The Unappreciated Alternative: The Northern Conservative Position

Two more points:

* Another scholarly source on the Northern conservative position and on the Radicals' sabotage of compromise efforts is
George Milton's research, especially chapters 31 and 32 of his book On the Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934, pp. 518-551). Milton, by the way, wrote approvingly of Lincoln in most cases (e.g., his book Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column).

* A strong indication that the Crittenden Compromise would have received solid support in the North and in the Border States is the 1864 presidential election. When I began to study the Civil War, I assumed that Lincoln had won re-election by a massive landslide, that he had gotten at least 65% of the popular vote, given the fact that the vast majority of Southern citizens did not vote in the election and that by October 1864 it appeared very likely that the Union would eventually win the war. In fact, I was surprised that anyone had even run against Lincoln in that election.

I was stunned to discover that George McClellan not only got 45% of the popular vote but that he came within 1.1% of winning New York and within 3.3% of winning Pennsylvania, the two most populated states in the Union, and that he did so in spite of numerous reported cases of voter fraud, and in spite of the unethical measures that Stanton and the War Department took to discourage Democratic soldiers from voting (see, for example, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/how-lincoln-won-the-soldier-vote/?_r=0).

McClellan had a Peace Democrat as his running mate (George Pendleton) and the Democratic Party’s platform called for a ceasefire. Even though McClellan repudiated that plank of the platform, everyone knew that McClellan disapproved of the scorched-earth tactics that Sherman and Sheridan were using and that with McClellan there would be a genuine chance of ending the war on generous terms that would allow the Southern states back into the Union with all their previous rights as states intact.

If 45% of voters in the Union states voted for McClellan in 1864, even when an eventual Union victory appeared very probable, it should come as no surprise that there is so much evidence that the Crittenden Compromise would have won by a solid majority of all Americans if the Republicans had allowed the people to vote on it.
 
When the war broke out, many Northern conservatives became Peace Democrats. Oddly, the Republicans labeled them as "Copperheads," a strange label to apply to a group of citizens who wanted to stop an unnecessary war, who wanted to allow states that wanted to belong to a new democratic union modeled after the old one to do so, who wanted to accept the CSA's offer of peaceful coexistence and full trade relations, and who wanted to see the Constitution reestablished in the North (i.e., an end to the shutting down of pro-peace newspapers, an end to suspending habeas corpus in areas far removed from CSA troops, etc.).
 
Davis's decision to bombard Sumter has to go down as one of the dumbest decisions ever made by a national leader.

Yes, I think most if not all would agree with your words. I like to point out the euphoria of secession was starting to wear off and many were beginning to have secessionist remorse about leaving the union. Both Lincoln and Davis needed war to unite their people behind them. In the short term, firing the first shot, Davis gained a lot of political capital in the south.

On the Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934, pp. 518-551). Milton,

I do not know this book but I do know it was the Southern Fire-eaters that sabotage Douglas run for the Presidency. They walk out of the Democrat convention and had their own convention and ran their own candidate for President. Later, they were instrumental in the secession of southern states after the election of 186o...

If 45% of voters in the Union states voted for McClellan in 1864, even when an eventual Union victory appeared very probable, it should come as no surprise that there is so much evidence that the Crittenden Compromise would have won by a solid majority of all Americans if the Republicans had allowed the people to vote on it.

This is a bogus argument, we are talking four years since 1860 election and the Crittenden Compromise, 1864 was about war weariness. It does not show any support for the Compromise you so proudly like remind us about. In political terms, a 10 point margin of victory in the popular vote and an electoral college landslide means overwhelming support for Lincoln and his war policies...
 
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Yes, I think most if not all would agree with your words. I like to point out the euphoria of secession was starting to wear off and many were beginning to have secessionist remorse about leaving the union. Both Lincoln and Davis needed war to unite their people behind them. In the short term, firing the first shot, Davis gained a lot of political capital in the south.

I see many problems with this take. After Davis ordered the Sumter attack, he publicly repeated the Confederacy's desire for peace. And I think Lincoln was trying pretty hard to avoid war, even in his handling of the naval convoy to Sumter.

I do not know this book but I do know it was the Southern Fire-eaters that sabotage Douglas run for the Presidency. They walk out of the Democrat convention and had their own convention and ran their own candidate for President. Later, they were instrumental in the secession of southern states after the election of 186o...

