 Only weeks after Abraham Lincoln issued his less famous preliminary emancipation proclamation, which he issued in September of 1862, Ohio held its congressional elections. The Democrats won Ohio in the 1862 elections, but there was one notable exception. A radical Republican named James M. Ashley retained his congressional seat despite the minority status of the Republican Party. He was lucky. He ran against two opponents who split the opposition vote, allowing him to win the election despite not having a majority of voters supporting him in his district. Long before Abraham Lincoln made the decision to support the emancipation of any slaves, James Ashley was calling for an amendment that would abolish slavery throughout the entire country. Two years later, after Lincoln's re-election, the president spoke to Congress and urged them to support Ashley's proposed amendment. The United States Senate had approved such an amendment as early as April of 1864, but the House of Representatives was the battleground that held the amendment up. After the president added his endorsement, the House passed the amendment on the last day of January of 1865. After enough states ratified, the 13th Amendment to the Constitution, abolishing slavery in the United States, took effect in December. Another important figure in engineering the passage of the 13th Amendment was William Seward. But this wasn't the first 13th Amendment that William Seward worked to get passed, nor was it the first 13th Amendment that Abraham Lincoln supported. Only months before Lincoln's preliminary emancipation proclamation, given in September of 1862, Illinois became the last state to ratify the nearly passed Corwin Amendment, which would have made it explicitly unconstitutional for Congress to abolish slavery anywhere. After the Illinois ratification, the Corwin Amendment was tossed in the trash heap of history. Nothing came of it ultimately, and it would be infamous if it weren't so largely forgotten. But the other 13th Amendment, the one that did not quite come through, is important because it tells us a great deal about the politics of slavery, the Republican Party, and Abraham Lincoln at the outset of the Civil War. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the previous episode, we looked at the tense state of affairs directly before and after South Carolina's secession, and everything that was taking place off the Charleston coast at Fort's Moultrie in Sumter. But while all of that was going on, Lincoln and the Republicans were working to find a compromise that would pacify the southern states and hopefully prevent disunion. This began with a series of compromises by Kentucky Senator John J. Crittenden. You might remember John Crittenden from my episodes on the filibuster in Cuba. His nephew was one of the filibusters who joined Narciso Lopez and was eventually executed by firing squad in Cuba. But that was a decade earlier when John Crittenden was the attorney general. By 1860, John Crittenden was back in the U.S. Senate, taking the seat held previously by John Breckenridge, the Southern Democrat candidate for president in 1860. In December of 1860, with southern secession in view, Crittenden began to talk to Stephen Douglas about how disunion might be avoided. Crittenden was a former Whig, but when his party died, he did not join the Republicans and instead joined the Constitutional Union Party. He was also a Kentuckian, a slave state as well as the state that Lincoln grew up in. His partnership with Douglas, a Northern Democrat and staunch unionist, made sense. If they could unite the unionists in the south with the conservative Republicans, maybe they could reach a compromise that would prevent secession or at least prevent any state other than South Carolina from seceding, hoping that then South Carolina might peaceably rejoin the union itself. The Crittenden compromise was too compromising for many Republicans, including Lincoln. Crittenden wanted to protect slavery in all areas the federal government controlled, which meant recognizing such issues as the fugitive slave law, slavery in the District of Columbia, and the interstate slave trade, but those weren't the controversial issues. The real controversy came from the proposal to extend the Missouri compromise line all the way to California so that slavery would be federally protected in all territories south of the line. Repeating the Missouri compromise seemed reasonable in theory, but the only hard line stance that Republicans took on slavery was the matter of territorial extension. On the other end of the debate, Southern Democrats saw the Dred Scott ruling as constitutionally recognizing slavery in all territories. So the conservative Republicans, the conditional unionists, and the unconditional unionist Democrats were likely to support Crittenden's compromise plan, but moderate and radical Republicans, as well as many Southern Democrats, wanted more. Lincoln, for his part, criticized Crittenden's plan as requiring the Republican party to apologize and beg forgiveness for winning the 1860 presidential election. Crittenden unveiled his plan on the same day that the committee of 13 was formed in the Senate to try to figure out a way to stave off secession in the wake of Lincoln's election. Two days later, on Christmas Eve, Stephen Douglas offered a similar compromise, except his proposal predictably offered