Sure and supported by Senator Seward, soon to be Lincoln’s Secretary of State. This was your typical “moderate” Republicans doing their moderate thing, trying to “compromise” with Democrats to keep Democrats from going insane. As usual, it didn’t work.
But evidence of Lincoln’s involvement or approval is slim to none.
Lincoln supported it and got his political machine to support its passage. This wasn’t a “moderate” Republican thing. This was a shrewd political move. The North and the vast majority of Northern voters didn’t give a damn about slavery. Neither did Northern business interests. They did however care a great deal about keeping the Southern states in. They stood to lose a lot of money if the Southern states left. So Lincoln and the Republicans offered up a bargaining chip they were quite willing to compromise on to get what they really wanted.
The Southern states for their part rejected it....even though they had cited the refusal of the Northern states to uphold the fugitive slave clause as violating the constitution and thus providing them an out clause....”hey we didn’t break the deal. Y’all did. Therefore we’re out of here and nobody can claim we acted in bad faith”. Their real motivations are pretty obvious when you see they never even entertained the Corwin Amendment as addressing their concerns.
So blaming Corwin on Lincoln, regardless of how necessary to the Lost Cause mythology, is misguided & misdirected.
I don’t “blame” him for it. It was a shrewd political move. I just note that this was ground the Northern political establishment was only too happy to give but which the Southern political establishment would not accept as the basis for a deal even after claiming that’s officially why they had seceded.
Until Confederates rejected his peace offers, after that, not so much.
The key point to note is he was willing to give it but they were not willing to take it as the basis for a deal.
A basic tenet of Lost Cause mythology unsupported by any factual evidence.
Denying it is a basic part of PC Revisionist mythology unsupported by any evidence. Meanwhile there is ample evidence to support the opposite position.
Lincoln’s “real interest” was to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” according to his oath of office.
Had that been so, he would not have violated the constitution on numerous occasions.
Clay was a Southern Whig, Virginia born, a slave-holding plantation owner with no interest — none, zero, nada interest — in aggrandizing the North at the South’s expense. What Clay wanted was to, ahem, “put Americans first” by protecting US producers, North, South and West, against foreign competitions.
That was indeed Lincoln’s aim too, and was in no way antithetical to all Southerners. Instead it was just “politics as usual” in which tariff rates rose & fell over time depending on various coalitions & alliances in Congress.
Firstly, Clay was born in Virginia but he was a Kentuckian. Secondly, the way the economies of the regions developed with a huge amount of specialization, Henry Clay’s plan which Lincoln signed onto wholeheartedly would HUGELY benefit one region while doing huge economic damage to another. It may not have openly endorsed that, but that was the practical effect and everybody knew it. That had been what a lot of the most bitter political fighting had been about for the previous 2 generations.
Sure, the “tariff of abominations” did drive South Carolina to threaten nullification or secession in 1832 under President Jackson (Southern slaveholder), but nothing in effect or proposed in 1860 remotely approached such levels.
Southerners knew full well that this was only going to be the first bite of the apple. They knew Northern political interests would be back for more and more and more. Indeed that is exactly what happened. The Morill Tariff eventually more than tripled the rates of the Walker Tariff that preceded it.
In 1860 moderate tariffs were “politics as usual” not cause for secession. That’s why Deep South Fire Eaters focused on the Black Republican threat to slavery.
Even the Walker tariff which was 17% was considerably higher than the South wanted. Once they seceded they put a cap of 10% in the Confederate constitution (ie revenue tariff rather than protective tariff). The impending Morill tariff which everybody knew was going to pass the Senate was enough for the Southern states to throw in the towel on the whole experiment.
I think Davis was actually saying something a bit different, but if you do indeed have genuine quotes to that effect, then feel free to post them here. However — the bottom line with Davis is that he was a Unionist up until the moment Mississippi declared secession.
So none of his pre-secession statements can be read as justifying secession, but only as expressing his partisan political views within the United States Senate.
“Neither “love for the African” [witness the Northern laws against him], nor revulsion from “property in persons” [“No, you imported Africans and sold them as chattels in the slave markets”] motivated the present day agitators,”…... “No sir….the mask is off, the purpose is avowed…It is a struggle for political power.” Jefferson Davis 1848
“What do you propose, gentlemen of the free soil party? Do you propose to better the condition of the slave? Not at all. What then do you propose? You say you are opposed to the expansion of slavery. Is the slave to be benefited by it? Not at all. What then do you propose? It is not humanity that influences you in the position which you now occupy before the country. It is that you may have an opportunity of cheating us that you want to limit slave territory within circumscribed bounds. It is that you may have a majority in the Congress of the United States and convert the government into an engine of Northern aggrandizement. It is that your section may grow in power and prosperity upon treasures unjustly taken from the South, like the vampire bloated and gorged with the blood which it has secretly sucked from its victim. You desire to weaken the political power of the Southern states, - and why? Because you want, by an unjust system of legislation, to promote the industry of the New England States, at the expense of the people of the South and their industry.” Jefferson Davis 1860 speech in the US Senate
Davis is hardly the only one to say that what opposition to the spread of slavery existed was pecuniary in nature and not moral in nature. That is, it was part of the broader political struggle over economics - not over moral outrage about slavery itself. I can cite British and even a few Northern abolitionists who said the same thing.