History of the United States I / Unit 15 USH1 2102 review, 2 to 3 minutes
The Crittenden Compromise
The idea
Senator John Crittenden of Kentucky proposed six constitutional amendments and resolutions before Lincoln took office, in the last serious attempt to prevent the war. He would have restored the line of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes and extended it to the Pacific, protecting slavery south of it and prohibiting slavery north of it. He would have barred Congress from abolishing slavery where it already existed, and barred Congress from interfering with the interstate slave trade. Republicans, Lincoln among them, rejected the proposal because it conflicted with keeping slavery out of the territories, which was the one commitment their party existed to make. Southern states rejected the same proposal because it would stop slaveholders taking enslaved people north of the line. The Senate rejected Crittenden's plan on January sixteenth, eighteen sixty-one, after four states had already left. South Carolina had seceded on December twentieth, eighteen sixty, and Mississippi, Florida and Alabama followed before the Senate vote.
In practice
The same compromise refused by both sides in the same month, each of them rejecting it for the exact reason the other would have accepted it.
Where people slip
This is the cleanest demonstration available that the dispute was no longer about where the line sat. A geographic compromise can be moved. Crittenden offered to move it all the way to the Pacific, which is a larger concession to slavery than anything Congress had granted since eighteen twenty, and the South still refused, because the line would have stopped slaveholders going north of it. The Republicans refused for the mirror-image reason. By eighteen sixty-one both sides wanted the whole territory or none of it, and a proposal that split the difference could satisfy neither.
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