As the Union unraveled, President Buchanan seemed paralyzed. He denied that a state could secede, but he also insisted that the federal government had no right to use force against it. Other political leaders struggled to find a formula to resolve the crisis. Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, a slave state on the border between North and South, offered the most widely supported compromise plan of the secession winter. Embodied in a series of unamendable constitutional amendments, Crittenden’s proposal would have guaranteed the future of slavery in the states where it existed, and extended the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific Ocean, dividing between slavery and free soil all territories “now held, or hereafter acquired.” The seceding states rejected the compromise as too little, too late. But many in the Upper South and North saw it as a way to settle sectional differences and prevent civil war.
A Richmond, Virginia, cartoonist in April 1861 depicts Lincoln as a cat seeking to catch the southern states as mice fleeing the Union, which lies dead on the left.
Crittenden’s plan, however, foundered on the opposition of Abraham Lincoln. Willing to conciliate the South on issues like the return of fugitive slaves, Lincoln took an unyielding stand against the expansion of slavery. Here, he informed one Republican leader, he intended to “hold firm, as with a chain of steel.” A fundamental principle of democracy, Lincoln believed, was at stake. “We have just carried an election,” he wrote, “on principles fairly stated to the people. Now we are told in advance that the government shall be broken up unless we surrender to those we have beaten, before we take the offices If we surrender, it is the end of us and the end of the government.” Lincoln, moreover, feared that Crittenden’s reference to land “hereafter acquired” offered the South a thinly veiled invitation to demand the acquisition of Cuba, Mexico, and other territory suited to slavery.
Before Lincoln assumed office on March 4, 1861, the seven seceding states formed the Confederate States of America, adopted a constitution, and chose as their president Jefferson Davis of Mississippi. With a few alterations—the president served a single six-year term; cabinet members, as in Britain, could sit in Congress—the Confederate constitution was modeled closely on that of the United States. It departed from the federal Constitution, however, in explicitly guaranteeing slave property both in the states and in any territories the new nation acquired. The “cornerstone” of the Confederacy, announced Davis’s vice president, Alexander H. Stephens of Georgia, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
Inauguration of Mr. Lincoln, a photograph taken on March 4, 1861.
The unfinished dome of the Capitol building symbolizes the precarious state of the Union at the time Lincoln assumed office.