True, but after secession occurred, the moderates and the conservatives who did not want war pushed aside the Fire-Eaters at the Montgomery convention.

This is a bogus argument, we are talking four years since 1860 election and the Crittenden Compromise, 1864 was about war weariness. It does not show any support for the Compromise you so proudly like remind us about.

I disagree. "War weariness"? By November 1864, it was clear that the North was going to win the war and that the war would most likely be over by summer. So I don't see how "war weariness" would have influenced anyone's vote.

Anyone who voted for McClellan based on war policy was voting for honorable warfare, for an end to violations of civil liberties, and for a quick, conciliatory restoration of the Union after the South surrendered.

When the Crittenden Compromise was considered in 1861, the Radicals knew that a strong majority of the American people supported it and that it would win very handily in a national referendum, which is why they refused to allow a national referendum on it.

We have to keep in mind that although Lincoln won the election, the Republicans got beaten pretty badly in the Congressional elections. They lost control of the House and remained in the minority in the Senate. After all, 60% of Americans voted for presidential candidates--Douglas, Bell, and Breckinridge--who favored compromise on slavery in the territories. So the Radicals knew that there was strong support for compromise on this main sticking point, yet they sabotaged every compromise effort and refused to allow the people to vote on the Crittenden Compromise.

In political terms, a 10 point margin of victory in the popular vote and an electoral college landslide means overwhelming support for Lincoln and his war policies...

Uh, first of all, the vast majority of the votes cast in that election were cast by Northern citizens, and there is considerable evidence that the Republicans used all sorts of measures to suppress the Democratic vote. If Southern citizens would have voted, McClellan certainly would have gotten the overwhelming majority of their votes and would have beaten Lincoln in the popular vote.

Furthermore, as mentioned, McClellan came very close to winning New York and Pennsylvania, which would have dramatically changed the Electoral College vote count. Instead of 212 to 21, it would have been 153 to 80. Additionally, McClellan came within 2.8 percentage points of winning Connecticut and 5.2 percentage points of winning New Hampshire, and he was within 6-8 percentage points in several other states (including Indiana).

By any measurement, it is amazing that Lincoln did not win reelection by at least 20 percentage points, given that there had been a series of important federal victories and that it was clear that the war would most likely be over by summer.
 
In his first inaugural address Lincoln endorsed the Corwin Amendment, which would have protected slavery permanently, making it immune from Congressional legislation and constitutional amendments.

Very true. He also offered to allow New Mexico Territory to be open to slavery. If you look at a map of that territory as it existed in 1860, you'll see that it encompassed most of what is now the two states of New Mexico and Arizona. This was most of the land south of the Missouri Compromise Line.

This raises two very interesting questions:

One, since Lincoln was willing to let NM Territory be open to slavery, and since that territory contained most of the land south of the Missouri Compromise Line, why did Lincoln oppose the Crittenden Compromise?

Two, why didn't Southern leaders accept Lincoln's offer to leave NM Territory open to slavery? The answer to this question might be that few of them were aware of the offer early enough, if at all, because Lincoln conveyed it to William Seward in a written response to Seward and Seward was then supposed to convey the offer to the Southerners with whom he was holding discussions. I can't think of a reason that Seward would not have conveyed this offer, since he was anxious to achieve a compromise to avoid war. It is surprising--or perhaps not--that this offer has received scant attention from modern Civil War scholars.
 
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The tragedy is that peace could have been had and slavery's slide to extinction could have been accelerated non-violently if cooler heads had prevailed on both sides. Instead of 600K-plus dead and 1,000,000-plus badly wounded, we could have had peace, prosperity, and a peaceful end to slavery.
 
The alternative of compromise and peace became vastly harder after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.

A stronger, wiser statesman would have considered all the facts about the attack and would have decided against using the attack as a reason for starting a war. Regardless of how many shells were fired, the fact was--and still is--that not a single federal soldier died in the attack, and the garrison was allowed to surrender with full military honors and to return to the North. Perhaps a big reason no soldiers were killed is (1) that the Confederates told them when the attack would begin, and (2) that the Confederates temporarily ceased fire when the blaze on the fort appeared to be getting out of control and even offered to help put it out.

