Not really. What the 'planters' wanted was expansion and that is the only area where Lincoln could not, and would not compromise.
Well, of course they wanted expansion. Everyone wanted expansion. So why should Mrs. Parks sit in the back of the expansion bus?
Like I said, finding some sort of territorial compromise, either on the lines of Popular Sovereignty or the 1820 Missouri Compromise (and we are talking about amending the Constitution here, so Dred Scott goes away) would pacify the planters enough that secession would go away. But Lincoln didn't do that, did he? IMHO because war was his plan all along, and his goal wasn't exclusion, but extinction, of slavery -- in the South, contrary his platform, never mind what he said on the stump. It's the only explanation that makes sense to me.
There was no chance in hell that emancipation could have passed under Lincoln or any other president without the agreement of the South. The 3/4 state majority required for an amendment with 15 slaves states voting against made it a mathematical impossibility.
I agree, if you are talking about constitutional emancipation, with the participation of the South.
What you propose may have 'pacified' the non-slaveholding whites who had been propagandized to the point of fear and loathing for the "Black Republicans" but I doubt it.
All I'm talking about is breaking the impetus toward secession, period. The idea being, "what could Lincoln have done or said, that would have resulted in fewer or no States going out over winter?" So that when he finally came into office, only one or two, if any, States would have been out, and their representatives would have been present to see him sworn into office.
My point is that there were things he could have done to slow or stop the rush toward secession.
My cousin's wife is Canadian, and they've had their own secessionist movement. Having not heard from the Quebeckers lately, I asked her about it. It seems that, in the last 10 years or so, the Indian tribes up there have discovered their political swing, and when Quebec's government started talking about really leaving the federation, the tribes in northern Quebec laid a marker: if Quebec left the Canadian federation, the tribes would leave Quebec on the same theory of cultural and linguistic dissimilarities -- and they'd take a big chunk of Quebec with them, including a lot of the hydroelectric projects that the Quebecers had just assumed would go out with an intact Quebec, giving them some foreign exchange. When the Indians laid their marker, that was a stopper for the Quebeckers.
A lot of pure conjecture. The Republican party was founded with free-soil as its primary plank. Lincoln talked almost exclusively about restoring the Missouri Compromise and repealing Kansas-Nebraska. There is no way in the world he could have or should have backed off on territorial expansion anymore than we would expect Jeff Davis to become an abolitionist. And Lincoln said at the time, the slaveocrats would not have stopped with another 'compromise'. They were, after all, the ones who pushed to overturn the Missouri Compromise in the first place. They desperately needed expansion and any 'compromise' with them would have been a purely temporary arrangement. Lincoln recognized that fact and drew a line in the sand. He did not in any way challenge or interfere with slavery where it existed. He would have likely gone along with a return to the Missouri Compromise which would have been a return to the pre-Kansas-Nebraska status, but beyond that, he could not go. On the surface, that seems to be all the compromise necessary by the Federal government and it was up to the states to 'compromise' as well. But looking at the economics of slavery, expansion wasn't simply one option --- it was a absolute 100% necessity to the survival of the 'planter class.' That is why they started the war.