Chapter 10
The Flight Toward Compromise
From June until November 1860, Republican congressmen had been campaigning in their districts—either for themselves, each other, or Abraham Lincoln. They had given speeches, shaken hands, kissed babies, raised money, given interviews for newspapers, written pamphlets, handed out literature, mixed with the voters at rallies and picnics, and waved from carriages in parades—but they always hewed closely to orders handed down by their state party bosses. The Republican strategy differed from state to state, but everywhere Republican candidates sounded the single note that stirred voters in every town, hamlet, and farm community from Minnesota to Maine: outrage at the wickedness of the Slave Power in the South, its corrupting influence, its long-term conspiracy to pervert the values of the American republic to its own selfish ends.
Once Congress was met on December 3, however, things changed. Now that the representatives from districts all over the North were talking face-to-face with their counterparts from the South, the hard-line speeches that had sounded so bold and righteous in front of the cheering crowds of autumn seemed strident and simplistic in the cold light of winter. The Republican fable that secession was a bluff, that the Cotton States had no real intention of leaving the Union, and that their threats were mere bluster meant to frighten timid voters and extort new concessions, was meeting hard reality in the noisy halls and chambers under the Capitol dome.
On the Hill, the word “compromise” had the aura of a hallowed tradition, not the stigma of weakness. It was not surprising, then, that in December, under these new circumstances, the harsh campaign rhetoric was forgotten and a new appreciation for the need for adjustment with the South grew up among the Republican congressmen. Within days after convening, both Houses hurried to form committees to hammer out a compromise acceptable to all sides. Many Republican leaders thought they discerned wisdom in dropping the anti-slavery Chicago platform.
But for Lincoln—still a private citizen, still in exile, still far removed in his borrowed office on the prairie and insulated from the pressures for compromise—the issue of slavery in the territories was etched in crystal, and his resolve remained diamond-hard. There must be no compromise. For him this was essential. The territories in the West had always represented the future of the nation, and he regarded the exclusion of slavery in the territories as the key issue over which the election had been fought. He saw his election as a signal that the nation had turned away from slavery—forever. In the territorial issue dual weighty themes were thus bound up: the foundation of the new society in the West, and the nation’s first step in its journey toward the ultimate extinction of slavery.
Lincoln left no doubt that here he expected Republicans to stand firm. He also opposed any attempt to reestablish the Missouri Compromise line that would permit slavery in national territory below the latitude of 36°30’. It is hard for us to understand his sensitivity on this point, since there was no real danger of slavery taking root in the arid plateaus and deserts of the New Mexico Territory below that line. The southern border of the United States, however, which seems etched in granite to us, seemed a mere tissue to Americans in 1860. The people of Lincoln’s time had seen the southern border change radically after the Mexican War, by the Treaty of Guadelupe-Hidalgo in 1848 and again by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. In the 1850s there had been constant attempts by Southerners to move it further south by the formal purchase or outright seizure of Mexico, Cuba, and Nicaragua, in order to add more slave territory and eventually make a dozen more slave states. Lincoln realized that if slavery were permitted in national territory below any given latitude, it would only act as an incentive to grab more territory to the south. If Republicans surrender on the territorial question, he wrote, “it is the end of us, and of the government.”
As warning shots across the bow of the growing movement toward compromise among the Republicans in Congress, Lincoln fired off letters, writing to three Illinois congressmen in four days. On December 10 he sent the first to Senator Lyman Trumbull, which began abruptly, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again…. The tug has to come, and better now than at any time hereafter.” He followed this with a similar letter the next day to Congressman William Kellogg: “Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery.” A couple of days later, he wrote to Congressman Elihu Washburne, repeating the warning against compromise lest “immediately filibustering [as with William Walker in Nicaragua] and extending slavery recommences. On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.” On December 17, he indirectly informed a conference of Republican governors of his resolve. “Should the … Governors … seem desirous to know my views,” he wrote to his emissary, Thurlow Weed, “tell them you judge from my speeches that I will be inflexible on the territorial question.”
Here Lincoln was at odds with the nation, even at odds with the North. With South Carolina hell-bent on leaving the Union, the masses now wanted compromise. As a result, Lincoln’s support had already started shrinking in the first days after his election. Many of the 40% minority of voters who voted for Lincoln in November had voted for his homespun image as “The Railsplitter,” or had voted Republican for the tariff, or homesteads, or against Democratic corruption—they had voted for Lincoln in spite of his stand on slavery, not because of it. These were the first to desert him. Even many anti-slavery Republicans were suddenly panicked, however, as a growing list of Deep South states prepared to secede. Seeing the republic threatened by Lincoln’s intransigence on the issue of slavery in the territories, they too abandoned the party ranks.
“Iron-backed” Republicans were frantic at the mass defections. Norman Judd, meeting with Republicans in the Illinois legislature in December, reported “trouble holding them steady,” even in the rah-rah Republican milieu of the Illinois state capital. New York millionaire Moses Grinnell warned Seward that “many of our Republican friends have strong sympathies with those who are ready to yield…. ” Banker August Belmont of New York wrote of the thousands there who were repenting their votes for Lincoln, men he met every day “who confess the error, and almost with tears in their eyes wish they could undo what they helped to do.” Now that committees in Congress were putting their heads together for a solution—which would necessarily demand compromise—the pro-slavery New York Herald, on December 9, confidently predicted that “better things will occur within a fortnight than the most ultra of either side anticipate.” The 22-year-old Henry Adams, grandson and great-grandson of presidents, with his privileged view into the Republican heart from family’s parlor in Washington, was in despair over the wavering lines in the Senate and House. It looked to him as though the old story would be retold: the anti-slavery legions would throw down their swords in the face of Southern hostility. Adams wrote to his brother on December 9, listing “very fishy and weak-kneed” senators. A full third of Republicans were not to be trusted, he said. And the situation was only getting worse. On December 13, Adams wrote to his brother again, warning him to “prepare yourself for a complete disorganization of our party…. How many there will be faithful unto the end, I cannot say, but I fear me much, not a third of the House.” By January 3 the Herald was crowing that many of the Republicans, victorious in November, now wanted adjustment, and that they were restrained from saying so only out of fear of the militant Republican press.