Forgotten Pages
Behind the Pages · documentary
The Corwin Amendment
The amendment Lincoln had "no objection" to, 1861
What you'll hear
On March 4, 1861, with seven slave states already out of the Union, Abraham Lincoln told the South in his first inaugural address that he had no purpose to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed. He also spoke of an amendment Congress had passed only hours before, which would have barred forever any amendment giving Congress power over slavery in the states. He had “no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.”
This documentary tells the story of that first Thirteenth Amendment, largely in Lincoln's own words: what he told Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward in December 1860, Thomas Corwin's work in the House, the night vote in the Senate, and James Buchanan's signature. You'll hear how Frederick Douglass answered the inaugural, which states ratified it, and why, with no deadline, it is in theory still before the states.
It is told with period pictures, and the primary sources are quoted word for word.
Watch on YouTubeWatch the preview
A one-minute Short: The First 13th Amendment Would Have Protected Slavery
- Length
- 7 min 56 s
- Narration
- Eric
- Sources
- Lincoln's inaugural and letters, the Congressional Globe, the Statutes at Large, the National Archives
- Music
- Valse Triste (1915), Siegfried’s Funeral March (1913), Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C-sharp minor (1915)