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Congress passed the Corwin Amendment to the Constituion near the end of Buchanan?s administration. (Due to the outbreak of hostilities the states never had the time needed to adopt or reject it.) It prohibted the Federal Government from abolishing slavery in the states where it existed. (It was identical to a earlier proposal that William H. Stewart made in the Senate.)Buchanan supported it. So did Linclon in his first inagural address. The South, however, ignored it--just as they had Stewart's proposal. Sadly the South was unreceiptive to compromise; the firebrands were in control and they didn't really want to avert the coming war. It?s interesting to sepeculate on what would have happened if the Corwin Amendment had become part of the Constitution.
The south would have continued to fight for the territories that were later to become states to enter the union as slave states. I'm not sure how the ammendment would have dealt with that.
I would have to agree with SF here. At best the Corwin Amendment would have been a band-aid that covered the divide but would not have healed it. It would have delayed the inevitable showdown for a few years at best.
Had that amendment come into effect earlier in the Buchanan presidency, the South would have seceded then. Had the Civil War started just 4-5 years earlier, it is highly possible that the North would not have been able to prevent the South from breaking away. By 1861 though, the North's resources were just too vast.
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