How long can the Crittenden Compromise feasibly last?

On December 18th, 1860, John J Crittenden introduced a packaged proposal, consisting of six constitutional amendments and four Congressional resolutions, to the United States Senate, which would become known as the Crittenden Compromise. This compromise, proposed before Abraham Lincoln took office as President of the United States, was part of a last ditch effort to prevent the secession of the Southern states.

In full, the amendments were as follows-

  1. Slavery would be prohibited in any territory of the United States "now held, or hereafter acquired," north of latitude 36 degrees, 30 minute line. In territories south of this line, slavery of the African race was "hereby recognized" and could not be interfered with by Congress. Furthermore, property in African slaves was to be "protected by all the departments of the territorial government during its continuance." States would be admitted to the Union from any territory with or without slavery as their constitutions provided.
  2. Congress was forbidden to abolish slavery in places under its jurisdiction within a slave state such as a military post.
  3. Congress could not abolish slavery in the District of Columbia so long as it existed in the adjoining states of Virginia and Maryland and without the consent of the District's inhabitants. Compensation would be given to owners who refused consent to abolition.
  4. Congress could not prohibit or interfere with the interstate slave trade.
  5. Congress would provide full compensation to owners of rescued fugitive slaves. Congress was empowered to sue the county in which obstruction to the fugitive slave laws took place to recover payment; the county, in turn, could sue "the wrong doers or rescuers" who prevented the return of the fugitive.
  6. No future amendment of the Constitution could change these amendments or authorize or empower Congress to interfere with slavery within any slave state

And the resolutions were as follows:

  1. That fugitive slave laws were constitutional and should be faithfully observed and executed.
  2. That all state laws which impeded the operation of fugitive slave laws, the so-called "Personal Liberty Laws," were unconstitutional and should be repealed.
  3. That the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 should be amended (and rendered less objectionable to the North) by equalizing the fee schedule for returning or releasing alleged fugitives and limiting the powers of marshals to summon citizens to aid in their capture.
  4. That laws for the suppression of the African slave trade should be effectively and thoroughly executed.

The compromise was rejected by the United States Senate and the House of Representatives.

This compromise was clearly intended to be a permanent and final solution to the question of slavery within the United States with it literally written into the compromise that upon approval, this compromise was permanently going to be part of American law for all time.

But of course, as we know, even during the 1860s, slavery was on it's way out, with Brazil being the final country to outlaw the practice in 1880 in our timeline. The Compromise was going to fall apart sometime.

So, feasibly, how long could the Crittenden Compromise have lasted had it been approvd?
 
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But of course, as we know, even during the 1860s, slavery was on it's way out, with Brazil being the final country to outlaw the practice in 1880 in our timeline.

If racism can survive, I don't see why slavery couldn't as long as USA becomes more powerful than Britain. Slavery survived the rise and fall of the Romans, and while by the 1860s its likely on its way out in America, I don't see it being 100% guarantee. Some people will just be dicks and if there are enough of them, by democracy their will is the law.

Besides, getting rid of slavery is a thorny issue America's history. The direct solution would be immediate emancipation. But that would involve punishing people who never broke the law. Compensated emancipation was done in Britain, and the concept was rejected several times in America in the committee (not coming to a vote) because Congress didn't want to spend money for the welfare of blacks (and... the various conceptual proposals likely would be blocked by SCOTUS if they did pass but didn't have state consent). Unlike Barbados and Jamaica, a lot of free whites didn't want to live near free blacks, but they also didn't want blacks grabbing prime real estate expropriated from the Indians. So there are two problems with the Britain route. There was a serious proposal by Lincoln when he was an Illinois legislator to have a 30 year period where all the slaves were relocated to Africa. This runs into the compensation problem that Congress doesn't want to touch. The cost of shipping 9 million people across the Atlantic is probably cheaper than blockading the Gulf States for 4 years.

The OTL solution is to have a revolt. Since the South obviously voted for the secessionists, the voters themselves were no longer people who never broke the law. Like horses or cows, slaves could be seized as contraband. One Emancipation Proclamation later, and all that's needed is to win a war that is 100% unwinnable for the South.
 
But of course, as we know, even during the 1860s, slavery was on it's way out, with Brazil being the final country to outlaw the practice in 1880 in our timeline. The Compromise was going to fall apart sometime.
We know nothing of the sort. Slavery in the USA was going from strength to strength. Slaveowners were making money hand over fist. Slavery was entrenched in 15 states, with only two of those states even possibly going to remove slavery in the foreseeable future (Delaware and Missouri), and neither of those being very likely.

The crucial differences with Brazil (1888, not 1880, by the way), which cannot be emphasised enough:
(i) Brazil had an emperor who could abolish slavery by fiat (though doing so cost him his throne); and
(ii) In the USA, the slave population was growing by natural increase. In Brazil, in contrast, the slave population declined through natural decrease and was not sustainable once slave imports were stopped.

