The Fiery Trial (27 page)

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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 the Senate three days later. The sole compromise measure adopted by Congress, it hardly sufficed to settle the secession crisis.
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“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.”
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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

O
N
M
ARCH
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.
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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.
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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 of the word “slavery,” the amendment violated this principle, and for this reason a large number of Republicans had opposed its passage. It would “engraft upon the Constitution an express recognition of property in man,” said one congressman. On March 7, Lincoln sent the proposed amendment to the states. Only three states ratified it—Ohio in May 1861, and Maryland and Illinois in 1862. When a Thirteenth Amendment was finally added to the Constitution in 1865, rather than making slavery permanent it irrevocably abolished it.
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Despite this concession, it is easy to understand why many southerners did not view Lincoln’s inaugural address as conciliatory. When it came to what he considered the central issue of the controversy, Lincoln again refused to compromise. Repeating almost verbatim the language of his letters to Gilmer and Stephens the previous December, Lincoln declared, “One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute.” He repeated his commitment to the South’s right to retrieve fugitive slaves, but suggested not only that the law be modified so as to prevent free blacks from being enslaved, but also that legislation should enforce the Constitution’s requirement that each state respect the rights of citizens of other states. Free blacks, Lincoln appeared to be saying, must be viewed as entitled to recognition as citizens under the comity clause. No president, the
Liberator
pointed out, had ever made such an assertion, which repudiated the
Dred Scott
decision. Indeed, Lincoln went on to insist that when it came to vital issues “affecting the whole people,” Americans could not “resign their government into the hands” of judges. All this was said in the presence of Chief Justice Taney, who had administered the oath of office moments earlier, looking, according to one reporter, like a “galvanized corpse.”
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The heart of Lincoln’s first inaugural consisted of a lengthy repudiation of the right of secession and an affirmation of national sovereignty and majority rule. In preparing the address he had consulted Henry Clay’s speech to the Senate on the Compromise of 1850 and President Buchanan’s December 1860 message to Congress, some of whose phraseology made its way into his speech. But the two key influences were classic documents of American nationalism dating from the early 1830s: Andrew Jackson’s Proclamation on Nullification and Daniel Webster’s reply to South Carolina Senator Robert Hayne. Drawing on the arguments of Jackson and Webster, which generations of northern children had learned in school and Republicans had reiterated throughout the 1850s, Lincoln insisted that the nation had been created by the American people rather than the states, and had been meant from the outset to be perpetual. No state, therefore, could unilaterally dissolve it. The audience, one newspaper reported, greeted Lincoln’s passages on the necessity of maintaining the Union with “vociferous applause.”
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Lincoln couched his argument as a defense of a basic principle of democracy—that the minority must acquiesce in the rule of the majority, so long as that rule accords with constitutional principles. The deep national division over the morality of slavery could be decided only by a democratic process, such as the one that had placed him in office. Secession, by contrast, not only was illegal but would lead to an endless splintering of authority as disgruntled minorities seceded from polities they deemed oppressive. No government could function in such circumstances. Over two decades earlier, as a young legislator, Lincoln had condemned “the increasing disregard for law” as the greatest threat to American institutions and the American experiment in democratic self-government. Then, the culprit was mob violence; now it was the claim that a state could decide to leave the Union. “Plainly,” he declared, “the central idea of secession, is the essence of anarchy.”

But Lincoln also appealed to the spirit of American nationalism that he believed remained as powerful in the South as elsewhere in the country. More than a constitution, more than a set of ideals, the nation was also a physical reality that could not be sundered. Here, he abandoned abstruse legal arguments for the language of everyday life:

Lincoln closed with an eloquent call for reconciliation, based on a paragraph suggested by Seward but reworked into a poetic conclusion to an otherwise impersonal speech:

The diarist Sidney George Fisher found this “fine sentiment and beautiful image” so moving that he commented, “He who wrote it is no common man.”
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Some abolitionists criticized Lincoln for failing to address the real cause of the crisis. Borrowing Lincoln’s own words, the
Weekly Anglo-African
noted that the “only substantial dispute” was not the “mere question of extension,” but the very existence of slavery. But the address rallied Republicans and seems to have reassured Unionists in the Upper South and Democrats and conservative former Whigs in the North. Under the circumstances, commented a Jersey City newspaper that had supported John C. Bell for president in 1860, “it was hardly possible for Mr. Lincoln to speak with more mildness.” In New York City, according to one letter to the White House, reactions to the speech were universally enthusiastic, except for one “stock broker” who thought “there is too much fight in it.”
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But if Lincoln thought his speech would persuade secessionists to abandon their ways, he was sorely disappointed. To Confederates and their supporters, Lincoln’s refusal to recognize the legitimacy of secession and his insistence on retaining control of federal property in the seceded states amounted to a decision for confrontation. Two days after Lincoln delivered the speech, the Confederate Congress authorized the raising of 100,000 troops. Americans, wrote one North Carolina newspaper, “might as well open their eyes to the solemn fact that war is inevitable.” Frederick Douglass chided Lincoln for failing to include any statement of his personal feelings “against slavery.” But, he added, while Lincoln complained that his intentions had been misunderstood in the South, the real problem was that “the slaveholders understand the position of the Republican party” all too well. Secessionists were not “such fools” as to believe that Lincoln would suddenly issue a proclamation abolishing slavery, but they knew “that the power of slavery” in the federal government had been broken. Lincoln had insisted that in a democratic government, the “majority” must rule. Of course, Lincoln’s was an extremely unusual majority, comprising only 40 percent of the popular vote. But his election indicated that the free states, when united, now constituted a self-conscious national majority and here, Douglass suggested, lay the real cause of secession.
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