6. Lincoln, the Border States, and the Failure of Compromise

Questions:
1. Why did Lincoln resist compromise during the winter and spring of 1861?
2. Was Lincoln’s refusal to compromise in line with northern public opinion?
3. What explains the divergent responses in the upper South to events at Fort Sumter?
4. How effectively did the Lincoln and Davis administrations handle the challenge of the Border states?

Phillip Paludan, “The American Civil War considered as a Crisis of Law and Order” American Historical Review 77 (1972) (JSTOR)
William E. Gienapp, “Abraham Lincoln and the Border States,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 13 (1992): 13-46
Daniel W. Crofts, Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989)
David M. Potter, Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (1942)
Kenneth Stampp, And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis (1950)

Primary sources:
Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address”
Abraham Lincoln to Lyman Trumbull, Dec 10, 1860
Letter from Fred Spooner, resident of Providence, Rhode Island, to his older brother Henry Joshua Spooner, April 30, 1861.