southerners this was a distinction without a difference. To "execute the laws" in a foreign country—the Confederacy—would mean war. "Why, sir," asked Louis Wigfall of Texas, "if the President of the United States were to send a fleet to Liverpool, and attempt there . . . to collect the revenue . . . would anybody say that the British Government was responsible for the bloodshed that might follow?"
³⁸

In any event the whole question was hypothetical until March 4, for Buchanan intended no "coercion." And even if he had, the resources were pitifully inadequate. Most of the tiny 16,000-man army was scattered over two thousand miles of frontier, while most of the navy's ships were patrolling distant waters or laid up for repair. The strongest armed forces during the winter of 1860–61 were the militias of seceding states. Moreover, upper-South unionists who had managed to keep fire-eaters in their states at bay made an impression on Republicans with warnings that anything which smacked of coercion would tip the balance toward secession. For a time, therefore, Republican opinion drifted uncertainly while other groups sought to fashion a compromise.

Buchanan's message to Congress set the agenda for these efforts. He first blamed the North in general and Republicans in particular for "the incessant and violent agitation of the slavery question" which had now "produced its natural effects" by provoking disunion. Because of Republicans, said the president, "many a matron throughout the South retires at night in dread of what may befall herself and children before morning."

37
. John G. Nicolay and John Hay,
Abraham Lincoln: A History
, 10 vols. (New York, 1890), III, 248; Lincoln to Francis P. Blair, Dec. 21, 1860, Lincoln to Elihu B. Washburne, Dec. 22, 1860, in
CWL
, IV, 157, 159;
Illinois State Journal
, Nov. 14, Dec. 20, 1860, in Nevins,
Emergence
, II, 356–57.

38
. Both quotations from Stampp,
And the War Came
, 39, 44.

Buchanan stopped short of asking the Republican party to dissolve; instead he asked northerners to stop criticizing slavery, repeal their "unconstitutional and obnoxious" personal liberty laws, obey the fugitive slave law, and join with the South to adopt a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in all territories. Unless Yankees proved willing to do these things, said Buchanan, the South would after all "be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government." As an additional sign of northern good will, Buchanan also advised support for his long-standing effort to acquire Cuba, which would further placate southern fears by adding a large new slave state to the Union.
³⁹

Republican responses to these suggestions may be readily imagined. The printable comments included: "Pharasaical old hypocrite . . . bristling with the spirit of a rabid slaveocracy . . . wretched drivel . . . truckling subserviency to the Cotton Lords . . . gross perversion of facts . . . brazen lies." After the voters had just rejected the Breckinridge platform by a margin of 4,000,000 to 670,000 in the presidential election, Buchanan "proposes an unconditional surrender . . . of six-sevenths of the people to one-seventh . . . by
making the Breckinridge platform a part of the Constitution!"
⁴⁰

Although few of the compromise proposals introduced in Congress went so far as Buchanan's, they all shared the same feature: Republicans would have to make all the concessions. Republicans refused to succumb to what they considered blackmail. Indeed, the possibility that a coalition of Democrats and Constitutional Unionists might patch together a "shameful surrender" and call it compromise caused some Republicans to prefer the alternative of letting the cotton states "go in peace." Having long regarded the Union as a "covenant with death," Garrisonian abolitionists were glad that slaveholders had broken the covenant. Even non-Garrisonians agreed, in Frederick Douglass's words, that "if the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders [and] a new drain on the negro's blood, then . . . let the Union perish." Several radical Republicans initially took a similar position. If South Carolina wanted to leave, said the
Chicago Tribune
in October 1860, "let her go, and like a limb lopped from a healthy trunk, wilt and rot where she falls." Horace Greeley's
New York Tribune
prominently advocated the go-in-peace approach. "If the Cotton States shall

39
. Richardson,
Messages and Papers
, V, 626–27, 630, 638, 642.

40
. Various Republican editorials quoted in Perkins, ed.,
Northern Editorials
, 154, 127, 137, 152, 146, 138, 147.

become satisfied that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist on letting them go," wrote Greeley in a famous editorial three days after Lincoln's election. "We hope never to live in a republic whereof one section is pinned to the residue by bayonets."
⁴¹

A genuine desire to avoid war accounted in part for this attitude. But other motives were probably more important, for all of these Republicans subsequently endorsed war to preserve the Union. Greeley's go-in-peace editorials represented a dual gambit, one part aimed at the North and the other at the South. Like most Republicans, Greeley believed at first that southern states did not really intend to secede; "they simply mean to bully the Free States into concessions." Even after South Carolina went out, Greeley wrote to Lincoln that "I fear nothing . . . but another disgraceful backdown of the free States. . . . Another nasty compromise, whereby everything is conceded and nothing secured, will so thoroughly disgrace and humiliate us that we can never again raise our heads."
⁴²
To advise the North to let the disunionists go, therefore, became a way of deflecting compromise. Toward the South, Greeley expected his gambit to operate like the strategy of parents who tell an obstreperous adolescent son, after his repeated threats to run away from home, "There's the door—go!" By avoiding talk of coercion it might also allow passions to cool and give unionists breathing room to mobilize their presumed silent majority below the Potomac.
⁴³

