Several of the Northern States had “Personal Liberty Laws” expressly devised to impede the execution of the Federal law of 1850 as to fugitive slaves.  Some attention was devoted to these, especially by Alexander Stephens, who, as the Southern leader most opposed to immediate secession, wished to direct men’s minds to a grievance that could be remedied.  Lincoln, who had always said that, though the Fugitive Slave Law should be made just and seemly, it ought in substance to be enforced, made clear again that he thought such “Personal Liberty Laws” should be amended, though he protested that it was not for him as President-elect to advise the State Legislatures on their own business.  The Republicans generally agreed.  Some of the States concerned actually began amending their laws.  Thus, if the disquiet of the South had depended on this grievance, the cause of disquiet would no doubt have been removed.  Again the Republican leaders, including Lincoln in particular, let there be no ground for thinking that an attack was intended upon slavery in the States where it was established; they offered eventually to give the most solemn pledge possible in this matter by passing an Amendment of the Constitution declaring that it should never be altered so as to take away the independence of the existing slave States as to this portion of their democratic institutions.  Lincoln indeed refused on several occasions to make any fresh public disclaimer of an intention to attack existing institutions.  His views were “open to all who will read.”  “For the good men in the South,” he writes privately, “—­I regard the majority of them as such—­I have no objection to repeat them seventy times seven.  But I have bad men to deal with both North and South; men who are eager for something new upon which to base new misrepresentations; men who would like to frighten me, or at least fix upon me the character of timidity and cowardice.”  Nevertheless he endeavoured constantly in private correspondence to narrow and define the issue, which, as he insisted, concerned only the territorial extension of slavery.

The most serious of the negotiations that took place, and to which most hope was attached, consisted in the deliberations of a committee of thirteen appointed by the Senate in December, 1860, which took for its guidance a detailed scheme of compromise put forward by Senator Crittenden, of Kentucky.  The efforts of this committee to come to an agreement broke down at the outset upon the question of the Territories, and the responsibility, for good or for evil, of bringing them to an end must probably be attributed to the advice of Lincoln.  Crittenden’s first proposal was that there should be a Constitutional Amendment declaring that slavery should be prohibited “in all the territory of the United States, now held or hereafter acquired, north of latitude 36 degrees 30 minutes”—­(the limit fixed in the Missouri Compromise, but restricted then to the Louisiana purchase)—­while in all territory,