Confederate "Heritage" Month 2022, April 11: The Crittenden Compromise ploy by the Slave Power

Kevin Levin, who I've already quoted in two posts this month, makes doing these annual sets of posts a lot easier. Because for a lot of them, I could just link to posts he's already done!

In Should Lincoln Have Let the South Go? Civil War Memory (Substack) 04/10/2022, he touches on the pre-Civil War dilemma that American politicians faced: how should the free states free themselves from the slave system, with which they were in a symbiotic relationship in the Union.

As he notes of the question in his title, "Most people who speculate about what Lincoln should have done have no real understanding of why he did what he did. More to the point, few people have any sense of what the Union meant to the loyal citizenry of the United States in 1860-61."

I can't improve on Kevin's description of why the question itself is a symptom of the lack of adequate historical understanding of early and antebellum American history. So go read his piece.

It's worth mentioning here that there was a significant proposal for a Constitutional Amendment that wouldn't have "let the slave states go," but would have protected slavery within them. It was known as the Crittenden Compromise after its main sponsor, Kentucky's Democratic Sen. John J. Crittenden. It would have "denied Congress the right to ever abolish slavery in states where it existed." (Farrell Evans, The 1860 Compromise That Would Have Preserved Slavery in the US Constitution History.com 12/06/2021)

Evans relates how President Lincoln used a political maneuver to kill the Crittenden proposal. Crittenden himself supported the Union in the Civil War. But he continued to defend slavery, as well:

After the failure of his plan and the start of the Civil War, Crittenden left the Senate and returned to Kentucky in an effort to save Kentucky for the Union. In May 1861, he became the chairman of the Border State Convention, a group of delegates from Kentucky and Missouri who met in Frankfort to ask the Southern states to reconsider their position on secession. After first pushing Kentucky to stay neutral in the war, Crittenden became a supporter of the Union. His own family was split over the war. Two of his sons became generals in opposing armies.

Two years into the Civil War, Crittenden died in 1863 of failing health at the age of 77 as he was preparing for reelection to Congress. He was not a supporter of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation nor the use of Black men as Union troops. In July 1861, he introduced resolutions that the purpose of the war was not for “overthrowing or interfering with the rights or established institutions of those states,” but rather to “defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and to preserve the Union.” [my emphasis]

James McPherson elaborates on Lincoln's position (Who Freed the Slaves? Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 139:1, Mar 1995):

When [William] Seward flirted with the idea of supporting the Crittenden Compromise, Lincoln stiffened the backbones of Seward and other key Republicans. "Entertain no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery;" he wrote to them. "The tug has to come, & better now, than any time hereafter." Crittenden's compromise "would lose us everything we gained by the [1860] election. Filibustering for all South of us [this refers to military operations to seize more territory in Latin America], and making slave states would follow ... to put us again on the high-road to a slave empire." The proposal for concessions, Lincoln pointed out, "acknowledges that slavery has equal rights with liberty, and surrenders all we have contended for. ... 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. ... If we surrender, it is the end of us. They will repeat the experiment upon us ad libitum. A year will not pass, till we shall have to take Cuba as a condition upon which they will stay in the Union."

Lincoln knew when it came to secession, it was now all or nothing. The rebellion had to be defeated and the further spread of slavery blocked. And both the Slave Power and the Abolitionists were very aware that the Southern brand of slavery was an institution that had to expand or die out.

He goes on to point out that there were those who questioned Lincoln's caution in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. But on the Crittenden Compromise, he knew that accepting it would have been doom for democracy and the American Republic.