History of the United States I / Unit 15 USH1 2110 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
The Corwin Amendment
The idea
Representative Thomas Corwin of Ohio proposed a constitutional amendment preventing Congress from abolishing slavery. It passed the House on February twenty-eighth, eighteen sixty-one and the Senate on March second. Lincoln said he had no objection to it. Ohio ratified it in eighteen sixty-one, and Maryland and Illinois in eighteen sixty-two. The Confederate states did not return. Had it been ratified, it would have been the Thirteenth Amendment, and it would have protected slavery permanently rather than abolishing it.
In practice
Congress passing, and an incoming president accepting, an amendment guaranteeing slavery for ever, at the exact moment the South was leaving over the threat to slavery.
Where people slip
Teach this one carefully because it settles a common claim. Secession is often explained as a response to an imminent threat of abolition. There was no such threat, and the proof is that the threatened party was offered a permanent constitutional guarantee and left anyway. What the South would not accept was not abolition, which was not on offer from anybody, but the end of expansion. The number Thirteen is the detail students remember: the same numeral, two opposite amendments, four years apart.
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