The Crittenden Compromise was the creation of John J. Crittenden, Moderate Democrat and Slaveholder, Authors the Plan “Now, in the wake of Lincoln’s election, the nation’s only hope was to stitch together yet another new compromise, by which to continue sheltering both freedom and bondage beneath the same threadbare tent.”īetween Lincoln’s election and the start of the Civil War when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, there were three major attempts to avert secession and Civil War: the Crittenden Compromise, the Washington Peace Convention and Corwin’s Amendment. “The word meant a nation united by compromise, preserved through the careful balancing of Southern interests and Northern ones, of slavery and freedom,” wrote Adam Goodheart in 1861: The Civil War Awakening. Some lawmakers saw the prospect of another compromise as the nation's best bet for survival. Slavery and states' rights had been at the center of the election, and Lincoln had vowed during his campaign to not restrict slavery where it already existed, but to limit its expansion to the western territories.Ī series of concessions to the slaveholding southern states, from the Missouri Compromise in 1820 to the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, had helped manage sectional crisis and hold the Union together. Following Abraham Lincoln’s victory in the 1860 presidential election, 11 southern states seceded from the Union.
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