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