What if: William Seward 16th President

Well, as the title suggests, what if Seward was elected president in the 1860 Election? How would he act as president while states are seceding?
 
The most important question is whether President-Elect Seward could have prevented secession by offering territorial concessions to the South. I discussed this in a soc.history.what-if post a few years ago:

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It is true that Seward seemed more conciliatory than Lincoln during the Secession Winter. This is primarily because he thought that the election of Lincoln had meant that the Slave Power had already been defeated. As he put it, "I implore you to remember that the battle for Freedom has been fought and won. Henceforth forget that Freedom ever was in danger, and exert your best influence now to save the Union." http://books.google.com/books?id=IjJCAAAAIAAJ&pg=PA31

James Oates concludes in his Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865, https://books.google.com/books?id=MaVp-YES1F0C&pg=PA66 that whatever he may have privately assured Upper South Unionists, at no time did Seward--in Senate speeches, in public statements or in private correspondence, hint at a willingness to allow slavery expansion by restoring the Missouri Compromise line and allowing slavery in territories to the south of that line.

And yet, in November Thurlow Weed did suggest extension of the Missouri Compromise line:

"But the earthquake that truly shook [Republican] party confidence came from an entirely unexpected quarter: Thurlow Weed, the undisputed ruler of the New York State organization and alter ego of Senator William H. Seward. On November 24 [,1860], Weed's Albany Evening Journal flouted Republican dogma by proposing not just a strengthening of the Fugitive Slave Law but also a re-extension of the old Missouri Compromise line . . .. Although it had been the Kansas-Nebraska Act's repeal of that line six years earlier that had led to the founding of the Republican coalition, from early on the party had rejected its reinstitution, insisting on nothing less than barring slavery from all federal territories. But now, Weed explained, the Republicans' accession to the White House marked the end of the controversy over slavery in the territories. There was no need to legislate against slavery in federal territories because the lands remaining would not support a slave-based economy anyway. The executive branch could easily keep slavery out through regulation; in the meantime reestablishing the line would assist the cause of union by granting a meaningless concession." http://books.google.com/books?
id=Qpx2PSrRexwC&pg=PA57


Would Weed really have floated a trial balloon like this without at least the tacit support of Seward? It is hard for me to believe. Anyway, the reaction from Republicans was so vehement that if Seward were ever tempted to call publicly for the restoration of the Missouri Compromise line, the response to Weed's editorial would be enough to dissuade him.

In any event, let's suppose that President-Elect Seward did call for restoration of the Missouri Compromise line. This would have fallen far short of secessionist demands. Senator Douglas was probably right in saying that the Crittenden Compromise if adopted speedily would have prevented the secession of every state but South Carolina. But the Crittenden Compromise--at least as Republicans saw it--went far beyond restoring the Missouri Compromise. The Missouri Compromise had simply dealt with the Louisiana Purchase territory and had merely said that slavery was prohibited north of the Compromise line; Crittenden's proposition insisted on not merely tolerance but positive federal protection for slavery everywhere south of that line (regardless of the wishes of the people of the territory), not only in existing territory but in any territory the US would hereafter acquire--which could mean anything from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego! Lyman Trumbull stated indignantly that "The proposition known as the 'Crittenden Proposition' is no more like the Missouri Compromise than is the Government of Turkey like that of the United States."
http://books.google.com/books?id=PaYBAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA131

So even if he wanted to, President-Elect Seward could not possibly endorse the Crittenden Compromise without alienating his entire party. And yet the Deep South would insist on nothing less. Admittedly, the victories of "immediate secessionists" over "cooperationists" in some Deep South secession conventions were quite narrow--see https://groups.google.com/d/msg/soc.history.what-if/Rvz7CiH3QMU/_e1cUioLJi0J for some of the figures--and it is conceivable that even concessions short of the Crittenden Compromise could have prevented immediate secession in Georgia and Louisiana. But in the first place, as the reaction to Weed's proposal shows, Seward would have a hard time getting Republicans to agree even to relatively moderate concessions on the territorial issue; and in the second place, without more far-reaching concessions, a defeat of immediate secessionists in Louisiana and Georgia would probably just mean A Southern Confederacy Later rather than A Southern Confederacy Now.

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On the whole I stand behind what I wrote in that post, yet there are two caveats: (1) Before concluding that no Republican would support restoration of the Missouri Compromise even as applied only to currently held territory of the United States, we should not only remember that Weed was after all one of the leading Republicans, but also that many Republicans (including Lincoln) were willing to see New Mexico admitted to the Union as a slave state (at least nominally). This underlines that their real concern was future territorial accessions, and something like the Peace Conference proposal might allay such concerns by requiring a majority of northern members of Congress to agree to such accessions. (2) While I still believe that any concessions short of the Crittenden proposals would merely slow secession down rather than prevent it, we can never be totally sure that even delaying secession would not be fatal to the secessionist cause (at least outside South Carolina). Once the South had the experience of living under a "Black Republican" president for a while and finding it not so horrible, southerners might become more moderate in their demands. In any event, the immediate secessionists certainly feared that this might be so; that is why they were in such a hurry to get their states to leave the Union before the hysteria engendered by Lincoln's election had died down.
 
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