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By Root 1689 0

not seceded, isolate the secessionists, and ensure Lincoln’s peaceful inauguration. He had always believed that inexorable historical forces made slavery’s doom inevitable. Lincoln’s election, he believed, marked a historic turning point that could not be reversed. It had forever broken the Slave Power’s hold on the federal government and no concessions would alter this fact. When “freedom was in danger,” he explained to one critic, he had spoken so single-mindedly in its defense that “men inferred that I was disloyal to the Union.” Now, freedom had triumphed and the nation was in danger, so “I speak single for the Union.” At the very least, if compromise failed, Seward wanted “to cast the responsibility on the party of slavery.” Most Republicans, he feared, did not appreciate the seriousness of the crisis.34

Unionists in the Upper South rallied to the Crittenden plan and hailed Seward’s speech as a harbinger of reconciliation. Most Republican members of Congress, however—and, the evidence suggests, most Republican voters—rejected all these proposals. Grassroots Republicans, Russell Errett, an editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette, reported at the end of January, were “bitter against all efforts at concession…. Those who are familiar with the public sentiment at Harrisburg, Philadelphia, N. Y. and Washington can have no idea of the fierceness of the sentiment here.” From deep in southern Illinois, one constituent reported to Lyman Trumbull that Republicans in his neighborhood unanimously opposed any compromise recognizing slavery as right in principle, or as a national institution. Any such concession, another writer from Illinois informed Trumbull, “dissolves the Republican party.” Crittenden’s reference to territory “hereafter acquired,” many Republicans believed, offered a thinly veiled invitation for renewed filibustering expeditions to add slave states to the Union.35

As to Douglas’s proposed “sedition” act, Republicans took this as an indication that the South’s “real grievance,” as the Chicago Tribune put it, was not so much the election of Lincoln, but northern public sentiment—“it is…the eradication of ideas that is demanded.” Indeed, during the crisis, members of Congress from the South frequently referred to the growth of antislavery public opinion as the reason their states could not safely remain in the Union, a position reiterated in the official declarations justifying secession. “Why not make the concession which they really want?” the Republican entrepreneur John Murray Forbes wondered sarcastically after Seward’s January 12 speech: a constitutional amendment allowing federal judges to determine “what it is proper to write or say” about slavery. Already, a number of Republican congressmen were warning that slavery could not survive a civil war. “The standard of revolt,” declared Sidney Edgerton of Ohio, “will be the signal of emancipation.”36

Buffeted by these crosscurrents of opinion, Lincoln struggled to keep abreast of the rapidly evolving crisis and to devise a consistent policy for dealing with it. At the same time, he began the process of selecting a cabinet, a task not completed until the very eve of his inauguration. In keeping with tradition, he offered the post of secretary of state to his chief rival for the presidential nomination, William H. Seward. He used the other appointments to satisfy the various political and regional factions in his party. Salmon P. Chase, perhaps the party’s leading Radical, became secretary of the Treasury; the more conservative Attorney General Edward Bates of Missouri and Postmaster General Montgomery Blair of Maryland represented crucial border slave states. Lincoln appointed Gideon Welles, a former Democrat from Connecticut, as secretary of the navy, and Caleb B. Smith, a former Whig from Indiana, to head the Interior Department. The most controversial choice was Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania as secretary of war. Cameron had a well-earned reputation for corruption, and a number of leading Republicans in his own state opposed his inclusion. The Chicago editor Horace