Someone made the point in another thread that it was contradictory and implausible for Davis to profess his desire for peace after the attack. Yes, surely Davis's public call for peaceful relations seemed ludicrous to many after he had just ordered an attack on a fort to keep its soldiers from receiving food. But, calmer and wiser heads would have understood that Davis was glad that no federal soldiers had been killed, that he had nothing against the soldiers themselves and realized they were merely following orders, that the fort should have been evacuated weeks earlier, and that Davis did not want war with the U.S. but wanted peaceful relations and full trade relations. Some voices in the North did speak out against using the attack as an excuse for war, but they were in the minority.

It would have taken a very strong, courageous U.S. president to resist the pressure to use force in response to the attack. I think John Adams could have done it, given how he resisted the intense pressure to go to war with France after the XYZ Affair and after the French had seized some American ships.

I like to believe that if Lincoln had thought there was a decent chance that the war would last for four years and would result in so much death and destruction, or that if he had felt certain this would be the case, that he would have responded differently after the attack and would not have been so quick to abandon peace.
 
The alternative of compromise and peace became vastly harder after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.

A stronger, wiser statesman would have considered all the facts about the attack and would have decided against using the attack as a reason for starting a war. Regardless of how many shells were fired, the fact was--and still is--that not a single federal soldier died in the attack, and the garrison was allowed to surrender with full military honors and to return to the North. Perhaps a big reason no soldiers were killed is (1) that the Confederates told them when the attack would begin, and (2) that the Confederates temporarily ceased fire when the blaze on the fort appeared to be getting out of control and even offered to help put it out.

Someone made the point in another thread that it was contradictory and implausible for Davis to profess his desire for peace after the attack. Yes, surely Davis's public call for peaceful relations seemed ludicrous to many after he had just ordered an attack on a fort to keep its soldiers from receiving food. But, calmer and wiser heads would have understood that Davis was glad that no federal soldiers had been killed, that he had nothing against the soldiers themselves and realized they were merely following orders, that the fort should have been evacuated weeks earlier, and that Davis did not want war with the U.S. but wanted peaceful relations and full trade relations. Some voices in the North did speak out against using the attack as an excuse for war, but they were in the minority.

It would have taken a very strong, courageous U.S. president to resist the pressure to use force in response to the attack. I think John Adams could have done it, given how he resisted the intense pressure to go to war with France after the XYZ Affair and after the French had seized some American ships.

I like to believe that if Lincoln had thought there was a decent chance that the war would last for four years and would result in so much death and destruction, or that if he had felt certain this would be the case, that he would have responded differently after the attack and would not have been so quick to abandon peace.

So, Lincoln should have caved into Confederate demands in order to avoid a bloody war.

Ryan
 
For at least the last 40 years, the only two positions that have continued to get any substantive attention are the "Southern position" and the "Northern position," but the "Northern position" presented in the vast majority of books on the Civil War largely consists of the Radical Republican position.

However, there was, and is, a third position, a position that was embraced by a large segment of the Northern population, namely, the Northern conservative position, which supported compromise measures (such as the Crittenden Compromise) to halt, if not reverse, secession, which supported evacuating Fort Sumter, and which, once the war started, supported following the rules of war and respecting Northern civil liberties (i.e., many/most of them opposed shutting down newspapers and jailing editors, suspending habeas corpus, etc.).

Some Northern conservatives were Republicans; some were Democrats; and some were independents. Most of the independents supported John Bell and his Constitutional Union party. Bell supported the Crittenden Compromise and voiced opposition to federal coercion.

Northern conservatives, like the Radicals and the Southerners, did not agree on every issue and sometimes took somewhat different approaches even when they generally agreed on an issue. Who were these people? They included John Crittenden, Stephen Douglas, George McClellan, George Henry Thomas, George Armstrong Custer, John Bell, William Seward, Winfield Scott, James Buchanan, and, to a certain extent, even Abraham Lincoln.

Lincoln, for example, although he opposed the Crittenden Compromise, supported compromise measures that were not drastically different from the end results proposed by Crittenden. Early Lincoln biographers were willing to acknowledge and discuss the fact that Lincoln even offered to allow the New Mexico Territory to be open to slavery and was willing to guarantee via a constitutional amendment that slavery would not be disturbed where it already existed.

Nearly all Northern conservatives supported the Crittenden Compromise, as did most Southern moderates and conservatives (as opposed to the Southern Fire-Eaters, who were the Southern version of the Radical Republicans in their tendency to take extreme positions and to refuse to compromise).