So, feasibly, how long could the Crittenden Compromise have lasted had it been approvd?
More information is needed about how the Crittenden Compromise gets passed in the first place. It was extremely unpalatable in OTL, so we need to know what changed first to make it acceptable before working out how long that change might last.
 

Deleted member 94708

To call it a compromise seems a stretch; for free-soilers it would be difficult to stomach, while abolitionists would find it intolerable. Given the increasing preponderance of the Northern states in population and industry and theit increasing alienation from the institutions of the Southern states, I simply can’t see how it would be passed in the first place.

If it somehow were, I can’t see it outlasting the decade.

I must disagree with @Jared; while there was no demographic or economic obstacle to slavery’s continued survival in the United States, there were very strong political/moral reasons why it was going to end, most likely at bayonet-point. Its continued existence was becoming intolerable to Northerners who saw it as a threat to their own livelihoods and privileges, as well as a sizable minority who felt it morally unacceptable.
 
I must disagree with @Jared; while there was no demographic or economic obstacle to slavery’s continued survival in the United States, there were very strong political/moral reasons why it was going to end, most likely at bayonet-point. Its continued existence was becoming intolerable to Northerners who saw it as a threat to their own livelihoods and privileges, as well as a sizable minority who felt it morally unacceptable.
The proportion of Northerners who wanted to end slavery within existing states was a relatively small minority - though the application of the fugitive slave laws makes this more of a concern. The more significant issue was the extension of slavery to the territories, which did get a lot of Northerners concerned.

The abolotionist support was mostly - though not exclusively - in the Northeast. The exclusion of slavery sentiment was stronger in the Midwest, and included many who wanted to keep out all black Americans, whether slave or free.

These two factions made common cause, but they were not necessarily permanent allies. More importantly, it was widely accepted that no-one had the constitutional power to end slavery in existing states without their consent.

If the Crittenden Compromise had gone through, then the slavery in the territories issue is resolved. This undercuts much of the Northern interest in stopping slavery. The fugitive slave issue is also reduced as a bone of contention.

In these circumstances, no, I don't see a Northern effort to forcibly end slavery any time soon.
 
The Crittenden Compromise was, in fact, not a compromise. It gave the slave states pretty much everything they wanted, it in fact opened new territories to slavery compared to previous deals, it quashed the "personal liberty" laws of the free states, made the fugitive slave law more onerous (the taking away of the right to summon citizen was pointless, it was rarely if ever useful). It fundamentally altered the constitutional process by making the amendment eternal. I won't go in to the economics of slavery, merely to opine that evidence seems to show that large scale agricultural slavery was unlikely in the new western states/territories, that industrial slavery, to compete with free labor industry, was not as efficient/profitable as the free labor. One reason there was a movement of slaves from the upper south to the deep south was that the profitability of slave enterprises in the upper south was decreasing and the now unprofitable property was being sold south.

A key poison pill in this is that even in non-slave states slaves could not be freed by personal liberty laws. If someone brings a slave in to a free state, that person remains a slave. If I move from a slave state to a free state with a large number of slaves, they remain my property in perpetuity. In essence, this means slavery is functionally universal.

While the "African" slave trade is suppressed, this says nothing about the importation of slaves from elsewhere - say Cuba or Brazil.

This had zero chance of being passed with a constitutional amendment even had it gotten through the Congress. Had Skippy the ASB waved his magic bat wing, I doubt this would have been the permanent solution the south thought it would be. The only states that would have been affected by the slave line were Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico - California was already in as a free state. None of these states to be were going to be admitted in the next few decades (1907-1912 for these three OTL). In the house of Representatives, even with the 3/5 rule the slave states were quite outnumbered by the free states, and this was accelerating. In the Senate, the salve states were outnumbered and as new free states were admitted this would bulge a great deal. The lid was going to come off sooner or later, as there were other issues besides slavery that were dividng the country, although slavery was the biggest.
 
If racism can survive, I don't see why slavery couldn't as long as USA becomes more powerful than Britain. Slavery survived the rise and fall of the Romans, and while by the 1860s its likely on its way out in America, I don't see it being 100% guarantee. Some people will just be dicks and if there are enough of them, by democracy their will is the law.

Besides, getting rid of slavery is a thorny issue America's history. The direct solution would be immediate emancipation. But that would involve punishing people who never broke the law. Compensated emancipation was done in Britain, and the concept was rejected several times in America in the committee (not coming to a vote) because Congress didn't want to spend money for the welfare of blacks (and... the various conceptual proposals likely would be blocked by SCOTUS if they did pass but didn't have state consent). Unlike Barbados and Jamaica, a lot of free whites didn't want to live near free blacks, but they also didn't want blacks grabbing prime real estate expropriated from the Indians. So there are two problems with the Britain route. There was a serious proposal by Lincoln when he was an Illinois legislator to have a 30 year period where all the slaves were relocated to Africa. This runs into the compensation problem that Congress doesn't want to touch. The cost of shipping 9 million people across the Atlantic is probably cheaper than blockading the Gulf States for 4 years.

