Not yet had Lincoln attained a true appreciation of the real difficulty before him.  He had not got rid of the idea that a dispute over slavery had widened accidentally into a needless sectional quarrel, and that as soon as the South had time to think things over, it would see that it did not really want the quarrel.  He had a queer idea that meanwhile he could hold a few points on the margin of the Seceded States, open custom houses on ships at the mouths of harbors, but leave vacant all Federal appointments within the Seceded States and ignore the absence of their representatives from Washington.(14) This marginal policy did not seem to him a policy of coercion; and though he was beginning to see that the situation from the Southern point of view turned on the right of a State to resist coercion, he was yet to learn that idealistic elements of emotion and of political dogma were the larger part of his difficulty.

Meanwhile, the upper South had been proclaiming its idealism.  Its attitude was creating a problem for the lower South as well as for the North.  The pro-slavery leaders had been startled out of a dream.  The belief in a Southern economic solidarity so complete that the secession of any one Slave State would compel the secession of all the others, that belief had been proved fallacious.  It had been made plain that on the economic issue, even as on the issue of sectional distrust, the upper South would not follow the lower South into secession.  When delegates from the Georgia Secessionists visited the legislature of North Carolina, every courtesy was shown to them; the Speaker of the House assured them of North Carolina’s sympathy and of her enduring friendliness; but he was careful not to suggest an intention to secede, unless (the condition that was destiny!) an attempt should be made to violate the sovereignty of the State by marching troops across her soil to attack the Confederates.  Then, on the one issue of State sovereignty, North Carolina would leave the Union.(15) The Unionists in Virginia took similar ground.  They wished to stay in the Union, and they were determined not to go out on the issue of slavery.  Therefore they laid their heads together to get that issue out of the way.  Their problem was to devise a compromise that would do three things:  lay the Southern dread of an inundation of sectional Northern influence; silence the slave profiteers; meet the objections that had induced Lincoln to wreck the Crittenden Compromise.  They felt that the first and second objectives would be reached easily enough by reviving the line of the Missouri Compromise.  But something more was needed, or again, Lincoln would refuse to negotiate.  They met their crucial difficulty by boldly appealing to the South to be satisfied with the conservation of its present life and renounce the dream of unlimited Southern expansion.  Their Compromise proposed a death blow to the filibuster and all he stood for.  It provided that no new territory other than naval stations should be acquired by the United States on either side the Missouri Line without consent of a majority of the Senators from the States on the opposite side of that line.(16)