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By Root 1744 0

would become the Confederacy’s vice president). Gilmer asked for reassurances regarding Lincoln’s intentions on a range of issues—abolition in the District of Columbia, the future of the interstate slave trade, federal interference with slavery in the states, the use of federal patronage, and “the disturbing question of Slavery in the Territories.” In his response, which soon became public, Lincoln remarked that Gilmer could hardly expect him to “shift the ground upon which I have been elected.” But he went on to promise to “accommodate” southern views on all the issues mentioned except one. “On the territorial issue,” he noted, “I am inflexible.” Repeating in somewhat different language a point he had made at Cooper Institute, Lincoln identified the “only substantial difference” between North and South: “You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted.” Lincoln repeated these very words a few days later in his letter to Stephens, whom he had befriended years earlier when they both served in Congress and who now asked him to make a public statement to help “save our common country.”44

Unionists in the Upper South begged Lincoln to support the Crittenden plan when it came before Congress in January. Opinion in “the whole southern states,” wrote Neill S. Brown, a former governor of Tennessee, was so inflamed that only in this way could the Union be saved. But Lincoln did not budge. As he explained to James T. Hale, a Republican member of Congress from Pennsylvania who urged him to support the proposal, he considered demands for compromise under threat of secession a kind of extortion:

We have just carried an election on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance, the government shall be broken up, unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices…. If we surrender, it is the end of us, and of the government. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum [as they desire]. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union.45

On February 1, 1861, Lincoln replied to a long letter from Seward, who pleaded with him to respond to “the appeals from the Union men in the Border states for something of concession or compromise.” Lincoln began by reaffirming his inflexibility on the territorial issue—compromise on that point would “put us again on the high-road to a slave empire.” As to fugitive slaves, the nation’s capital, and so on, “I care but little,” so long as the measures adopted were not “altogether outrageous.” But in a significant shift in policy, Lincoln added that he could accept the plan to admit New Mexico as a slave state “if further extension were hedged against.” Seward took Lincoln’s letter as a green light to continue his compromise efforts. But realizing that Lincoln’s concession would not satisfy southerners who preferred the Crittenden plan, he did not make it public. Nothing came of the New Mexico idea, but Congress did in February organize three new territories—Colorado, Nebraska, and Nevada—with no mention of slavery. This reflected not a sudden embrace of Douglas’s popular sovereignty doctrine, but Republicans’ conviction, stated in the 1860 platform, that slavery could not legally exist under federal jurisdiction.46

After delivering a moving farewell speech to his Springfield neighbors, in which he said he was about to “assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington,” Lincoln on February 11 departed on a journey by train to the nation’s capital. The circuitous 2,000-mile trip took Lincoln to state capitals such as Indianapolis, Columbus, Albany, Trenton, and Harrisburg, and numerous other cities, large and small. It lasted twelve days, during which time Lincoln made more than 100 impromptu speeches. Generally delivered before large, enthusiastic crowds, his remarks gave hundreds of thousands of northerners their first real glimpse of Lincoln himself and of his thinking on the crisis. Lincoln repeatedly tried to persuade