The OTL solution is to have a revolt. Since the South obviously voted for the secessionists, the voters themselves were no longer people who never broke the law. Like horses or cows, slaves could be seized as contraband. One Emancipation Proclamation later, and all that's needed is to win a war that is 100% unwinnable for the South.

The problem with Compensated Emancipation is the staggering cost. The Average cost at Auction for a Slave was over $700. And there were over 3 Million Slaves in 1860. It could easily come to near 3 BILLION USD, which is more than the Union's total military expenditure for 1861-65, appox $2.4 Billion.
(There are several AH's that seem to hand-wave this)
 

Anaxagoras

Banned
Can any provision in the Constitution be secured against future amendment, though? I know that in the original Constitution, Article VI says that even a future amendment cannot take away the equal representation of the states in the Senate, but how is this possible? An amendment could simply have an initial clause stating that the protection against amendment is repealed, with the second clause stating that the provision itself is repealed.
 
I don't think any amendment is unamenable and a constitutional convention can definitely trump any amendment and at some point the free states will be able to trigger one of those.
 
I don't think any amendment is unamenable and a constitutional convention can definitely trump any amendment and at some point the free states will be able to trigger one of those.

But that basically leads us back to square 1. Direct emancipation punishes people who never broke the law, most poor whites in the south didn't want to live next to free blacks, most Americans didn't want blacks settling the Indian lands, and Congress refuses compensated emancipation. Any amendment might fix "slavery exists" but it doesn't fix any of those problems.
 
Yeah the big difference between the various European* powers compensated emancipation and the US is the ex slaves were a long way away and the amounts were proportionally smaller. By 1750 slavery in the Thirteen Colonies was on such a scale that it couldn't be ended easily under pretty much any scenario including a persisting British North America.



*(Dutch, Danes and others as well as Britain)
 
Yeah the big difference between the various European* powers compensated emancipation and the US is the ex slaves were a long way away and the amounts were proportionally smaller. By 1750 slavery in the Thirteen Colonies was on such a scale that it couldn't be ended easily under pretty much any scenario including a persisting British North America.

A BNA would make it easier.
 
The problem with Compensated Emancipation is the staggering cost. The Average cost at Auction for a Slave was over $700. And there were over 3 Million Slaves in 1860. It could easily come to near 3 BILLION USD, which is more than the Union's total military expenditure for 1861-65, appox $2.4 Billion.
(There are several AH's that seem to hand-wave this)

This. Very much this. And remember that this would have had to occur in an environment where both Federal spending and taxation were FAR lower and indirect than in post-war culture. It would require assembling a tax collecting machinery and intruding into people's lives on a scale nobody would accept for peacetime purposes, much less the crippling impact it would have on an economy without the compensating wartime industrial boom.
 
A BNA would make it easier.

Considering the UK economy was 25% larger than the US in 1860 it would still be a massive expenditure and I still think the southerners would fight. Not least because they have a remote chance, the planters in the Caribbean would have gone the way of Haiti if they tried to resist. While Confederate slavery didn't really break down until either Union troops arrived or the end of the war and that was because the White/Black population balance was so much more even, even in the Black Belt.
 

Deleted member 94708

The proportion of Northerners who wanted to end slavery within existing states was a relatively small minority - though the application of the fugitive slave laws makes this more of a concern. The more significant issue was the extension of slavery to the territories, which did get a lot of Northerners concerned.

The abolotionist support was mostly - though not exclusively - in the Northeast. The exclusion of slavery sentiment was stronger in the Midwest, and included many who wanted to keep out all black Americans, whether slave or free.

These two factions made common cause, but they were not necessarily permanent allies. More importantly, it was widely accepted that no-one had the constitutional power to end slavery in existing states without their consent.

If the Crittenden Compromise had gone through, then the slavery in the territories issue is resolved. This undercuts much of the Northern interest in stopping slavery. The fugitive slave issue is also reduced as a bone of contention.

In these circumstances, no, I don't see a Northern effort to forcibly end slavery any time soon.

I disagree; federal enforcement of any sort of fugitive slave law across the whole country would inevitably be viewed by both Northern abolitionists (who were admittedly a minority) and free-soilers (who were at least a plurality and more likely a majority) as a prelude to the extension of slaveholding rights across the whole US. After all, that’s what it logically was, as such a law would be just a step short of saying that slaves purchased in the South were still slaves even when in the North.

The likelihood of it being passed was, for that very reason, basically nil, but it would almost inevitably rupture within a decade at most even if it somehow were passed.
 
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