Northern conservatives, including William Seward and Winfield Scott, supported evacuating Fort Sumter to avoid an armed collision there, but some other Northern conservatives believed that the government should insist on maintaining control of Fort Sumter.

Once the war started, many Northern conservatives, including John Crittenden and Stephen Douglas, strongly supported the use of force to restore the Union. However, they also wanted to bring the war to a speedy end and to readmit the Southern states as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Many, if not the majority of, Northern conservatives opposed the shutting down of hundreds of Northern newspapers, the jailing of Northern newspaper editors, and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus.

If you're wondering if there are any authors who have expounded the Northern conservative position, there have been many over the years (although not many in the last 20-30 years), chief among them being J.G. Randall. Other scholars who have extensively discussed and/or defended this position include William Cooper, Albert Kirwan, John Ford Rhodes, Otto Eisenschiml, David Donald, and (to a limited extent) Michael Holt.
Thanks for bringing up this topic. Knowing myself, I think I would have been a Northern Conservative myself, supporting the war (somewhat reluctantly) for the preservation of the Union but ambivalent about whether or not the extinction of slavery should be tied up with that. I think that is why the then position of Northern conservatives has not been adequately studied, as for many, it is the extinction of slavery as much as, if not more, than the preservation of the Union that has become the focus of academic studies. I can tell you that in the last few years of my high school teaching the war itself, the fighting of it, was consistently being downplayed in the state curriculum as social matters more and more were emphasized. I sometimes got the impression that the only reason the battle of Gettysburg was considered important was because it provided a rationale for the Gettysburg Address.
 
In his first inaugural address Lincoln endorsed the Corwin Amendment, which would have protected slavery permanently, making it immune from Congressional legislation and constitutional amendments.
I knew that lincoln had supported this but I did not know he had endorsed it in his inaugural address. Did any of the seceded states reply to this offer?
 
Two more points:

* Another scholarly source on the Northern conservative position and on the Radicals' sabotage of compromise efforts is
George Milton's research, especially chapters 31 and 32 of his book On the Eve of Conflict: Stephen A. Douglas and the Needless War, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1934, pp. 518-551). Milton, by the way, wrote approvingly of Lincoln in most cases (e.g., his book Abraham Lincoln and the Fifth Column).

* A strong indication that the Crittenden Compromise would have received solid support in the North and in the Border States is the 1864 presidential election. When I began to study the Civil War, I assumed that Lincoln had won re-election by a massive landslide, that he had gotten at least 65% of the popular vote, given the fact that the vast majority of Southern citizens did not vote in the election and that by October 1864 it appeared very likely that the Union would eventually win the war. In fact, I was surprised that anyone had even run against Lincoln in that election.

I was stunned to discover that George McClellan not only got 45% of the popular vote but that he came within 1.1% of winning New York and within 3.3% of winning Pennsylvania, the two most populated states in the Union, and that he did so in spite of numerous reported cases of voter fraud, and in spite of the unethical measures that Stanton and the War Department took to discourage Democratic soldiers from voting (see, for example, https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/how-lincoln-won-the-soldier-vote/?_r=0).

McClellan had a Peace Democrat as his running mate (George Pendleton) and the Democratic Party’s platform called for a ceasefire. Even though McClellan repudiated that plank of the platform, everyone knew that McClellan disapproved of the scorched-earth tactics that Sherman and Sheridan were using and that with McClellan there would be a genuine chance of ending the war on generous terms that would allow the Southern states back into the Union with all their previous rights as states intact.

If 45% of voters in the Union states voted for McClellan in 1864, even when an eventual Union victory appeared very probable, it should come as no surprise that there is so much evidence that the Crittenden Compromise would have won by a solid majority of all Americans if the Republicans had allowed the people to vote on it.
Interesting to speculate on the outcome of a McClellan presidency. Lincoln might have pressured Grant and Sherman to speed up the final assault on the Confederacy before McClellan's inauguration but also it is possible that the Southern leadership could have persuaded Jeff Davis to take any offer at reconciliation rather than fight it out in the last ditch. I cannot see McClellan throwing away four years of Northern sacrifice to end the war with Southern independence, not after Sherman had gutted Georgia and the Carolinas and Grant had boxed in Lee defending Petersburg and Richmond. Still, almost anything could have happened in the last few months of the war that would have changed everything. Few Americans realize how close, just before Yorktown, the Patriot effort was close to collapsing. A Lincoln loss and a McClellan victory? Roll the dice on that one.
 
