(Part One of Two)

Secession was the Lower South's (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas) immediate response to Lincoln's election. The whole region quit the Union before Lincoln got up in front of the unfinished Capitol dome and read his first inaugural, starting with South Carolina on December 20, 1860, and ending with Texas on February 1, 1861. By the time the tall dude from Illinois took office, March 4, 1861, six of the seven (Texas was delayed because they had a referendum on secession.) had gotten together at Montgomery, written a Constitution, and established a government. Jefferson Davis became president before Abraham Lincoln did. Even before all that, before anybody suggested any kind of compromise, north of 2/3 of the members of Congress from seven slave states signed a public statement that

The argument is exhausted. All hope of relief in the Union, though the agency of committees, Congressional legislation, or constitutional amendments, is extinguished, and we trust the South will not be deceived by appearances or the pretence of new guarantees. The Republicans are resolution in the purpose to grant nothing that will or ought to satisfy the South. We are satisfied the honor, safety, and independence of the Southern people are to be found only in a Southern Confederacy-a result to be obtained only by separate State secession-and that the sole and primary aim of each slaveholding State ought to be its speedy and absolute separation from an unnatural and hostile Union.

That's pretty unequivocal. And this is December 13, 1860. Nobody has quit the Union when it's written.

There were dissenters even down in the Cotton Kingdom, but for the most part they weren't shopping for a radical constitutional revision. Alexander Stephens, who knew Lincoln from back in their days as Whigs, told Georgia's secession convention that they didn't need to do anything as Lincoln had no ability to do them any harm.

Stephens was not an unconditional unionist, and had not been for at least a decade by this point, but he did the math. The president would need Congress to cooperate in any antislavery shenanigans and Lincoln lacked majorities in the House and Senate. Stephens saw the Democracy's performance in the Lower North (those free states bordering slave states) as also encouraging. Over in the Senate, Lincoln would be four shy of a majority and would require one to appoint his Cabinet. Together, the majorities would tie Lincoln's hands thoroughly.

That said, there were some compromise proposals. This was a scary sectional crisis, but the nation had endured those before. What usually happened was that the South rose up over some outrage against slavery and the nation as a whole rolled over and gave the section almost everything they wanted, while throwing a bone or two to antislavery sentiment to make it look a bit less like capitulation. These then became hallowed compromises elevated, at least in the minds of their advocates, to quasi-constitutional status. If the nation could fold before, it could fold again.

But that's the Lower South. They're the hard cases. There's also the Upper South. These states were proportionally less enslaved, less to not at all invested in Lower South staples like Cotton and Sugar, and somewhat more economically diverse. Most also have significant white belt areas with few slaves and plantations which were often at odds with the planter-dominated state governments and had successfully used threatening slavery for leverage in reforming those governments to be a bit less planter-dominated. If you couldn't win over the Cotton Kingdom then you might still do the job with these guys.

By February, that's what compromise is really aimed toward. The big one is the Crittenden Compromise. Crittenden's a Kentucky senator. His state was home to the great compromiser Henry Clay. It had also hosted a serious, though not successful, debate on ending slavery in the previous decade. When the Senate votes up Committee of Thirteen (of course it's thirteen) to look into compromise proposals, Crittenden set the agenda with a package of constitutional amendments:

1. The Missouri Compromise is back, with a twist. Everywhere, except Missouri, north of its southern border will never have slavery while organized as a territory. (States could vote slavery in if they wanted after admission to the Union.) South of the line, Crittenden revised the Missouri Compromise's "we're not saying you can have slavery, but everybody knows we're letting you have the option in order for you to take it." into "the territorial governments will and must recognize, protect, and defend slavery. Furthermore, the Congress would be required to take states into the Union with placing any kind of rider or condition on their admission with regard to slavery, whatsoever. This all references both recent troubles in Kansas and real deep cut stuff from the original Missouri controversy.

2. Congress has no power whatsoever to abolish slavery in federal properties within the bounds of slave states. This means that slaves could not run off to a military fort, customs house, or other federal installation and use it as a way to escape slavery. I'm not aware of any slave ever having done this, but it was considered something that the Republicans were very likely to permit. Come the Civil War, they eventually did just that in practice, and then some, by declining to return fled slaves to their legal owners.

3. Congress has no power to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, where it has otherwise complete power and where abolition had been taken as a serious practical possibility by the antislavery movement, unless the white residents agree, and Virginia and Maryland have abolished slavery already, and owners are compensated, and members of Congress and other federal officials are guaranteed the right to bring slaves with them from home, use them how they liked, and take them back home freely and without fear.

4. Congress has no power to restrict the interstate slave trade in any way, or the importation of slaves into territories where slavery is legal.

5. The fugitive slave law gone wild: The federal government would now be on the hook for the full value of any slave who fled and could not be recovered due to interference by free localities. The feds could then sue the state and locality to make them whole for the cost, and the state and local governments could sue the individuals directly responsible.

6. All the previous are rendered un-amendable, permanently removing the chance to undo them short of tossing the whole Constitution or the very dodgy prospect of a separate amendment to un-amend the un-amendable stuff and then a separate one to strike the rest.

Crittenden accompanied these with a list of resolutions:

a) endorsing the Fugitive Slave Act and the pursuance of new laws to punish those who aided absconded slaves in their escapes and sheltered them from rendition.

b) Personal liberty laws in the free states, which facilitated the help and sheltering of runaway slaves, were illegal, unconstitutional, null and void, but they served as encouragement to the people engaged in such activities and thus should be repealed.

c) The Fugitive Slave law paid commissioners, who were in charge of declaring the person before them was the fugitive and ordering them back to slavery, five dollars for an acquittal and ten for a rendition. The fees should be equalized at ten dollars and the right of the slave catcher to conscript people into a posse to help him, which they refused under severe penalties, should be limited to cases with a real danger of resistance or rescue.

d) We are serious about outlawing the African slave trade. No more importing slaves from Africa. Serious penalties if you do.

The initial hope here was that Crittenden could isolate those crazy South Carolinians, because everyone knew they were going over the top. If they found themselves out alone, they might think better of it. The Committee of Thirteen was not impressed by the package, and recommended to the Congress only a constitutional amendment restating accepted wisdom: Congress could not abolish slavery within the bounds of a state.

Congress is on board and passes this unamendable amendment. Lincoln recommends it in his first inaugural. Four states ratify it. Had the war not intervened, it would have almost surely been the Thirteenth amendment. But it's not enough. A convention of long-in-the-tooth statesmen chaired by John Tyler, the accidental president that annexed Texas, got together in Washington for a peace conference that achieved nothing more than modifying Crittenden's package so that the Missouri Compromise revival would apply to then-present territory, not all future territory. (Lincoln considered the previous version, where all points south of the line forever would be preserved for slavery, essentially a declaration of war from Mexico all the way to Tierra Del Fuego.) As a dubious bonus, all future territorial acquisitions would have to have a majority of senators from both sections in their favor to take effect. Congress rejected the idea.