The Proslavery Thirteenth Amendment That Almost Was (with Damon Root)

In his first inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln endorsed the Corwin Amendment, which would have permanently barred the federal government from interfering with slavery in the states where it already existed; had it been ratified, that would be the Thirteenth Amendment we know today. Host Aaron Ross Powell talks with Damon Root, senior editor at Reason and author of Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment, about the four years that turned a proslavery amendment into an abolitionist one. They discuss the three competing readings of slavery in the Constitution that divided Calhoun, Garrison, Douglass, and Lincoln; the enslaved men who walked into Fortress Monroe in 1861 and pushed Union policy toward emancipation from the bottom up; and why Root disputes the claim, associated with Angela Davis and Ava DuVernay's documentary 13th, that the amendment's exception clause was a deliberate loophole.

Further Reading

• Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment — Damon Root, Potomac Books

• A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution — Damon Root, Potomac Books

• Damon Root's archive at Reason — Reason

More from Liberalism.org

• A Civic Education That Extends America — Melvin Rogers

• The Eighteenth Brumaire and Collective Wrongs — Michael C. Munger