popular sovereignty as the better solution to territorial slavery. William Seward was not present when the committee was formed, but he arrived back in Washington DC on December 24th, just after South Carolina's secession. He wanted to compromise as much as anybody, certainly more so than Lincoln, but Seward had been offered a position in Lincoln's cabinet as Secretary of State, and he knew that the president-elect was not going to budge on the issue of territorial slavery, so he wanted to offer something that Lincoln would agree to. So William Seward drafted an amendment, which read as follows, quote, No amendment shall be made to the Constitution, which will authorize or give to Congress any power to abolish or interfere with any state, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said state, end quote. There's more political significance to all this than easily meets the eye, by the way. Up to Lincoln's election, William Seward was the leader of the new Republican party, at least in the eyes of many people. His political manager was Thurlow Weed, publisher of the Albany Evening Journal. Private documents from Weed indicate that he played a significant behind-the-scenes role in the Seward amendment, and Weed and Lincoln shared a train together between Syracuse and Albany on December 22, days before Seward proposed his amendment. There's a degree of speculation involved, but historian Daniel Crofts claims that even though there is no smoking gun, evidence suggests that Weed and Lincoln discussed the perspective amendment on the train ride. He cites a conversation that Seward and Lincoln had four days after the train ride, in which Seward said that the Committee of Thirteen, quote, offered three propositions, which seemed to me to cover the ground of the suggestions made by you, through Mr. Weed, as I understand it, end quote. So even though Seward does not specify what suggestions Lincoln made, it seems likely that the constitutional amendment was one of them. But in a private letter written on December 28 to Duff Green, one of Lincoln's old friends, Lincoln claimed that he wanted no such amendment. Weed's personal records make it seem quite clear that he played a significant role in the Seward amendment, and other evidence suggests that Lincoln and he likely discussed the amendment before it was proposed. Lincoln would explicitly endorse it in his inaugural address a few months later, but then this letter to Duff Green says that he doesn't want it. So Lincoln's position at this point is hard for historians to pin down. At the very least, Lincoln was playing politics on the matter, which makes sense in the context of a new and fragile Republican Party. But a compromise was not reached by the Committee of Thirteen, and all talk of compromise was upset on January 9 when South Carolina fired on the Star of the West while it was trying to send provisions to Fort Sumter, which I ended the last episode on. Three days later, William Seward gave a speech in front of a large crowd in D.C. In the speech, Seward called for more conciliation. He called for a truce on the slavery issue and said that the western territories should be admitted as two large states, bypassing the territorial phase altogether. He also urged the passage of his amendment protecting slavery where it existed. Lastly, he said that Southerners' rights inside the United States were secure, but quote, the horrors of civil war would dwarf their silly grievances with the Union. Again, even while Seward genuinely was working to avoid war, as we will continue to see in the upcoming episodes, Southerners could easily take this statement as a veiled threat, even though it's highly doubtful that Seward meant it as a threat. The speech outraged the more radical Republicans such as Thaddeus Stevens and Charles Sumner, but it is interesting to note one person who looked kindly on Seward's speech, and that's John Greenleaf Whittier, the poet. Whittier had previously castigated Daniel Webster for his compromising attitude on the slavery question in 1850, but Whittier was anti-slavery because he was a Quaker, and this meant that he was also anti-war. So although Whittier deplored slavery, he understood Seward's position as being a genuine attempt to avoid war, and he wrote a poem entitled simply Two William H. Seward that began by thanking him. One of the lines of the poem reads, quote, I think thee in the sweet and holy name of peace for wise calm words that put to shame passion and party, end quote. The Senate formed the committee of 13, but the House of Representatives formed its own committee of 33 to try to find a way to pacify the southern states. Ohio Representative Thomas Corwin agreed to head the committee. Corwin was an old school Whig who first made a name for himself by opposing the Mexican-American War, though now, of course, he's known almost exclusively because of his involvement in the amendment we're talking about in this episode. Corwin joined the Republicans after the death of the Whig party, but he was a conservative Republican, meaning that he opposed the extension of slavery, but he made no moral arguments against slavery. If anything, he was concerned with the competition slaves meant for free white labor. Corwin was willing to concede the issue of territorial slavery if it would help combat the narrative that Republicans were a radical anti-slavery party, but Lincoln wasn't