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.
Okay, now explain to your pals that they are the ones who are revisionists.
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."
Says the cynic. During the Civil War somebody wrote a story about you, "The Man Without a Country."
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.
Maryland and Kentucky were union states but not Northern states. The Southern states were already gone or almost gone. The Northern tier of states weren't going to ratify. Work on a compromise amendment to reassure the South that the government wouldn't try to abolish slavery had been going on since the election. The amendment only got the required 2/3rds majority a few days before Lincoln took the oath of office. Buchanan approved of it and even signed it though he didn't have to. It wasn't Lincoln's project. The Amendment was bound to fail, but people who wanted keep the country together were willing to make the attempt.
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.
Slaveowners didn't believe him. They said over and over and over again that they didn't believe him. Do you really deny this? They saw a party that wasn't committed to slavery as a threat to slavery, and thought slavery would be more secure outside the union than inside it.
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.
In other words, you are a defender of slavery.