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By Root 1769 0

southerners that his administration would pose no threat to them or to slavery, while seeking to satisfy Republican demands for firmness. But overall, his speeches did not augur well for reconciliation. Nothing, he said, “can ever bring me willingly to consent to the destruction of this Union.” He did not threaten war but neither did he reject that possibility, and he denied that retaking federal property seized by the Confederacy or enforcing federal laws would constitute “coercion.” Already, Lincoln was positioning the Union as the victim, not the aggressor, if war broke out. There would be no bloodshed, he announced, unless “forced upon the government.”47

Lincoln’s speeches dismayed Seward and other advocates of compromise, who considered their tone far too belligerent. Lincoln’s audiences, however, responded enthusiastically to his expressions of resolve. When Lincoln told the Democrat-dominated New Jersey General Assembly that while he cherished peace, “it may be necessary to put the foot down,” the legislators broke out in wild, prolonged cheering. It is worth noting, however, that Lincoln’s speeches were less bellicose than those delivered at the same time by Jefferson Davis as he made his way to Montgomery, Alabama, for his swearing-in as president of the Confederacy. Northerners, Davis warned, would soon “smell southern gunpowder and feel southern steel.”48

During his journey, Lincoln said nothing directly about slavery. But in a speech on George Washington’s birthday at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, where the Declaration of Independence had been signed, Lincoln reaffirmed his oft-stated conviction that the Declaration’s affirmation of human equality had kept the United States “so long together.” He identified that idea with the free-labor ethos, the “promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.” Even if it were the only way to settle the secession crisis without bloodshed, he said, he would not surrender that principle.49

As March 4, the date of Lincoln’s inauguration, neared, supporters of compromise desperately sought to hammer out a settlement. Throughout February, delegates to a national peace conference in Washington, called by Virginia, debated the situation, with little result. Because of the advanced age of many delegates—the chair, ex-president John Tyler, was seventy-one—Horace Greeley dubbed it the “Old Gentlemen’s Convention.” The debates did not suggest that a meeting of minds was likely. James A. Seddon of Virginia, later the Confederacy’s secretary of war, condemned northerners for seeking the “final extinction of slavery,” which he described as a beneficent institution that brought “Christian civilization” to “colored barbarians.” Most Republican delegates were playing for time, hoping the discussion would prevent further acts of secession before Lincoln’s inauguration. As the convention drew to a close at the end of February, it approved a revised version of the Crittenden plan, a single, multipart constitutional amendment reworded to apply only to territory currently owned by the United States, not “hereafter acquired.” But the Senate rejected the proposal and it never came before the House.50

In the end, the only substantive result of all these deliberations was a single constitutional amendment, originally drafted by Seward but known as the Corwin amendment after Thomas Corwin of Ohio, the head of the House committee deliberating on the crisis. This explicitly denied Congress the power to abolish slavery in the states, although in keeping with the language of the original document it avoided the words “slave” and “slavery” in favor of circumlocutions: “domestic institutions” and “persons held to labor.” Radicals like Owen Lovejoy, who predicted that in time Virginia, Maryland, and other states of the Border South would request federal aid in emancipating their slaves, opposed the amendment. But the proposed Thirteenth Amendment received the necessary two-thirds majority in the House on February 28 and