going to budge on the territorial issue. One of the first plans to be proposed to the committee of 33 by Henry Winters Davis was the New Mexico Plan, which would have brought the New Mexico Territory, present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and Southern Nevada, into the union as a slave state, following the Missouri Compromise Line. This was essentially the same idea as the Clinton Compromise Proposal. The second plan proposed to the committee of 33 was one that Lincoln might actually be more open to. This would be a constitutional amendment protecting slavery in the states where it existed. I know this all sounds like a repeat of the Senate plans I already explained, but we're talking about meetings taking place in two different committees for the separate houses of Congress. Taking the lead on this amendment was the grandson of John Adams and the son of John Quincy Adams, this being Charles Francis Adams. On December 28th, he asked the committee to consider an amendment that was slightly different than the Seward amendment. Adams's amendment read quote, No amendment of this constitution having for its object any interference with the states, with the relations between their citizens, and those described in section second of the first article of the Constitution as all other persons, shall originate with any state that does not recognize the relations within its own limits, or shall be valid without the ascent of every one of the states composing the union. End quote. So basically, Adams was saying that the only way for any amendment to be passed outlawing slavery would have to originate in a slave state and be unanimously ratified. The committee overwhelmingly supported the Adams amendment, but with South Carolina firing on the star of the West only days later, the attempts at compromise were almost entirely derailed. Many Republicans were outraged and patriotic tempers flared. Buchanan made a statement that only further enraged sympathetic Northerners. He said quote, All for which the slave states have ever contended is to be let alone and permitted to manage their domestic institutions in their own way, end quote. He went on to suggest that the free states created the crisis and it was their responsibility to mend the division. This was not happily received in the north. Corwin pointed out that most Northerners did not, for instance, object to the fugitive slave law. They just didn't like the provision that compelled them to participate in the capture of fugitive slaves. The committee of 33 wanted to revise the law to do away with this provision, but it appealed to northern states to repeal their personal liberty laws that nullified the fugitive slave law as a compromise on the matter. Remember that the personal liberty laws were among the list of grievances made by Southern states and some of the secession documents. But Corwin and many other conservative and moderate Republicans did recognize the reality of Southern fears about Northern political power, even if he knew the fears to be unfounded. So the committee came back to the proposed amendment to protect slavery where it existed. The logic among many Republicans, including Lincoln, was that since they already believed it to be unconstitutional for Congress to outlaw slavery, the amendment was harmless. It was merely a way to signal to the South that Republicans were sincere in their promises not to interfere with slavery where it existed. In fact, some of the Republicans who opposed the amendment only opposed it because they felt that it was unnecessary and redundant rather than because they were particularly anti-slavery. But by January, the committee of 33 was far more divided on the matter of compromise than it had been before the incident with the Star of the West. Corwin wrote to Lincoln saying, If the states are no more harmonious in their feelings and opinions than these 33 representative men, then appalling as the idea is, we must dissolve and a long and bloody civil war must follow. I cannot comprehend the madness of the time. Southern men are theoretically crazy. Extreme Northern men are practical fools. The latter are really quite as mad as the former. Treason is in the air around us everywhere. It goes by the name of patriotism. Men in Congress boldly avow it, but the public offices are full of acknowledged secessionists. God alone, I fear, can help us. Four or five states are gone. Others are driving before the gale. I have looked on this horrid picture till I have been able to gaze on it with perfect calmness. Another letter Corwin expressed frustration with Southerners for believing that Northerners hated slavery, which he felt was so clearly untrue. Southerners were acting on a stupendous mistake as to facts. In believing that Northerners hated slavery and wanted to quote deprive them of their property. But now the compromise proposals were essentially done away with, except for the proposed 13th amendment in one form or another. And that's where the debate shifted. By mid-January, Republicans like John Sherman and Thomas Corwin were making appeals on behalf of the amendment. Sherman is a great example of the mindset of many Republicans. He supported the New Mexico plan because although it nominally extended slavery to the New Mexico territory, nobody really expected slavery to survive there for long. At the beginning of 1861, there were something