The Failed Crittenden Compromise
As the southern states considered secession in late 1860, a U.S. senator proposed a complex scheme to keep the Union from dividing.
U.S. Senator John J. Crittenden
Senator John J. Crittenden belonged to the Constitutional Union Party, a group that was formed during the 1860 election campaign to urge preserving the Union at all costs. When South Carolina seceded in December 1860, Crittenden offered a plan to return that state to the Union and prevent any future secession.
The plan focused mainly on slavery, which was one of the primary causes of southern grievances with the North. To southerners’ dismay, most northerners refused to allow slavery in the newly acquired western territories and refused to enforce fugitive slave laws. Crittenden’s proposal contained six constitutional amendments and four congressional resolutions. The six amendments:
The original Missouri Compromise line (36 degrees, 30 minutes) would be extended to the Pacific Ocean and slavery would be prohibited in any U.S. territory “now held, or hereafter acquired” north of the line. South of the line, slavery would be “protected by all the departments of the territorial government during its continuance.”
Congress could not prohibit slavery on federal property within a state that allowed slavery, such as a southern military post.
Congress could not prohibit slavery in the District of Columbia without consent of the District’s residents; if the residents approved abolishing slavery, the District’s slaveholders would be compensated for their loss.
Congress could not interfere with slave trading between two or more states that allowed slavery.
Congress would compensate slaveholders who lost fugitive slaves by suing counties that obstructed federal fugitive slave laws; the counties in turn could sue the individuals obstructing the laws.
These amendments could never be changed, and Congress could never interfere with slavery where it already existed.
The four congressional resolutions:
Laws banning the African slave trade should be consistently enforced.
Fugitive slave laws should be consistently enforced.
“Personal liberty laws” in northern states that nullified the fugitive slave laws should be repealed.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 should be amended to equalize the fee for returning or releasing suspected fugitives (the original law offered a higher fee for returning than releasing, thus incentivizing slavery), and to limit the power of federal marshals to force citizens into helping capture fugitives.
In January 1861, President James Buchanan submitted a message to Congress urging fast approval of the Crittenden Compromise to reconcile North and South. Southerners generally supported the measure, but northern Republicans opposed the provision allowing the expansion of slavery south of the Missouri Compromise line. Influential President-elect Abraham Lincoln sided with the opposition.
A Senate committee approved the Crittenden Compromise bill, but the Republican-controlled House of Representatives defeated the measure, 113 to 80. A later Senate vote also defeated the measure, 20 to 19, and senators adopted a resolution declaring that the Constitution “needs to be obeyed rather than amended.”
The compromise failed largely because too many politicians in both North and South believed that it offered too little, too late. Six more states seceded from the Union, and a February 1861 editorial in the Charleston (Missouri) Courier lamented, “Men at Washington think there is no chance for peace, and indeed we can see but little, everything looks gloomy… Let our citizens be prepared for the worst, it may come.”
Sources
The Civil War Day by Day by E.B. Long and Barbara Long (New York, NY: Da Capo Press, Inc., 1971)
Battle Cry for Freedom: The Civil War Era by James M. McPherson (Oxford University Press)
