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By Root 1640 0

member. In the days after the presidential election, some Republican newspapers predicted that Lincoln, as a gesture of national unity, would appoint him secretary of state. Other rumors had it that the seventy-four-year-old statesman was on a confidential mission to South Carolina, working behind the scenes to restore calm. Meanwhile, dozens of Crittenden’s influential friends—from former President Martin Van Buren to Winfield Scott, the army’s highest-ranking general—barraged him with letters proposing various schemes for reconciliation. One envisioned splitting the Union into two perfectly equal parts, while another suggested a law that would emancipate all America’s slaves by 1890, at a rate of precisely 3.3 percent each year. John B. Bibb, the brother of Crittenden’s old mentor, wrote from his Kentucky plantation to recommend—as many other correspondents did—that the Missouri Compromise of 1820 be reinstated, drawing a line straight across the continent to separate slave territory from free. General Scott laid out a detailed plan that would amicably divide the entire country into four “new Unions,” with their capitals at Albany, New York; Columbia, South Carolina; Alton, Illinois; and some unspecified point on the Pacific coast. (If Crittenden found this an odd suggestion from the man in charge of defending the nation’s borders, he didn’t say.)23

Ordinary citizens sent missives, too, offering dozens of different solutions, many of them even more elaborate and far-fetched than Scott’s: surely the national puzzle could be solved with a bit of practical American ingenuity, like a mantelpiece clock that had stopped and just needed some tinkering to set it aright. Many forwarded petitions, resolutions, sermons. Appeals came from the concerned citizens of Dubuque, Iowa, and from the inmates of an asylum for “deaf mutes” in Georgia. One New Jerseyan spoke for many when he vented his disgust at abolitionists and Southern extremists alike, proposing that the middle states should together form their own new country, “leaving all the New England states out, to burn witches … and affiliate with Niggers. After we get rid of them we shall have peace.” There was one thing nearly all the letter writers had in common: they extolled Crittenden as the only person who could save the country. A Virginian addressed him as “one of the Fathers of the Republic.” Another called him “the patriarch of the Union.” A third man hailed “one of the last of our Country’s noblest Patriots,” adding, in parentheses, “Alas, for the old days!” An anonymous correspondent signing him-self “A Southerner & Lover of His Country” could not restrain his passion: “I love you God knows I love you,” his somewhat surprising letter to Crittenden began.24 Never in his long life had the genial Kentuckian been the object of so much attention, let alone adoration.

It was as though these citizens believed that, by the sheer force of their hopes and prayers, they could somehow transform an elderly, mild-mannered legislator into some sort of reincarnation of George Washington, into a latter-day national saint. “The eyes of all good men in all sections are turned toward you,” a minister in Baltimore wrote. “The prospect looks dark, but the God of our Fathers will I believe yet in some way bring deliverance.… Unless indeed our national sins are so great that God must punish us.”25

Interestingly, few Americans pinned their hopes for compromise on either the outgoing president or the incoming one. Buchanan was a lame duck, while Lincoln remained at home in Springfield, still seemingly as mute about his plans and intentions as the inmates of that Georgia asylum.26 (“We don’t know what Lincoln wants,” even a leading Republican congressman complained. “He communicates nothing even to his friends here & so we drift along.”)27 Anyhow, the federal government’s executive branch in the antebellum period had usually been far less powerful than its legislative branch. In nearly all past crises, the compromises that preserved the Union had been forged in Congress.

Four years earlier,