Southern slave owners fervently believed that the Republicans would bring an end to slavery, but their defenders today want to believe that they would have made slavery permanent.
This is rationalization for the North embracing continuing slavery in the US.
What possible reason could they have for holding onto slave states that would require them to abrogate their principles?
My answer is easy and obvious. "Money."
It wasn't ratified and probably couldn't have been ratified.
This is whistling past the graveyard. It was ratified by five northern states. William Seward, Lincoln's secretary of state and former governor of New York, guaranteed that the amendment would be ratified by New York. With New York's support, it would have been ratified by the surrounding states too, and add to that the 16 slave states, and the thing was virtually guaranteed to pass.
Bear in mind the representatives of those very same northern states voted to pass it through the congress. What makes you think their legislators wouldn't have passed it too?
Southern slave owners fervently believed that the Republicans would bring an end to slavery,...
So I have been constantly told, though Lincoln himself said repeatedly he would not do this and that he had no power to do this.
...but their defenders today want to believe that they would have made slavery permanent.
Presumably you are categorizing me as one of "their defenders", but I have repeatedly said that slavery would have ended when the social pressure against slavery within each state became greater than the economic benefit of slavery, and I have predicted that tipping point would have been reached between 20 and 80 years subsequent to 1860.
Meaning that even if the claims that the war was over slavery were true, it would have ended on it's own without bloodshed anyway, rendering the war a horrible tragedy.