Go-in-peace sentiment faded as it became clear that the dreaded alternative of compromise would not come to pass. To sift all the compromise proposals introduced in Congress, each house set up a special committee. The Senate "Committee of Thirteen" included powerful men: William H. Seward, Benjamin Wade, Stephen Douglas, Robert Toombs, Jefferson Davis, and John J. Crittenden. It was Crittenden who cobbled together a plan which he proposed as a series of amendments to the Constitution. In their final form these amendments would

41
.
Douglass' Monthly
, Jan. 1861;
Chicago Tribune
, Oct. 11, 1860, quoted in Stampp,
And the War Came
, 22;
New York Tribune
, Nov. 9, 1860.

42
.
New York Tribune
, Nov. 20, 1860; Greeley to Lincoln, Dec. 22, 1860, Abraham Lincoln Papers, Library of Congress.

43
. This analysis of Greeley's motives has been much influenced by David M. Potter's perceptive writings on the subject, especially "Horace Greeley and Peaceable Secession," and "Postscript," in Potter,
The South and the Sectional Conflict
(Baton Rouge, 1968), 219–42, and Potter,
Lincoln and His Party
, 51–57. For a slightly different interpretation see Bernard A. Weisberger, "Horace Greeley: Reformer as Republican,"
CWH
, 23 (1977), 5–25.

have guaranteed slavery in the states against future interference by the national government; prohibited slavery in territories north of 36° 30' and protected it south of that line in all territories "now held,
or hereafter acquired"
(italics added); forbidden Congress to abolish slavery on any federal property within slave states (forts, arsenals, naval bases, etc.); forbidden Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of its inhabitants
and
unless it had first been abolished by both Virginia and Maryland; denied Congress any power to interfere with the interstate slave trade; and compensated slaveholders who were prevented from recovering fugitives in northern states. These constitutional amendments were to be valid for all time; no future amendment could override them.
⁴⁴

Despite the one-sided nature of this "compromise," some Republican businessmen who feared that a secession panic on Wall Street might deepen into another depression urged party leaders to accept it. Thurlow Weed—and by implication Seward—gave signs in December of a willingness to do so. But from Springfield came word to stand firm. "Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the
extension
of slavery," Lincoln wrote to key senators and congressmen. "The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter." Crittenden's compromise, Lincoln told Weed and Seward, "would lose us everything we gained by the election. . . . Filibustering for all South of us, and making slave states would follow . . . to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire." The very notion of a territorial compromise, Lincoln pointed out, "acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for. . . . We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten. . . . If we surrender, it is the end of us. They will repeat the experiment upon us
ad libitum
. A year will not pass, till we' shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union."
⁴⁵

Following Lincoln's advice, all five Republicans on the Senate Committee

44
.
CG
, 36 Cong., 2 Sess., 114. The Constitution contained a precedent for these "unamendable" amendments: Article V, which prohibits any change in the equal representation of each state in the Senate.

45
. Lincoln to Lyman Trumbull, Dec. 10, 1860, to William Kellogg, Dec. 11, to Elihu B. Washburne, Dec. 13, to Thurlow Weed, Dec. 17, to William H. Seward, Feb. i, 1861, to John D. DeFrees, Dec. 18, 1860, to James T. Hale, Jan. 11, 1861, in
CWL
, IV, 149–51, 154, 183, 155, 172.

of Thirteen voted against the Crittenden compromise. On the grounds that any compromise would be worthless if opposed by the Republicans, Toombs and Davis also voted No, sending the measure down to defeat 7–6. Crittenden then took his proposal to the Senate floor, where on January 16 it was rejected by a vote of 25–23, with all 25 negative votes cast by Republicans. Fourteen senators from states that had seceded or were about to secede did not vote. Although Crittenden's compromise resurfaced again later, Republican opposition and lower-South indifference continued to doom it.
⁴⁶

Did this mean that Republicans killed the last, best hope to avert disunion? Probably not. Neither Crittenden's nor any other compromise could have stopped secession in the lower South. No compromise could undo the event that triggered disunion: Lincoln's election by a solid North. "We spit upon every plan to compromise," wrote one secessionist. "No human power can save the Union, all the cotton states will go," said Jefferson Davis, while Judah Benjamin agreed that "a settlement [is] totally out of our power to accomplish."
⁴⁷
On December 13, before any compromises had been debated—indeed, before any states had actually seceded—more than two-thirds of the senators and representatives from seven southern states signed an address to their constituents: "The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union, through the agency of committees, Congressional legislation, or constitutional amendments, is extinguished. . . . The honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people are to be found in a Southern Confederacy."
⁴⁸
Delegates from seven states who met in Montgomery on February 4, 1861, to organize a new nation paid no attention to the compromise efforts in Washington.