like 22 slaves in the entire territory, so people just didn't think the institution was economically viable. But Sherman also endorsed the amendment protecting slavery because he thought it would simply convince the South of what the Republicans had been saying all along. They had no intention of interfering with slavery where it existed. So he made a speech advocating these two propositions on January 18th. Three days later, Thomas Corwin made his own argument for his amendment. He had been in office during the nullification crisis three decades earlier, and he feared that the present crisis was far more dangerous. Keep in mind at the time of his giving this speech, five states had now seceded. He argued that the federal government had not yet violated any Southern rights, an argument that was more powerful in the Upper South. His speech culminated in an endorsement of the amendment that Charles Francis Adams had drafted for the Committee of 33. A couple of days following their speeches, an unconditional unionist Upper South representative, Tennessee's Emerson Ethridge, castigated Southerners, who held the ridiculous view that Republicans were going to interfere with slavery. He, along with 20 or so other Southern representatives, made up a coalition in the House called the Southern Opposition. These were unconditional unionists, and they mostly lived in border states. But here was an alliance of Southern unionists who were willing to work with more conservative Republicans to reach a compromise and prevent the Upper South states from seceding. Following Ethridge's lead, the following weeks saw a flood of Southern unionist rhetoric, all while the Confederacy was being formed in Montgomery, Alabama. One of the other members of the Southern Opposition was Representative John Gilmer from North Carolina. He begged Republicans to meet the Southern demands for territorial protection of slavery. What would it matter? He reasoned. Slavery wasn't economically viable in the West, so a territorial slave code would be unlikely to lead to new slave states anyway. Gilmer had been selected as the representative leader of the Southern Opposition, and his willingness to work with conservative and moderate Republicans made him look like a traitor to the South in the eyes of many secessionists. Secretly, William Seward and Thurlow Weed had convinced Lincoln to offer Gilmer a cabinet position. Lincoln was hesitant to offer any position to a non-Republican, but he thought the offer might seem like an olive branch to the South. Gilmer was still only considering Lincoln's offer while he was arguing for the amendment, but word of the cabinet offer started to leak out, and secessionists immediately charged him with being a pawn of the quote-unquote Lincoln Black Republicans. In the realm of compromise, the author of the Committee of 33's amendment, Charles Francis Adams, is representative of the contrast to Gilmer. Adams toed the line between moderate and radical Republican. He was clearly more anti-slavery than Lincoln, but he also wanted to pacify Southern fears about interference with slavery, so he lobbied heavily for support of the amendment. Adams gave his own speech on the matter only a week before two Upper South States, Virginia and Tennessee, held their own secession conventions, and of course they would stay in the Union at least for the time. Although it's hard to say how much the compromise debates influenced the decision for Virginia, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Arkansas to not participate in the first wave of secession, the timing did seem encouraging for supporters of the amendment. It seemed like the appeals to demonstrate to the South that their property and slaves was secure might be having the desired effect, and border state politicians continued to offer their own endorsement of the amendment. But Virginia and Tennessee added a qualification to their Union loyalty. They wanted a compromise on territorial slavery, which was even less likely now that secession was starting to die down, and they wanted guarantees that no acts of coercion would be taken against the states who had seceded. It's this last point that would end up driving the second wave of secession. But with Virginia and Tennessee giving their full demand for territorial compromise, William Seward was pressured again to try to convince his party to meet southern demands. But even though many people were still reaching out to Seward for leadership, he was no longer the leader of the Republican party. Lincoln was, and Lincoln was not going to budge on the territories. Lincoln's position was a matter of party unity more than anything else as far as we can tell. I've already talked in other episodes about the fact that Lincoln did make moral appeals against slavery, but those never amounted to much in practice. But opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories was the one major slavery issue that Republicans could agree on, from the most radical to the most conservative. And conceding territorial slavery might appease the south, but the deep south had already seceded. But it would likely alienate the radical Republicans who were already opposed to compromise. So the amendment was really a double compromise. It was an attempt at compromising with the south to stave off disunion obviously, but it was also a compromise among Republicans and that the amendment