Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War & Reconstruction by Allen C. Guelzo

more than all the other temper tantrums the South had thrown since the Missouri Compromise. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, in a speech to the Senate on January 25, 1860, had heaped contempt on the secessionthreats as “this DISUNION FARCE ,” which was intended only to “startle and appall the timid, make the servility of the servile still more abject, rouse the selfish instincts of that nerveless conservatism which has ever opposed every useful reform, and wailed over every rotten institution as it fell.” Lincoln himself was confidently predicting “that things have reached their worst point in the South, and they are likely to mend in the future.” Part of Lincoln’s peculiar confidence was due to his own overweening certainty that, as a born Kentuckian, he possessed a special insight into and empathy with Southerners. Possessed with this insight, he was sure that Unionism was a far more powerful force in the long run than the apparently illogical rush to secession. 79
    Lincoln was not the only Republican floating on a bubble of confidence. “We shall keep the border states,” predicted William H. Seward in February, “and in three months or thereabouts, if we hold off, the Unionists and Disunionists will have their hands on each other’s throats in the cotton states.” William S. Thayer, the assistant editor of the
New York Evening Post
, noted that “the leading Republicans” were all convinced that “the seceders had no purpose of
remaining
out of the Union.” 80 It was also clear to the Republicans that a stout refusal to yield to Southern threats or accommodate Southern demands was politically useful. The Southern threat of secession gave the Republicans an important issue on which to rally Northern public opinion, even while the threats of disunion divided hesitant Southerners.
    Consequently, neither Lincoln nor the Republicans were going to be at all receptive when Buchanan pleaded for compromises to placate the secessionists and keep the Union together. In his December 3 message to Congress, Buchanan had called upon Congress to work out a series of compromises that would take the wind out of the secession-mongers’ sails, including a constitutional convention that would consider an amendment to protect slavery in the territories and the purchase of the Spanish colony of Cuba in order to admit it to the Union as a slave state. These proposals were hardly the sort to please either Northern Democrats or Republicans, but they might have forced the secessionists to back down long enough to let the storm over Lincoln’s election die down. Similarly, a constitutional convention might have been just the instrument to reawaken national interest and loyalty in the South. Congress grudgingly formed two committees, one each for the House and Senate, to discuss Buchanan’s proposals for compromise, and by the end of December the Senate Committee was ready to put forth a compromise proposal that had been drafted by John J. Crittenden of Kentucky. 81
    The Crittenden Compromise actually called for not one but a series of constitutional amendments that guaranteed the following: the old Missouri Compromise line of 36°30′ would be revived and slavery would be forbidden in any state or territory north of the line and protected anywhere to the south; slavery in the District of Columbia was to be protected from congressional regulation; Congress would be prohibited from interfering in the interstate slave trade; and Congress would compensate any slave owner whose runaways were sheltered by local Northern courts or anti-slavery measures.
    Crittenden seriously believed that his compromise could win popular support, and he even urged Congress to submit it to a national referendum. Lincoln, who refused to believe that the secession threats were finally serious, would have none of it. “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the
extension
of slavery,” Lincoln wrote on December 11. “The