So lincoln was a craven opportunist on top of being a tyrant? Say it ain’t so!
In his first inaugural address Lincoln declared that he had “no objection” to the Corwin Amendment, nor that it be made forever unamendable.
A few points.
The President has no role in the amendment process, so any "support" was more or less irrelevant.
The amendment merely made explicit what almost everybody at the time believed to already be in the Constitution. With the exception, of course, of the unamendable portion, which was arguably idiotic, since it's difficult to think of any way an amendment can be made in such a way that it cannot be amended by a future process.
IOW, the amendment merely put into the Constitution what Lincoln and the Republican platform had already campaigned and won an election on.
I find it intriguing that the amendment does not prohibit Congress from prohibiting interstate commerce in slaves, which would have put a truly major crimp in the institution.
Finally, to state one has no objection to an amendment does not constitute "support" of it.
I found this to.
Lincoln’s March 16, 1861 letters to the governors did not endorse or oppose the proposed thirteenth amendment.
The Corwin Amendment was ratified by:
Ohio — May 13, 1861 Rescinded ratification – March 31, 1864
Maryland — January 10, 1862 Rescinded ratification – April 7, 2014
Illinois — February 14, 1862 (questionable validity)
Once the Confederacy’s free-trade and low-tariff policy was announced around March 11, 1861 and the Corwin Amendment rejected by the SOUTH , all hell broke loose in the North.
On 18 March 1861, the Philadelphia Press demanded war: “Blockade Southern Ports”.
On 22-23 March 1861, New York Times “At once shut down every Southern port, destroy its commerce and bring utter ruin on the Confederate States”.
Leaders in the North decided they could not allow the South to go and taking about $70,000,000.00 tarif dollars with them wasn’t going to happen.
All ships would come South for free trade and LOW TARIFFS and of course bankrupt the North.
April 12, the war was on.
Except that I would think that the 13th Amendment makes it moot. Passing an amendment to protect an institution that is unconstitutional doesn't make a lot of sense.
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.
What Republicans called a “cordon of freedom,” secessionists denounced as an inflammatory circle of fire.
http://www.salon.com/2012/08/29/did_northern_aggression_cause_the_civil_war/
Calhoun’s death on March 31, 1850, one of his greatest foes, U.S. Senator Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, sternly rebuked an associate who suggested that he honor Calhoun with a eulogy in Congress. ‘He is not dead, sir — he is not dead,’ remarked Benton, a staunch Unionist. ‘There may be no vitality in his body, but there is in his doctrines.’ A decade later, a bloody civil war would prove Benton was right.
http://www.historynet.com/john-c-calhoun-he-started-the-civil-war.htm
Lincoln said: “The power confided in me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property, and places belonging to the government, and to collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may be necessary for these objects, there will be no invasion—no using force against, or among the people anywhere” (emphasis added).
Collect the higher tariff rate, he said, and there will be no invasion. Fail to collect it, and there will be an invasion. Two years later, he would deport the most outspoken member of the Democratic Party opposition, Congressman Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham said this in a speech:
[T]he Confederate Congress . . . adopted our old tariff of 1857 . . .fixing their rate of duties at five, fifteen, and twenty percent lower than ours. The result was . . . trade and commerce . . . began to look to the South . . . . The city of New York, the great commercial emporium of the Union, and the North-west, the chief granary of the union, began to clamor now, loudly, for a repeal of the pernicious and ruinous tariff. Threatened thus with the loss of both political power and wealth, or the repeal of the tariff, and, at last, of both, New England—and Pennsylvania . . . demanded, now, coercion and civil war, with all its horrors, as the price of preserving either from destruction . . . . The subjugation of the South, and the closing up of her ports—first, by force, in war, and afterward, by tariff laws, in peace, was deliberately resolved upon by the East.
As McGuire and Van Cott conclude: “[T]he tariff issue may in fact have been even more important in the North-South tensions that led to the Civil War than many economists and historians currently believe.”
Part 2 from Washington 1861: Crittenden-Johnson Resolution
what Resolution was that?
The Crittenden-Johnson Resolution dated July 25, 1861 the U.S. Congress
The U.S. Congress held the same purpose as Lincoln for the war. In the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution dated July 25, 1861 the U.S. Congress stated clearly and unambiguously that the purpose of the war was to “preserve the union” and “not to interfere with the domestic institutions of the states.”
WHY did the South fight? The South fought in SELF DEFENSE.