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.
But it was significant that only seven slave states were represented at Montgomery. By February 1861 the main goal of compromise maneuvers was to keep the other eight from going out. The legislatures of five of these states had enacted provisions for the calling of conventions.49
46. Nevins, Emergence, II, 390–98; CG, 36 Cong., 2 Sess., 409.
47. Reynolds, Editors Make War, 169; Davis quoted in Samuel C. Buttersworth to Samuel L. M. Barlow, Dec. 3, 1860, Benjamin to Barlow, Dec. 9, 1860, Barlow Papers, Henry E. Huntington Library.
48. Edward McPherson, The Political History of the United States of America duringthe Great Rebellion, 2nd ed. (Washington, 1865), 37.
49. The legislatures of Kentucky and Delaware refused to provide for conventions and the governor of Maryland did not call his legislature into session.
But thereafter the resemblance to events below the 35th parallel ceased. Voters in Virginia, Arkansas, and Missouri elected a majority of unionists to their conventions. Voters in North Carolina and Tennessee, given the choice of voting for or against the holding of a convention, voted against doing so. Although the Confederate states sent commissioners to the upper-South conventions with appeals to join their southern sisters, the Missouri and Arkansas conventions rejected secession in March (Arkansas by a narrow margin) and Virginia did the same by a two-to-one margin on April 4. The main reason for this outcome was the lesser salience of slavery in the upper South. Slaves constituted 47 percent of the population in the Confederate states but only 24 percent in the upper South; 37 percent of the white families in Confederate states owned slaves compared with 20 percent of the families in the upper South.50
This failure of secession in the upper South seemed to confirm the Republican belief in the region's basic unionism. But much of that unionism was highly conditional. The condition was northern forbearance from any attempt to "coerce" Confederate states. The Tennessee legislature resolved that its citizens "will as one man, resist [any] invasion of the soil of the South at any hazard and to the last extremity." To put teeth into a similar admonition by the Virginia legislature, the convention of that commonwealth remained in session to watch developments after initially voting down secession. Moderate Republicans heeded these warnings and trod softly during the first three months of 1861. This was the time of "masterly inactivity," of limited concessions to strengthen that silent majority of lower-South unionists so they could begin a "voluntary reconstruction" of their states. Seward in particular had abandoned the irrepressible conflict to become chief of the conciliationists. "Every thought that we think," he wrote to Lincoln on January 27, "ought to be conciliatory, forbearing and patient, and so open the way for the rising of a Union Party in the
seceding States which will bring them back into the Union." Although less optimistic than Seward, Lincoln approved of this approach so long as it involved "no compromise which assists or permits the extension" of slavery.51
Republicans on the special House Committee of Thirty-Three (one
50. Calculated from the census of 1860.
51. Mary E. R. Campbell, The Attitude of Tennesseans toward the Union (New York, 1961), 161–62; Seward to Lincoln, Jan. 27, 1861, Lincoln to Seward, Feb. 1, 1861, CWL, IV, 183.
for each state)52 had first demonstrated the possibilities of such a "Fabian policy." Charles Francis Adams sponsored a proposal to admit New Mexico (which included present-day Arizona) as a state. This maneuver had a deep purpose: to divide the upper and lower South and cement the former to the Union by the appearance of concession on the territorial question. New Mexico had a slave code and a few slaves. But everyone recognized that the institution would not take root there; as Crittenden noted, the ultimate consequence of New Mexico's admission would be to give the North another free state. Lower-South members of the committee scorned the proposal while several upper-South members approved it, thereby accomplishing Adams's intention. He persuaded nine of the fifteen Republicans on the committee to endorse this apparent violation of the party's platform. The measure therefore obtained committee approval on December 29. When it finally reached a floor vote two months later, however, a three-to-one negative Republican margin defeated it. Nevertheless, during those two months the New Mexico scheme had played a part in keeping the upper South in the Union.53
Two other recommendations from the Committee of Thirty-Three helped along this cause. Both received Seward's active and Lincoln's passive endorsement. The first was a resolution calling for faithful obedience to the fugitive slave law and repeal of personal liberty laws in conflict with it. This passed the House on February 27 with the support of about half the Republican representatives. Next day the House adopted a proposed Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution guaranteeing slavery in the states against any future interference by the federal government. This was too much for three-fifths of the Republicans to swallow, but the two-fifths who did vote for it in both House and Senate gave this Amendment the bare two-thirds majority needed to send it to the states for ratification. Before that process got anywhere, however, other matters intervened to produce four years later a Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery.
Seward's conciliation policy also bore fruit in the form of a "peace convention" that assembled in Washington on February 4, the same day that the Confederate constitutional convention met in Montgomery. Called by the Virginia legislature, the peace convention further
52. Members from two of the seven seceding states refused to participate in any of the committee's sessions, and members from four others boycotted several of them.
53. Potter, Lincoln and His Party, 290–302.
divided the upper and lower South. The seceded states plus Arkansas refused to send delegates. Five northern states also failed to participate—California and Oregon because of distance; Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota because their Republican leaders distrusted the enterprise. Many Republicans in other states shared this distrust, but Seward persuaded them to support the project as a gesture of good will. Taking the Crittenden compromise as a starting point, this "Old Gentlemen's Convention" accomplished little except to mark time. Many of the delegates belonged to a past era, typified by the chairman, seventy-one-year-old ex-President John Tyler of Virginia. Debates were aimless or acrimonious; Republican participation was perfunctory or hostile. After three weeks of labor, the convention brought forth the Crittenden compromise modified to make it slightly more palatable to the North. Extension of the 36° 30′ line would apply only to "present territory" and a majority vote of senators from both the free and slave states would be required to obtain any new territory.54 When this recommendation went before Congress, it suffered an unceremonious defeat, mainly by Republican votes.
