Naturally, as the crisis developed, there were many efforts at still another great compromise.  Among the friends of the outgoing President, Buchanan, whose term of office would not expire until March 4, 1861, there were still some Southern leaders, like Jefferson Davis, seeking either a complete surrender to Southern will, or advantages for Southern security in case secession was accomplished.  Buchanan appealed hysterically to the old-time love of the Union and to the spirit of compromise.  Great congressional committees of both Senate and House of Representatives were formed seeking a solution.  Crittenden for the border states between North and South, where, more than anywhere else, there was division of opinion, proposed pledges to be given to the South.  Seward, long-time champion of the anti-slavery North, was active in the Senate in suggestion and intrigue seemingly intended to conciliate by concessions.  Charles Francis Adams, early a Free Soiler, in the House of Representatives Committee conducted his Republican colleagues along a path apparently leading to a guarantee of slavery as then established[62].  A constitutional amendment was drafted to this effect and received Lincoln’s preliminary approval.  Finally Lincoln, in his inaugural address, March 4, 1861, declared: 

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.  I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

It should be no matter for surprise, therefore, that, as these efforts were observed in Great Britain, a note of uncertainty began to replace the earlier unanimity of opinion that the future of slavery was at stake in America.  This offered an easy excuse for a switch-about of sympathy as British commercial and other interests began to be developed, and even dismayed the ardent friends of the anti-slavery North.  Meanwhile the Government of Great Britain, from the very first appearance of the cloud of civil war, had focused its attention on the point of what the events in America portended to British interests and policy.  This is the business of governments, and their agents would be condemned as inefficient did they neglect it.  But did British governmental policy go beyond this entirely justifiable first thought for immediate British interests to the point of positive hope that England would find an advantage in the breaking up of the great American Republic?  American opinion, both then and later, believed Great Britain guilty of this offence, but such criticism was tinged with the passions of the Civil War.  Yet a more impartial critic, though possibly an unfriendly one because of his official position, made emphatic declaration to like effect.  On January 1, 1861, Baron de Brunow, Russian Ambassador at London, reported to St. Petersburg that, “the English Government, at the bottom of its heart, desires the separation of North America into two republics, which will watch each other jealously and counterbalance one the other.  Then England, on terms of peace and commerce with both, would have nothing to fear from either; for she would dominate them, restraining them by their rival ambitions[63].”