The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [100]
“Your refusal to adopt the Crittenden compromise measures produced war,” charged Senator Willard Saulsbury, a Delaware Democrat, addressing his Republican colleagues in 1862. In any of its permutations, the Crittenden plan never attracted much support from Republican members of Congress. Given the state of Republican opinion, Hiland Hall, a Republican delegate from Vermont to the Peace Convention, wrote in February, Congress would approve it only “if Mr. Lincoln wishes it and makes his wishes known, but not otherwise.” Although rumors circulated that Lincoln had endorsed the Peace Convention’s version of the plan, he never did so publicly. Indeed, Lincoln later told Carl Schurz that he did not call Congress back into special session after it adjourned on March 4 “for fear of reopening the compromise agitation.”52 Whether approval of the Crittenden plan would have resolved the crisis, however, may be doubted. It certainly would have strengthened the hand of Unionists in the Upper South but would not have brought back the seven seceded states. As long as they insisted on their independence, some sort of armed confrontation was almost certainly unavoidable. And as events would reveal, four of the eight slave states that remained in the Union on the day of Lincoln’s inauguration were prepared to secede rather than see force used against the Confederacy, even if the latter struck the first blow. No compromise could alter these facts.
III
ON MARCH 1, with Lincoln set to assume the presidency in three days, the New York Times announced, “We have turned the most difficult corner. We have obtained delay.” Lincoln, it continued, must now announce a conciliatory policy. The Times often reflected Seward’s views, and in the days leading up to the inauguration Seward proposed numerous changes to a draft of Lincoln’s inaugural address, all of them intended, as he wrote, to “soothe the public mind” by toning down what he considered needlessly provocative language. The draft had ended with a startling statement: “With you, and not with me, is the solemn question of ‘Shall it be peace or a sword?’” At Seward’s insistence, Lincoln modified this, although the eventual wording—“in your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war”—still struck many observers as unnecessarily threatening. At the urging of Orville H. Browning, Lincoln also omitted a pledge to “reclaim” public property that had been appropriated by the seceded states, promising simply to “hold” places still in Union hands.53
On the sunny, chilly afternoon of March 4, 1861, a crowd estimated at 50,000 persons, the majority residents of slaveholding jurisdictions—Maryland, Virginia, and the District of Columbia—gathered at the Capitol for Lincoln’s inaugural address. In a voice described by a reporter as “clear and emphatic,” Lincoln went to great lengths to allay southern fears that his administration would endanger the South’s property in slaves, and attempted to rally northerners and southern Unionists, especially in the eight unseceded slave states, to support national authority.54
Lincoln reiterated at the outset that he had neither power nor inclination to interfere with slavery where it existed. He stated that the mails would be delivered unless repelled and that federal laws would be enforced unless the attempt to do so would cause conflict. Near the end, he took note of the proposed constitutional amendment permanently barring federal interference with slavery, stating that since it simply made explicit what was already “implied” constitutional law, he had no objection to its passage. Lincoln and other Republicans had always assumed that slavery would end by state action, which the amendment did nothing to inhibit. Nonetheless, this was not a minor concession. Republicans had long claimed that the Constitution did not explicitly recognize property in slaves. Despite its careful avoidance