VP Beast Butler?

[Thomas Thorne]

Any compromise to such a vexing issue as slavery expansion would have required each side to swallow something very repugnant to its beliefs. There were a variety of choices that could have been made.

There could have been a revival of a Missouri Compromiselike geographical division between free and slave territories. Complicating the issue would have been likely Northern insistence that US expansion to the Caribbean and Latin America be prohibited to prevent slavery expansion to the areas most conducive to the cotton economy.

Another formula which might have been acceptable to the North in 1861 would have likely foundered if the South had followed the logic of slavery security to its ultimate conclusion. Suppose the South had accepted the Republican principle of no slavery in the territories but insisted on stringent guarantees there would no interference with slavery in the 15 slave states.

This would have included vigorous enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act,the adoption of the principles of the proposed Crittenden compromise which forbade future constitutional amendments detrimental to slavery and continued prohibition of abolitionist literature distributed by the US mail in the South. Would the South have then insisted in its desire to prevent more John Browns that books like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" be prevented from being mailed anywhere in the United States or circulated in interstate commerce?
Tom