With all due respect to Professor Suber, who should certainly be applauded on his relatively firm grasp of an obscure and little-known event of American history, his characterization of the amendment's unamendability is in error. Very few people have studied this issue in quite some time, though those who have done so in greater depth have concluded differently (he is a philosopher as opposed to a lawyer, political scientist, or historian). If you read the debates from the congressional record and documents surrounding the amendment it is clear that they intended it to be an unamendable extension of the 1808 clause using that same clause as precedent. It was effectively intended to prevent slavery from being abolished by anyone except for the states individually doing it themselves.
If greater time permits, I'll happily point you to some of the documents on this matter. Some are very obscure and hard to come by, though I do have some photocopies of my own of some of them that I could excerpt. For the immediate time being, I'm going to have to ask you to trust me on it (I wrote a thesis on compromise legislation during the secession winter and have extensively researched the congressional records from that session if it helps any to establish me as a credible source on the matter). If I get around to pulling out my old files on it over the holiday though, I'll try and locate the relevant stuff on it.
I wrote a thesis on compromise legislation during the secession winter and have extensively researched the congressional records from that session if it helps any to establish me as a credible source on the matter... I would like to have the short form of your opinion of the proposed compromise. My working opinion of it until now has been that Lincoln didn't want a compromise, because he preferred to incur a war, win the war, and have things all his own way.