Six hundred miles distant the Confederate convention appeared by contrast to be a triumph of efficiency. In six days the delegates at Montgomery drafted a temporary constitution, turned themselves into a provisional Congress for the new government, elected a provisional president and vice president, and then spent a more leisurely month fashioning a permanent constitution and setting the machinery of government in motion. Elections for a bicameral Congress and for a president and vice president to serve the single six-year term prescribed by the Constitution were to be held in November 1861.
Although Barnwell Rhett and a few other fire-eaters came to Montgomery as delegates, they took a back seat at a convention that did its best to project a moderate image to the upper South. Befitting the new Confederacy's claim to represent the true principles of the U. S. Constitution which the North had trampled upon, most of the provisional
54. The key vote in the convention was 9–8 in favor of this territorial provision, as follows:
Free states: 5 yes, 6 no, 3 abstentions
Slave states: 4 yes, 2 no, 1 abstention.
For detailed accounts of the convention, see Robert G. Gunderson, Old Gentlemen's Convention: The Washington Peace Conference of 1861 (Madison, 1961), and Jesse L. Keene, The Peace Convention of 1861 (Tuscaloosa, 1961).
constitution was copied verbatim from that venerable document. The same was true of the permanent Confederate Constitution, adopted a month later, though some of its departures from the original were significant. The preamble omitted the general welfare clause and the phrase "a more perfect Union," and added a clause after We the People: "each State acting in its sovereign and independent character." Instead of the U. S. Constitution's evasions on slavery ("persons held to service or labor"), the Confederate version called a slave a slave. It guaranteed the protection of bondage in any new territory the Confederacy might acquire. The Constitution did forbid the importation of slaves from abroad, to avoid alienating Britain and especially the upper South, whose economy benefitted from its monopoly on export of slaves to the lower South. The Constitution permitted a tariff for revenue but not for protection of domestic industries, though what this distinction meant was unclear since the clause did not define it. Another clause forbade government aid for internal improvements. The Constitution also nurtured state's rights by empowering legislatures to impeach Confederate officials whose duties lay wholly within a state. After weakening the executive by limiting the president to a single six-year term, the Constitution strengthened that branch by giving the president a line-item veto of appropriations and granting cabinet officers a potential non-voting seat on the floor of Congress (this was never put into effect).55
Most interest at Montgomery focused on the choice of a provisional president. There was no shortage of aspirants, but the final nod went to a West Point graduate who would have preferred to become commander of the Confederacy's army. As the most prominent of the original secessionists, Rhett and Yancey had a strong claim for preference. But conditional unionists north of the 35th parallel, especially in Virginia, regarded them as no less responsible than the blackest of Republicans for the tragic division of the country that was forcing them to choose sides. Since the new Confederacy—containing scarcely 10 percent of the country's white population and 5 percent of its industrial capacity—desperately needed the allegiance of the upper South, Yancey and Rhett were ruled out. Toombs, Stephens, and Howell Cobb, all from Georgia, seemed to fit the bill better. But the Georgia delegation could not unite on one of them. Moreover, as a conditional unionist until the last minute, Stephens was suspect in the eyes of original secessionists, while
55. The Constitution is conveniently printed in Emory M. Thomas, The Confederate Nation 1861–1865 (New York, 1979), 307–22.
Toombs, a former Whig, suffered a similar handicap among the longtime Democrats who predominated at Montgomery. Toombs's heavy drinking—he appeared at a party falling-down drunk two nights before the balloting for president—also hurt his chances. Word from Richmon
d that Virginia's pro-secession senators Mason and Hunter favored Jefferson Davis proved decisive. Austere, able, experienced in government as a senator and former secretary of war, a Democrat and a secessionist but no fire-eater, Davis was the ideal candidate. Though he had not sought the job and did not really want it, the delegates elected him unanimously on February 9. His sense of duty—and destiny—bid him accept. To console Georgia and strengthen the Confederacy's moderate image, one-time Whig and more recently Douglas Democrat Alexander Stephens received the vice presidency. To satisfy geographical balance, Davis apportioned the six cabinet posts among each state of the Confederacy except his own Mississippi, with the top position of secretary of state going to the sulking Toombs.56
"The man and the hour have met!" So said a genial William L. Yancey as he introduced Jefferson Davis to a cheering crowd in Montgomery on February 16. It was on this occasion that "Dixie" began its career as the unofficial Confederate anthem. Perhaps inspired by the music, Davis made a brief, bellicose speech. "The time for compromise has now passed," he said. "The South is determined to maintain her position, and make all who oppose her smell Southern powder and feel Southern steel." His inaugural address two days later was more pacific. He assured everyone that the Confederacy wished to live in peace and extended a warm invitation to any states that "may seek to unite their fortunes to ours."57 Davis then settled down to the heavy responsibilities of organizing a new nation—and of enlarging its borders.
Abraham Lincoln's chief concern was to prevent that enlargement. And part of the energy expended in building his cabinet was directed to that end. Putting together a cabinet gave Lincoln no end of trouble. The infant Republican party was still a loose coalition of several previous parties, of down-east Yankees and frontiersmen, radicals and conservatives, ideologues and pragmatists, of upper North and lower North and
56. Ibid., 37–66; E. Merton Coulter, The Confederate States of America (Baton Rouge, 1950), 19–32
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