The alternative of compromise and peace became vastly harder after the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter.

A stronger, wiser statesman would have considered all the facts about the attack and would have decided against using the attack as a reason for starting a war. Regardless of how many shells were fired, the fact was--and still is--that not a single federal soldier died in the attack, and the garrison was allowed to surrender with full military honors and to return to the North. Perhaps a big reason no soldiers were killed is (1) that the Confederates told them when the attack would begin, and (2) that the Confederates temporarily ceased fire when the blaze on the fort appeared to be getting out of control and even offered to help put it out.

Someone made the point in another thread that it was contradictory and implausible for Davis to profess his desire for peace after the attack. Yes, surely Davis's public call for peaceful relations seemed ludicrous to many after he had just ordered an attack on a fort to keep its soldiers from receiving food. But, calmer and wiser heads would have understood that Davis was glad that no federal soldiers had been killed, that he had nothing against the soldiers themselves and realized they were merely following orders, that the fort should have been evacuated weeks earlier, and that Davis did not want war with the U.S. but wanted peaceful relations and full trade relations. Some voices in the North did speak out against using the attack as an excuse for war, but they were in the minority.

It would have taken a very strong, courageous U.S. president to resist the pressure to use force in response to the attack. I think John Adams could have done it, given how he resisted the intense pressure to go to war with France after the XYZ Affair and after the French had seized some American ships.

I like to believe that if Lincoln had thought there was a decent chance that the war would last for four years and would result in so much death and destruction, or that if he had felt certain this would be the case, that he would have responded differently after the attack and would not have been so quick to abandon peace.
The Union....I can't say policy, since it was more like a lack of policy until Lincoln took office, was to do absolutely nothing about secession. And that "peaceful" policy made things, from the Union point of view, worse and worse. Being forebearing and avoiding conflict is exactly what the federal government had been doing. And what was the result? Appeasement and continual surrender is not a winning formula, unless you're working for the other side. The "conservative Northern" position seems identical to the Southern secessionist position.

I'd like to believe that is Jefferson Davis had a glimpse of the ruin he was leading his slave holders into, he would have pulled on the reins. But he never showed the slightest sense that instigating a major war to create his slaveholders' utopia was either immoral or stupid, before, during or after the war.
 
The only conference that would have avoided war and preserved the Union would be if Lincoln had summoned Davis, Toombs, Stephens and the rest of the brain trust, and then shot each one of them in the face. In 1844. It would have saved an untold number of lives.
 
We are rehashing the same old ground hog. We will always be in this endless incessant spin cycle because there is a small radical grow of activist seeking to reverse the out come of history.
The only right thing Buchanan did was to not recognize the CSA as a legitimate government.
To negotiate with the South would mean recognizing the CSA as a legitimate nation instead of what it really was, a regional rebellion.
There remains a few hard core self appointed supporters of the institutions of the Antebellum South.
Mules with blinders.
 
Thanks for bringing up this topic. Knowing myself, I think I would have been a Northern Conservative myself, supporting the war (somewhat reluctantly) for the preservation of the Union but ambivalent about whether or not the extinction of slavery should be tied up with that. I think that is why the then position of Northern conservatives has not been adequately studied, as for many, it is the extinction of slavery as much as, if not more, than the preservation of the Union that has become the focus of academic studies. I can tell you that in the last few years of my high school teaching the war itself, the fighting of it, was consistently being downplayed in the state curriculum as social matters more and more were emphasized. I sometimes got the impression that the only reason the battle of Gettysburg was considered important was because it provided a rationale for the Gettysburg Address.

Many of the Northern conservatives were willing to support emancipation after the war had dragged into late-1863 and after the Union Border States had stubbornly rejected Lincoln's offers of gradual compensated emancipation.
 
Many of the Northern conservatives were willing to support emancipation after the war had dragged into late-1863 and after the Union Border States had stubbornly rejected Lincoln's offers of gradual compensated emancipation.[/QU
True enough. But of those Northern Conservatives who came around to support the extinction of slavery. I believe it was not so much to help the slave as to hurt the Confederacy. For them, destroying slavery was a war measure to destroy secession and nothing more.
 
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