After Abraham Lincoln was elected United States President on a purely sectional vote in November of 1860, the Lower South States began moving towards secession. For the Fire-Eaters, the Southern nationalists who had long advocated Southern independence, Lincoln’s election was welcomed since they believed it would finally push Southern conservatives to break with the Union. In fact, some of the Fire-Eaters had worked to split up the Democratic Party (then the primary party of the South and free-traders and conservatives in the North) in order to assure Lincoln’s victory. Of course, secession was not welcomed by everyone in Dixie and especially in the Upper South and the Border States there were attempts to reach a compromise with the Federal Government and the Republican Party (then the primary party of New England and Northern radicals) that could prevent secession and hold the Union together. One of the famous compromise attempts was put forward by Kentucky Senator John Crittenden in December. Crittenden was a long-time Whig who had later supported the Know-Nothing Party and the Constitutional Union Party. Among other things, his compromise attempt, which came to be known as the Crittenden Compromise, would have perpetually ensured the legality of slavery and the fugitive slave laws while strictly enforcing the ban on the African slave trade and splitting up the Western territories between the North and South. This compromise was denounced in the New York Times and opposed not only by Northern Republicans but also by many Southern Democrats. Its backers were mainly Northern Democrats and Border State Unionists like Crittenden. The Fire-Eaters in particular, as described by author and Purdue University history professor Robert E May on pages 224-225 of his book The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire: 1854-1861, strongly opposed any compromise which would weaken the support for secession that had become dominant in much of the South after Lincoln’s election. Professor May (who, it should be noted, demonstrates an anti-Southern bias in his book) writes:
Louis Wigfall was one of the Fire-Eaters who strongly opposed any compromise which would prevent Southern independence
Certainly southern fire-eaters such as William Yancey of Alabama, Robert Rhett of South Carolina, Edmund Ruffin of Virginia, Albert Gallatin Brown of Mississippi, and Louis Wigfall of Texas – men who had long agitated for secession – had no use for Crittenden’s compromise. Ruffin, for instance, commented even before the Committee of Thirteen was established that he hoped none of the various compromise plans would be successful. A Florida newspaper declared: ‘We do not want Compromises. We do not want or intend to treat with Black Republicans and abolitionists, until we know that we are free and independent of them.” The influential Richmond Enquirer denounced the Crittenden proposal as involving ”the submission of Southern men, the subjection of Southern States.” The Enquirer maintained that since the North had not proven true to the original Constitution, there was no reason to expect that it would adhere to the Crittenden amendments if passed. Secessionist Governor Claibore Fox Jackson of Missouri claimed in his inaugural address that a congressional compromise would “postpone and aggravate the evil, and will utterly fail to reach the disease.” The Mississippi secession commissioner to the Virginia convention considering secession stated: “We ask no compromise and want none.” Such sentiments became stronger once the Confederacy was established. Former secretary of the treasury Howell Cobb of Georgia explained: “There is no compromise that the seceded States would accept. There is no single member of our Congress in favor of reconstruction [ie reunification with the North] upon any terms.”
Recent Comments