85 votes. With no candidate able to secure the needed votes, the meeting adjourned and reconvened in Baltimore, Maryland, a month later. At the Baltimore meeting, Guthrie garnered 9 votes on the first ballot. He received 5.5 on the second ballot, which finally saw Douglas attain the necessary majority. Douglas was defeated by Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election. Guthrie was offered the job of Secretary of War by President Lincoln, but he declined because of age and failing health. Civil War Though a slave holder and states' rights advocate, Guthrie ardently opposed secession. On this topic, he stated "I hate that word secession, because it is a cheat! Call things by their right names! The Southern States have... originated a revolution." He was not convinced that Lincoln's election was an inescapable harbinger of war. He believed the Southern states, if they did not secede, would control Congress and the judiciary, and render Lincoln powerless to impose his agenda upon them. At age 70, Guthrie was elected as one of Kentucky's six delegates to the Peace Conference of 1861 in Washington, D.C., to devise means to prevent the impending Civil War. He was chosen to chair the conference's Compromise Committee. He failed in his attempt to re-work and re-introduce the Crittenden Compromise earlier proposed in Congress by fellow Kentuckian John J. Crittenden. The Compromise Committee proposed a plan that included seven constitutional amendments and relied on Henry Clay's Missouri Compromise as a framework. Under the committee's proposal, 36°30' north latitude would continue to divide slave and free territory in the United States, and no more territory would be annexed except with the consent of equal representation from both slave and free states. The delegates to the convention presented this idea to Congress on February 27, 1861, and asked them to call a national convention to consider the question, but Congress rejected this report. Guthrie personally appealed to President Lincoln to consider the convention's report, but to no avail. Still convinced that war could be averted, he participated in a convention of border states held at Frankfort in May 1861. This convention also failed to avert the war. During the war, Guthrie's Louisville and Nashville railroad was of vital importance. It was the only rail line originating in the Union and terminating in the Confederacy. Early in the war, the line was used to transport supplies to the Confederates in Tennessee,