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To: Irontank
At the Hampton Roads Peace Conference, Lincoln assured the Confederate representatives that, if they re-joined the union, the Emancipation Proclamation would become inoperative.

Inaccurate. In his preliminary EP issued after Antietam in 1862, Lincoln offered to exempt any state from its provision that returned to its allegiance by January 1, 1863. None did.

At the HRPC, Lincoln had only two absolute requirements, return to the Union and abolition of slavery. Anything else was negotiable. As these were also the Confederacy's non-negotiable issues, only in reverse, nothing was settled.

Moreover, at that conference, Lincoln and Seward attempted to persuade the confederate states to re-join the Union by reminding them that they could defeat the pending 13th Amendment that would have ended slavery in the US...an amendment that was sure to pass unless the southern states re-joined the union.

I've read a number of accounts of this conference, but never heard of this. What's your source? It sounds like something Lincoln would have done much earlier in the war, but not in February of 1865.

7 posted on 01/18/2006 3:14:48 PM PST by Restorer
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To: Restorer
This is from the account of the conference by CSA Vice President Alexander Stephens in the second volume of his 1868 multivolume book A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States: Its Causes, Character, Conduct and Results
9 posted on 01/18/2006 3:37:26 PM PST by Irontank (Let them revere nothing but religion, morality and liberty -- John Adams)
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