Which they could have done under Corwin.
Without the Corwin amendment, eventually enough would have done so to ban it in the rest.
So in the space of a day, you've argued that there would never be enough states to pass an amendment abolishing slavery, and then you turn around and say there would have been, but the the Corwin Amendment would have stopped them.
How many decades later? I have previously estimated that the critical mass to abolish slavery would have been reached between 20 and 80 years in the future. With the Corwin amendment, it puts the time off a great deal further.
So in the space of a day, you've argued that there would never be enough states to pass an amendment abolishing slavery, and then you turn around and say there would have been, but the the Corwin Amendment would have stopped them.
I did not say that. You are misrepresenting what I said. I said that as things looked in 1860, it was literally impossible.
I have always held that the social pressure would work continuously to eventually undermine the will to maintain slavery, and that it would have eventually been overturned. But the Corwin amendment drastically increases the resistance that this would ever happen, because then states no longer have to worry about potential legal pressure from other states to over turn their institution.
I'm not sure if you can follow what i'm about to say next, but this stuff is non linear, and subject to sudden preference cascades.
Extrapolations using linear projections are very unlikely to be correct, but they are relatively easy to understand compared to the horrific difficulty of putting together some sort of more accurate model, and so that is why *I* and other people tend to use them, even knowing they are not very accurate.
We can see the trends and the directions, but we cannot predict the non linear nature of how they affect other factors.
But having a core group which cannot be dissolved tends to reinforce other components that may have otherwise transformed from one state to another.
People want others to stand with them, and if they know such exists, it reinforces their decision to stand. The Corwin amendment would have made slavery much harder to eradicate.