What do you think President Lincoln could have done differently between November 1860 and March 1861?
Walt
That isn't relevant to the point under discussion. N-S was cavilling that it would have been "hard" for Lincoln to have brought up the amendment. Lincoln wasn't a slave.
What do you think President Lincoln could have done differently between November 1860 and March 1861?
I've thought about that, and I think that if I'd been in Lincoln's position in 1860, I'd have begun a letter-writing campaign to the Southern papers, most of which would have printed them. People paid much closer attention to speeches and letters then, and I'd have used the papers as free advertising. I'd have made the offer of the amendment then, in the middle of much else offered up like FDR's "fireside chats". There were several demographic and political facts to work with:
1. The fact that slaveholders were a minority even among franchisees.
2. The divergence of interests between slaveholding planters and freeholders.
3. Lincoln wasn't committed to extending the franchise to blacks; I'd have put that in, along with other soothingly non-abolitionist statements, to underscore that I was not the John Brown partisan that people like Breckenridge were saying that I was.
4. I'd have talked redemption (for cash) and transportation (to relieve the Southerners' other bugbear about Haiti), and 5. An amendment like the proposed 13th would give the Southern planters most of what they wanted.
As Winston Churchill once said, jaw-jaw beats war-war.