Posted on 06/16/2014 6:04:34 PM PDT by riverss
The Corwin Amendment read as follows:
No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.
The Corwin Amendment was an effort to placate the South and contain secessionist sentiment. It proposed to do three things. First, to protect slavery by giving each state the power to regulate the “domestic institutions” within its borders. This was an enticing carrot for the slave states: stay in the Union and you can keep slavery. Second, to dispossess Congress of the power to “abolish or interfere” with slavery. And third, to make itself unamendable by providing that “no amendment shall be made to the Constitution” that would undo the Corwin Amendment.
After Seward proposed the Corwin Amendment, then newly-elected President Lincoln defended the states’ right to adopt it. In his first inaugural address Lincoln declared that he had “no objection” to the Corwin Amendment, nor that it be made forever unamendable.
Although its ratification was disrupted by the Civil War, the Corwin Amendment is not actually dead. To this day, it lies dormant, ready to be ratified by the required number of states.
(Excerpt) Read more at cognoscenti.wbur.org ...
The Corwin Amendment passed the House by the necessary 2/3 on Feb. 28 and the Senate on March 2.
Shortly thereafter, of course, it became moot when the CSA attacked the USA.
The only real effect of the Corwin Amendment would have been to change the ratification for an amendment to ban slavery from states from 75% of the states to 100%. And of course if every state was opposed to slavery the institution would already be dead.
It is an imponderable whether a succeeding amendment could have just repealed the Corwin Amendment as the 23rd repealed the 18th. At present there is only one theoretically unamendable section of the Constitution, “no state, without its consent, shall be deprived of its equal suffrage in the Senate.”
Again, it’s an interesting question whether this section could be constitutionally repealed. IMO it could be.
However, since there is effectively zero sentiment to do so, the point is moot.
So, does this Corwin Amendment make the case that the war was not over slavery, and there a hidden motive to send all the slaves South and it didn’t work out?
How they could even offer such an amendment is beyond me.
The war was not primarily about slavery at any time, though it became a strong secondary motivation after about the first year, once unionists realized the secession had killed "the old Union," and it wasn't coming back.
War as a consequence of secession was of course nearly inevitable from the beginning, eventually if not right away. Too many points for conflict. As Lincoln, you could declare secession, but you couldn't move away physically. The USA was always going to be right there, across a tremendously long border. If the two peoples could not adjust their difficulties over such issues as fugitive slaves or the territories within the Union, what reason is there to believe they could do so peacefully as two independent nations?
there a hidden motive to send all the slaves South and it didn’t work out?
I have no idea at all what you are asking here.
I think the North wanted to clean house of their slaves.
I also think that because of such a ridiculous amendment for permanent slavery, anything is possible.
Even a plan to grow the South to furnish more goods for Northern finished goods and exports.
You saw in an earlier post how much money the North was taking in above all others in the country.
This would in turn cause the South to increase their volume of slaves to increase goods and the North had plenty to move out.
No more slaves could come into America so the only place the South could have gotten more slaves would have been from...you guess it, the North.
It could be just that simple. I know there was talk in the North about shipping the slaves somewhere but that fell through.
Who knows what they were thinking back then.
Just a shot in the dark outside the box.
I guess it depends on what you define as “the North.”
In 1860 the term generally meant the free states, in which there were no slaves, so I fail to see how the South could get slaves from them.
Well I guess that answered itself then.
The South would have to have kept all the slaves in the South if they had taken the bait.
Just a back door way of making sure all the slaves didn’t end up in the North to live.
I don’t know how they were treated up North at that time.
The horror! The horror!
Of course that's not going to happen.
Article One of the original Bill of Rights is still out there, though, waiting for 27 or so more ratifications. If the proposed amendment with its requirements for numbers of Representatives in relation to the total population went into effect, the number of US Representatives could swell into the thousands.
Also still waiting are the Titles of Nobility Amendment (if it hasn't already been ratified already as some claim) which by one reading could strip US citizenship from Colin Powell, George HW Bush and other eminences and the Child Labor Amendment.
Nowadays they put time limits for ratification into the amendments so proponents of the feminist ERA or DC voting representation in Congress have to start all over from the beginning.
