You never needed an amendment prohibiting slavery to kill it. Merely appointing fed postmasters who would admit abolitionist literature in; appointing fed judges who would free slaves in freedom suits (such as Dred Scott); or appointment of fed marshals who would not pursue runaways. Two of these things I see as violating the terms of Constitutional law. Judges should not interpret law differently than it was intended when it was lawfully created, and Federal Marshals should be required to enforce Federal law, even if it is law they don't like.
But yes, I have said the social pressure would eventually destroy slavery in the South, it would just take time. There were quite a lot of people in the South that wanted to get rid of slavery. Eventually they would have become a majority, but getting the profit out of it would have helped.
So long as it was profitable, it was going to be difficult to get rid of it, but mechanization combined with the endless social pressure against it, would have eventually eliminated it in all the slave states.
Most likely the border states would have thrown it out first.
DiogenesLamp:
"Judges should not interpret law differently than it was intended when it was lawfully created, and Federal Marshals should be required to enforce Federal law, even if it is law they don't like." No violations of Constitutional Law were required to overturn Crazy Roger Taney's Dred Scot opinions.
Just some normal human sanity would do that job.
As for Federal Marshalls and Fugitive Slaves, there were no "personal liberty laws" in Northern states closest to the South -- meaning New York west all the way to Iowa.
In those states Federal Marshalls continued to enforce the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, so far as we know, up until the Civil War.
And Judge Andrew Napolitano even claims Lincoln enforced the Fugitive Slave Act until the end of the Civil War!
It's not true, but what is certainly true is that Lincoln had no intentions in 1860 to stop Federal Marshalls from enforcing the Fugitive Slave Act. ![]()