was softer than proposals such as the Crintenden compromise. So many radicals still opposed it, but as long as the party didn't open the door to territorial slavery, enough Republicans were willing to support the amendment to get it passed. On February 24th, Lincoln met with Thomas Corwin. Lincoln and Corwin met privately on Sunday, the evening of the 24th. The two men agreed on a revised version of the amendment, and Lincoln gave Corwin the green light to try to push it through. The revised version, that Corwin decided on incidentally, was just the original draft Seward made for the Senate's committee of 13. So this amendment is infamously known as the Corwin amendment, which might seem confusing throughout this episode, since we've mostly been talking about Charles Francis Adams's amendment. The final draft was Seward's language, but it was chosen by Corwin. Sometimes you see the amendment called the Seward-Corwin amendment, but it refers to this final version. Seward's language avoided the specification that abolition of slavery would have to originate from a slave state, which made it sound like less of a capitulation to the South, but it was also more absolute. It said that no amendment could be made to abolish slavery in any state. Effectively, the difference would have probably been moved, though. On February 28th, 1861, the House passed the amendment with a vote of 133 to 65. 46 of the votes in favor of the amendment came from Republicans. That night, at about 10.30 p.m., a crowd with a maritime ban in tow showed up at Willard's Hotel, where Lincoln was staying, and played Hail to the Chief to celebrate the passage of the amendment. Then the crowd moved down to Corwin's house and played Hail Columbia and cheered. Then they went to do the same for Seward, and when they found out that he wasn't home, they moved on to offer their celebration to Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln's vice president. The Senate did not pass the amendment for a few more days. When it did pass the amendment, it received far less attention, probably because they passed it at 5.20 in the morning on March 4th, less than seven hours before Lincoln was to be inaugurated. One of Buchanan's last acts as president, probably his last act I don't actually know for certain, was to sign the amendment. Lincoln gave his inaugural address at 1.30 on March 4th, and in it he said that neither he nor the Republican Party had any intention to quote interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. He specified that not only did he not have the legal authority to interfere with slavery, he had no desire to do so either. As such, Lincoln said that he had no objection to making explicit the doctrine that it was illegal for the federal government to interfere with slavery. In his inaugural address, the soon to be great emancipator endorsed an amendment that would have constitutionally protected slavery. But after inauguration, the Corwin Amendment received much less attention, as all eyes were on Fort Sumter. The ratification of the amendment moved forward, but eventually fizzled out in the middle of the war. Kentucky ratified the amendment on April 1st, only weeks before the bombardment of Fort Sumter. After the war started, two free states ratified the amendment as well, Ohio and Rhode Island, both of whom ratified in May. Indiana debated ratification around the same time, but they voted against the amendment. It wasn't until after the war ballooned into a full-scale conflict that further ratification took place. Maryland ratified the Corwin Amendment in January of 1862 and Virginia in February. It's worth noting, by the way, that the Virginia that ratified was what soon became West Virginia, but in February of 1862 the Union-occupied Virginia was operating out of Wheeling and was carrying on the pretense that the government there represented the entire state while Richmond, Virginia was serving as the capital of the Confederacy. The day after the Virginia government in Wheeling voted to ratify, Illinois also approved the amendment, but this would be the last stop for the Corwin Amendment. At this point, it was more than clear that the Corwin Amendment served no purpose. All but four slave states had already seceded, and the war had no end in sight. Lincoln would soon start toying with the idea of issuing his Emancipation Proclamation and his Preliminary Proclamation was delivered in September, only a few months after Illinois ratified the Corwin Amendment. After that, the approach to slavery changed, with the Emancipation Proclamation being issued at the beginning of 1863 and the final 13th Amendment being ratified in 1865. This amendment, as it would turn out, would also be engineered by William Seward. The Corwin Amendment is an anti-climatic episode in American history. It's important to note that at least in my view, the amendment was a non-starter from the very beginning. Southerners felt that the Republican Party represented a threat to slavery by its very existence. It was proof that the North was full of Southern hating abolitionists, at least that's how they saw the situation. But the effort to pass the Corwin Amendment and Lincoln's support of it tells us a great deal about the figures involved. There's no need to further drag this episode out, so I'll end here and we will take a look at the formation of the Confederacy in the next episode.