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The paradox of Southern slaveholding was that, for all the talk of it resting on liberty and a right to hold slaves as property, the preservation of slavery required increasingly stringent measures. This meant slave patrols and intrusive laws and police action. In most places in the South, it was illegal to teach slaves to read and write, and emancipation was forbidden or made difficult.

In addition, the visible energy and success of so many free blacks was unsettling to slavery because it contradicted assertions that it reflected a natural order based on race. Moreover, if so minded, free blacks could become a ready and active means of subverting slavery.

So long as the Union stood intact, abolitionist Northerners might overwhelm the South's system for maintaining slavery, and especially so by energizing free blacks to subvert slavery. It was easy enough to imagine a combination of abolitionist states financing such efforts, using the mails and the cover of commerce, aiming first at states where slavery was less secure.

Against such measure the Corwin Amendment would do nothing. Eventually, the abolitionists in the Union would have their way.

Against such measure the Corwin Amendment would do nothing. Eventually, the abolitionists in the Union would have their way.

If they were so influential, why wasn't the amendment they attempted to pass to abolish slavery?

So long as the Union stood intact, abolitionist Northerners might overwhelm the South's system for maintaining slavery, and especially so by energizing free blacks to subvert slavery. It was easy enough to imagine a combination of abolitionist states financing such efforts, using the mails and the cover of commerce, aiming first at states where slavery was less secure. Against such measure the Corwin Amendment would do nothing. Eventually, the abolitionists in the Union would have their way.

There was no popular support for abolition. Abolitionists could not get more than single digit percentages of the vote anywhere in any election. How would free Blacks have subverted slavery? The thing that was actually subverting slavery was the same thing that subverted it in the various European colonial empires and slowly subverted it in the Northern states - industrialization. That was at work in the Upper South already as evidenced by the percentage of slave owners decreasing and the percentage of the Black population who were freedmen steadily increasing.

Secession on the other hand meant the end of slavery. There is simply no way the seceding states could have secured the border stretching from the Atlantic Coast of South Carolina all the way to El Paso Texas. Once in the US - now a foreign country - there was no duty to return those slaves. There was no fugitive slave clause of the Constitution to protect the slave owner. Obviously they must have seceded for a different reason.