Slavers didn't need to look beyond their own backyards for more chattel. Slave populations had long been at self-sustaining levels.
Assuming the necessary 25 states or whatever ratified next week, which isn't going to happen, those with existing titles would be unaffected. Ex post facto and all that.
Article One of the Constitution: "No Bill of Attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed."
If you amend the Constitution, though, it's up to the courts to decide how to interpret the old and the new provisions.
More than self-sustaining. In 1810 there were 1.2M slaves, in 1860 4M.
Despite some minor slave smuggling, this was almost entirely natural increase, and indeed almost exactly parallels the white natural population increase.
No doubt. But I assume ex post facto would be deemed to apply unless the amendment specifically made it retroactive.
It’s interesting that this was apparently an important issue back then and nobody cares about it at all today.
At least important enough to get 2/3 of each house of Congress to vote for it, and to get it within two states of the number needed for ratification.
Thanks S.L., more:
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/crittenden-compromise-is-killed-in-senate
> Essentially, the Crittenden Compromise sought to alleviate all concerns of the Southern states. Four states had already left the Union when it was proposed, but Crittenden hoped the compromise would lure them back. Crittenden thought he could muster support from both South and North and avert either a split of the nation or a civil war. The major problem with the plan was that it called for a complete compromise [sic] by the Republicans with virtually no concessions on the part of the South.
IOW it wasn’t a compromise, it was a repudiation of the Republican platform of 1860 before he was even sworn in, and Lincoln rightly rejected it. If the Demagogic Party tried it today, they’d include hate speech provisions to prohibit criticism of slavery.
Righto. Should be noted that the Corwin Amendment was a quite separate attempt to appease the South from the Crittenden Compromise.
Lincoln neither supported nor rejected the CA, while rejecting the CC.
I’ve run across several references by Lincoln to a proposed treason law, or something like that, proposed by Douglass that would have criminalized abolition speech somewhat in the way you describe. But I’ve been unable to find any specifics, so I sure could be wrong on this.
The issue is that southerners, quite humanly, had grown to utterly resent being constantly told the economic and social basis of their way of life was evil. As Lincoln put it, in 1860 the only thing that would have appeased them was to “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”
Even Douglas, who proclaimed slavery a matter of moral indifference, was ostracized by southerners for refusing to call it a positive good and work for a federal slave code imposing slavery throughout the territories by federal military force.
And fairly often their own bedrooms, FTM.
Found it. Douglas proposed that any speech that would irritate southerners be classified as sedition, and that Republican leaders, including Seward and Lincoln, who he specified by name, be jailed under it.
Quite amazing, when you realize that Douglas considered himself, and was considered by many others, to be a moderate. In point of fact, he was in the middle between those who wanted to expand slavery and those who wanted to limit or end it. As such, he got attacked by both ends of the spectrum.
And yet, he attended Lincoln’s inaugural, while others in his party plotted to assassinate Lincoln before he took the oath.
> The issue is that southerners, quite humanly, had grown to utterly resent being constantly told the economic and social basis of their way of life was evil.
Nonsense. The issue was that the pro-slavery elite invaded Kansas, led the drive to secession based on expansion of slavery, attacked federal installations, and blamed everyone but themselves — which figures, since they were Democrats.
In fact, he held Lincoln’s hat while he spoke at the Inaugural.
I’ve read all the Lincoln-Douglas debates. He was a very eloquent and honorable man, IMO, just very mistaken.
After the first returns came in and it was obvious Lincoln would be elected, Douglas toured the South, including the Deep South, trying by his words to calm the fervor in that section. It was done at great personal risk, and damage to his health from which he never recovered.
In fact, it’s not entirely inaccurate to say that he worked himself to death trying to save the Union and prevent war. When secession came anyway, he opposed it strongly, and when war started, he did everything he could to rally Democrats to support the war effort. When Lincoln was working on his proclamation calling for 75,000 troops, Douglas suggested he call instead for 200,000.
He died shortly thereafter.
You’ll need to take your argument up with Lincoln. When he talked at Cooper Union about what would be needed appease southern anger.
“The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.”
“These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas’ new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.”
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