The Fiery Trial_ Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery - Eric Foner [93]
A few Republicans, notably the mercurial Horace Greeley, believed that only by letting the seceding states depart in peace could a demeaning compromise be avoided. In December, on the eve of South Carolina’s decision to leave the Union, Greeley’s New York Tribune commented that if the principle of government by the consent of the government were to be taken seriously, “we do not see that it would not justify…secession.” If the states of the Lower South declared their intention to leave, “we shall feel constrained by our devotion to human liberty to say, Let them go!” (Greeley, however, insisted that secession must come only after popular referendums in each state, which he thought advocates of southern independence would lose.)27
Many abolitionists, who had never shared the mystical devotion to the Union so common among their countrymen, also welcomed peaceable secession as preferable to compromise. “If the Union can only be maintained by new concessions to the slaveholders,” said Frederick Douglass early in December, “let the Union perish.” William Lloyd Garrison, who had long advocated disunion in order to free the North from its connection to slavery, insisted that the time had come for “a separation from the South…. Is it not evident that we are, and must be…two nations?” In a series of widely noted speeches, Wendell Phillips argued that disunion would bring nearer the day of emancipation. The Union, he said, protected and enriched the slave states; “disunion is abolition!”28
On the other hand, northern business leaders, especially those with commercial ties to the South, bombarded Lincoln with calls for compromise. The election was followed by falling stock and commodity prices as investors panicked at the possibility of civil war. In December and January, eastern businessmen made frantic efforts to save the Union. As in the 1830s, gentlemen of property and standing led mobs that disrupted gatherings of abolitionists, whom they blamed for the crisis. They held mass meetings where speakers (most of them Democrats, but with a fair representation of Republicans) called for compromise to avert secession. They circulated petitions that gathered tens of thousands of signatures in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and dispatched delegations to Washington to lobby Republican congressmen. In January, a special train brought thirty leading New York merchants to the nation’s capital bearing a petition for compromise signed by 40,000 New York businessmen. “The perpetuity of the Union,” it declared, was more important than “this or that subject of controversy.” Hamilton Fish, a prominent conservative Republican in New York City, expressed “surprise” at “the extent of concessions” merchants were willing to make. Many called for the repeal of the North’s personal liberty laws, which sought to impede the operation of the Fugitive Slave Act, and the extension of the old Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific—“a plan…manufactured in Wall Street,” according to William Cullen Bryant, who opposed the idea. Others spoke of accepting the validity of the Dred Scott decision and allowing slavery to expand throughout the West.29
Despite calls for compromise to avoid both secession and civil war, very few northerners of either party acknowledged a state’s right to secede or denied the government’s authority to employ force as a last resort to maintain the Union. During the secession winter, northern Democratic newspapers and party leaders blamed Republicans’ “agitation…of the slavery question” for the crisis and tried to assure the South that it enjoyed