Crittenden Compromise

• 1. Introduction

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  The Crittenden Compromise was a proposal that, if it had passed, would have made slavery a permanent feature of the United States Constitution. Introduced by Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky on the 18th of December 1860, it arrived in the final, desperate weeks before the country fractured into civil war. What makes the Crittenden Compromise so striking is not just what it proposed, but how far it was willing to go to protect slavery from any future political challenge. It did not merely permit slavery. It sought to place slavery beyond the reach of any future congress, any future generation. And it very nearly succeeded.

  Who was the man behind it, and what exactly did he propose? What did Lincoln have to do with its defeat, and why did even its collapse fail to stop the war? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. A Nation on the Edge

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  By late 1860, the United States was in the grip of a secession crisis. Southern states, alarmed by the election of Abraham Lincoln, were moving toward leaving the Union. Senator Crittenden, a Constitutional Unionist from Kentucky, believed a sweeping constitutional bargain could pull the country back from the brink.

  The Crittenden package consisted of six constitutional amendments and four congressional resolutions. At its core was a plan to revive the old Missouri Compromise line, which had drawn slavery's boundary at 36 degrees 30 minutes latitude. That line had been effectively erased by the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, then struck down entirely by the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision in 1857. Crittenden wanted to restore it, extend it westward across new territories, and lock it into the Constitution permanently.

  The proposal also guaranteed slavery's continued existence in the slave states, protected the interstate slave trade from congressional interference, and required the federal government to compensate slaveholders whose escaped people were rescued by others. One clause went further still: it declared that none of these amendments could themselves be repealed or amended by future generations.

• 3. Lincoln's Quiet Opposition

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  President-elect Abraham Lincoln publicly opposed the Crittenden Compromise on the grounds that he would not accept any policy permitting slavery to expand beyond the states where it already existed. His opposition was described as crucial by Republicans who rejected the plan.

  The Republicans who voted against it put their objections in stark terms. The compromise, they said, would amount to what they called "a perpetual covenant of war against every people, tribe, and state owning a foot of land between here and Tierra del Fuego." That language pointed to something the New York Times had already raised: that protecting slavery in all future southern territories would cover not just what the United States held, but everything it might ever acquire, including what the paper described as "the whole of Mexico and Central America."

  Yet behind the scenes, Lincoln's position was more complicated. The source records that while he publicly opposed the measure, he secretly encouraged it. What that contradiction meant for his strategy in those final weeks before taking office remains a striking detail of the record.

• 4. What the South Wanted

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  The compromise addressed a specific set of Southern fears, and it did so in granular detail. Congress would be forbidden to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia for as long as slavery existed in the neighboring states of Virginia and Maryland. Even if abolition were eventually pursued in the District, owners who withheld consent would be compensated.

  South of the Missouri Compromise line, slavery of the African race was explicitly "hereby recognized" by the proposed amendment's own language, and Congress was barred from interfering with it. Property in enslaved people was to be protected by all departments of territorial government. The provision covering fugitive slaves was equally detailed: Congress would compensate owners in full for people who escaped and were not returned, and could then sue the county where obstruction had occurred to recover that payment. The county, in turn, could pursue the individuals who had prevented the return.

  One of the congressional resolutions declared that so-called Personal Liberty Laws, state statutes that made it harder to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act, were unconstitutional and should be repealed. Another resolution called for stricter enforcement of laws against the African slave trade. The detail of these proposals reveals how precisely the compromise mapped Southern grievances, one by one.

• 5. The Geography of Compromise

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  Both sides understood that the actual territory at stake was limited. The only lands south of the 36-30 line that were not yet states were parts of the New Mexico Territory and the Indian Territory. There was, the source notes, considerable understanding on both sides that slavery would never practically take hold in New Mexico, largely because of its climate.

  Southern members of the Senate rejected a House Republican proposal, approved by committee on the 29th of December, to simply admit New Mexico as a state immediately. That would have resolved the territorial question without extending the slavery guarantee. The South's refusal made clear that the fight was not really about New Mexico. It was about the principle of the line itself, and about the future territories the United States might yet acquire.

  Not every opponent of the compromise also opposed American territorial expansion. The New York Times framed the stakes as covering the entire future growth of the republic, pointing toward Mexico and Central America as lands the country might one day absorb. In that light, locking slavery into all future southern acquisitions was not a minor concession. It was a guarantee that could span continents.

• 6. Defeat and Its Aftermath

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  Both the House of Representatives and the Senate rejected the Crittenden proposal. The vote was only one piece of a series of last-ditch efforts to reassure Southern states before the Lincoln administration took office. None of those efforts succeeded.

  In February 1861, the proposals came before the Peace Conference of 1861, a gathering of more than a hundred of the nation's leading politicians held from the 8th through the 27th of February in Washington, D.C. Former President John Tyler led the conference, which represented the final formal attempt by the states to avert war. There too, the provision guaranteeing slave ownership across all western territories and future acquisitions proved too much for opponents to accept, and the compromise failed again.

  A February 1861 editorial in the Charleston Courier of Charleston, Missouri, captured the mood in Southern-leaning border communities. Editor George Whitcomb wrote that men in Washington saw no chance for peace, and that the Crittenden resolutions had been "voted down again and again." His editorial asked whether any other proposition existed that the South could accept, and warned that if not, "there comes war." That editorial appeared in response to a letter from US Representative John William Noell, whose district included Charleston, and who had written to excoriate disunion. The exchange between Whitcomb and Noell stood for a wider fracture that no constitutional bargain had been able to close.

• 7. An Alternate History

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  The Crittenden Compromise lived on in the imagination of later writers. The 2016 novel Underground Airlines, written by Ben Winters, is set in an alternate history where the compromise was accepted after the assassination of President-elect Abraham Lincoln. In that fictional United States, slavery had survived into the twenty-first century, retained by four states that the novel calls the Hard Four: Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

  Winters's premise depends on the historical detail that Lincoln's opposition was described as crucial to the compromise's defeat. Remove Lincoln from the picture, and the novel asks: would the guarantees Crittenden built into the Constitution have held? The irony embedded in that question is real. The amendment Crittenden proposed included a clause explicitly preventing any future amendment from reversing it. Whether such a clause could have been legally binding is something constitutional scholars have debated, but the intent was clear: to make the compromise impossible to undo by ordinary political means.