December 13, 1860—For the second time in four days, Abraham Lincoln did what virtually no prior President-elect had done—influence the course of legislation before he took the oath of office—by urging a member of his own state’s delegation not to yield so much on compromise that he would break his party’s major plank: curbing the expansion of slavery.
Lincoln’s election the month before had spurred secessionist impulses in the South. One week after Lincoln’s second message, South Carolina would vote to secede from the Union. Five more Southern states would join her by the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861.
If Lincoln’s pre-inaugural intervention in legislation was extraordinary, it was because the times themselves were. Perhaps the best explanation of why comes from historian Elizabeth Varon of the University of Virginia. This past weekend, I saw her on a C-Span panel, “The Nation Before and After the Civil War,” in which she discussed how, after years in which disunion had been dismissed with a shudder because of the prospect of vast bloodshed that would follow in its wake, influential Southerners now imagined a scenario where disunion became thinkable, without the terrors so long ago )(and, it turned out, accurately) envisioned.
Upping the stakes in this situation: the sea change in American parties. The Republican Party, having come into existence only six years before after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had just won its first Presidential election.
But that race was the most sectionally divided in American history to that point. Lincoln won the Electoral College vote in a landslide, but not a single Southern state. In fact, his name did not even appear on the ballot in a number of these states. Whatever unionist sentiment was represented in these states divided between John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s longtime Illinois rival, both of whom were prepared to compromise, in some form, with the forces of slavery (including extending the old slave-free line of the Missouri Compromise west to the Pacific).
A new party, then, was taking over the national government--or what remained of one, since many Southerners on Capitol Hill had either departed already or were making no bones about doing so. But two years before Lincoln would tell Congress in his annual message, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew,” he was already acting on this belief in coping with this unprecedented crisis.
Four days after counseling Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” Lincoln wrote essentially the same thing from Springfield on December 13 to another friend on Capitol Hill from the same state, Congressman Elihu Washburne, in a short letter marked “Private and Confidential.”
Washburne had written Lincoln on December 10, warning that William Seward, a former rival for the Republican nomination who was about to become his Secretary of State, was “misrepresenting your position” with respect to slavery, in an attempt to conciliate the slaveholding South.
Lincoln would have none of it, writing in a nearly identical manner as the one he’d taken with Trumbull: “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves and our cause by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort on ‘slavery extension.’ There is no possible compromise upon it but which puts us under again, and leaves all our work to do over again…. On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”
In a way, Lincoln was surprised both that secessionist advocates could misconstrue his intentions concerning slavery and that he needed to say anything further on the subject. Ever since re-entering politics six years before, he had qualified his adamant, fiercely argued brief against permitting slavery into Western territories with an equal insistence that he would not interfere with it where it already existed. He had said this so long and so often, he told Northern congressional advocates of compromise, that he couldn’t believe that it needed to be said again.
For once, this most eminently rational of men was being naïve. Just as the Soviet Union would react with anger--and, often, refusal to negotiate seriously--when American Presidents criticized human-rights violations in their country, so the South lashed out over any criticism of “the peculiar institution.” Both cases might have been a century apart, but the principle remained the same for the U.S.S.R. and the slaveholding South: moral criticism undercut the very foundations of their legitimacy, even if opponents professed not to want to take military action against areas where these violations continued.
Lincoln’s election the month before had spurred secessionist impulses in the South. One week after Lincoln’s second message, South Carolina would vote to secede from the Union. Five more Southern states would join her by the time Lincoln was inaugurated in March 1861.
If Lincoln’s pre-inaugural intervention in legislation was extraordinary, it was because the times themselves were. Perhaps the best explanation of why comes from historian Elizabeth Varon of the University of Virginia. This past weekend, I saw her on a C-Span panel, “The Nation Before and After the Civil War,” in which she discussed how, after years in which disunion had been dismissed with a shudder because of the prospect of vast bloodshed that would follow in its wake, influential Southerners now imagined a scenario where disunion became thinkable, without the terrors so long ago )(and, it turned out, accurately) envisioned.
Upping the stakes in this situation: the sea change in American parties. The Republican Party, having come into existence only six years before after the Kansas-Nebraska Act, had just won its first Presidential election.
But that race was the most sectionally divided in American history to that point. Lincoln won the Electoral College vote in a landslide, but not a single Southern state. In fact, his name did not even appear on the ballot in a number of these states. Whatever unionist sentiment was represented in these states divided between John Bell and Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s longtime Illinois rival, both of whom were prepared to compromise, in some form, with the forces of slavery (including extending the old slave-free line of the Missouri Compromise west to the Pacific).
A new party, then, was taking over the national government--or what remained of one, since many Southerners on Capitol Hill had either departed already or were making no bones about doing so. But two years before Lincoln would tell Congress in his annual message, “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew,” he was already acting on this belief in coping with this unprecedented crisis.
Four days after counseling Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, “Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery,” Lincoln wrote essentially the same thing from Springfield on December 13 to another friend on Capitol Hill from the same state, Congressman Elihu Washburne, in a short letter marked “Private and Confidential.”
Washburne had written Lincoln on December 10, warning that William Seward, a former rival for the Republican nomination who was about to become his Secretary of State, was “misrepresenting your position” with respect to slavery, in an attempt to conciliate the slaveholding South.
Lincoln would have none of it, writing in a nearly identical manner as the one he’d taken with Trumbull: “Prevent, as far as possible, any of our friends from demoralizing themselves and our cause by entertaining propositions for compromise of any sort on ‘slavery extension.’ There is no possible compromise upon it but which puts us under again, and leaves all our work to do over again…. On that point hold firm, as with a chain of steel.”
In a way, Lincoln was surprised both that secessionist advocates could misconstrue his intentions concerning slavery and that he needed to say anything further on the subject. Ever since re-entering politics six years before, he had qualified his adamant, fiercely argued brief against permitting slavery into Western territories with an equal insistence that he would not interfere with it where it already existed. He had said this so long and so often, he told Northern congressional advocates of compromise, that he couldn’t believe that it needed to be said again.
For once, this most eminently rational of men was being naïve. Just as the Soviet Union would react with anger--and, often, refusal to negotiate seriously--when American Presidents criticized human-rights violations in their country, so the South lashed out over any criticism of “the peculiar institution.” Both cases might have been a century apart, but the principle remained the same for the U.S.S.R. and the slaveholding South: moral criticism undercut the very foundations of their legitimacy, even if opponents professed not to want to take military action against areas where these violations continued.
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