In the period between Lincoln's election in November and
his inauguration in March, the Union disintegrated. On November
9, three short days after Lincoln's election, a secession convention
was called in South Carolina. Although no definitive action was
taken, South Carolina's senators resigned from Congress the next
day. In the following weeks, several southern states would consider
seriously the possibility of leaving the union.
In December, President Buchanan made his final address
to Congress. As a lame duck, Buchanan took a characteristically
pasty stance, calling secession illegal but also failing to recognize
the Federal government's capacity to prevent such action. With
his administration winding down and sectional conflict heating
up, Buchanan began to lose the members of his cabinet one by one.
On December 8, Secretary of Treasury Howell Cobb of Georgia presented
his resignation, indicating his view that secession was a necessary
step for the southern states. Less than a week later, Secretary of
State Lewis Cass of Michigan would also resign, but for very different
reasons, feeling that Buchanan was not taking a strong enough stand
against the threat of secession.
Finally, on December 20, 1860, against the best efforts
of President Buchanan to the contrary, South Carolina officially
seceded from the Union. As the home state of the late John C.
Calhoun, champion of nullification, South Carolina had tested the
constitutional basis of union before, but it had never stepped
quite this far into the unknown. Implausible and unlikely as it
might have seemed, the United States had become two nations.
In a last desperate attempt to preserve what remained
of the Union, and to bring South Carolina back into the fold, Senator John
J. Crittenden of Kentucky attempted to follow in the steps of his
fellow statesman Clay with a compromise that would be amenable
to all sides. His proposal provided for the restoration of the boundary
drawn under the Missouri Compromise, an even stricter fugitive
slave law, federal compensation for owners of runaway slaves, and
territorial entry into the Union on the basis of popular sovereignty.
In addition, a congressional proviso would prevent the Constitution
from being amended in such as to prohibit slavery in states where
it already existed.
The Crittenden Compromise enjoyed considerable support,
but in the end it was Lincoln who rejected it as untenable. Satisfied though
he was with the idea of guaranteeing the right of slavery in states
where it existed, Lincoln insisted that the government could "entertain
no proposition for a compromise in regard to the extension of slavery."
Crittenden would suffer as much as any in this final failure to
reach middle ground: one of his sons remained with the Union in
the Civil War while the other defected to the Confederacy.
With an insurgent state government in his midst, President Buchanan
was faced with a crisis in the closing days of his administration.
In attempt to cut their losses in truant South Carolina, federal
agents had bolstered their position at Fort Sumter in Charleston
Harbor on December 26. Reasserting independence from the federal
government, South Carolina demanded a total evacuation of the harbor.
Buchanan refused to comply, and sent a ship full of reinforcements
and supplies down to Charleston a few days later. With this act,
Buchanan lost the remainder of his cabinet, which had been liquidated
completely in less than a month.
