text: The Corwin Amendment is a proposed amendment to the United States Constitution that would shield "domestic institutions" of the states (which in 1861 included slavery) from the constitutional amendment process and from abolition or interference by Congress.[1][2] It was passed by the 36th Congress on March 2, 1861, and submitted to the state legislatures for ratification. Senator William H. Seward of New York introduced the amendment in the Senate and Representative Thomas Corwin of Ohio introduced it in the House of Representatives. It was one of several measures considered by Congress in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to attract the seceding states back into the Union and in an attempt to entice border slave states to stay.[3][4]
  No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any State, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said State.[1][5]
  The text refers to slavery with terms such as "domestic institutions" and "persons held to labor or service" and avoids using the word "slavery", following the example set at the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which referred to slavery in its draft of the Constitution with comparable descriptions of legal status: "Person held to Service", "the whole Number of free Persons ..., three fifths of all other Persons", "The Migration and Importation of such Persons".[6]
  No amendment of this Constitution, having for its object any interference within the States with the relations between their citizens and those described in second section of the first article of the Constitution as "all other persons," shall originate with any State that does not recognize that relation within its own limits, or shall be valid without the assent of every one of the States composing the Union.
  The Corwin Amendment as it was approved by the House of Representatives on February 28, 1861 and the Senate on March 2, 1861.
  On March 2, 1861, the United States Senate adopted it, with no changes, on a vote of 24 to 12.[13] Since proposed constitutional amendments require a two-thirds majority, 132 votes were required in the House and 24 in the Senate. The Senators and Representatives from the seven slave states that had already declared their secession from the Union did not vote on the Corwin Amendment.[14] The resolution called for the amendment to be submitted to the state legislatures and to be adopted "when ratified by three-fourths of said Legislatures."[15] Its supporters believed that the Corwin Amendment had a greater chance of success in the legislatures of the Southern states than would have been the case in state ratifying conventions, since state conventions were being conducted throughout the South at which votes to secede from the Union were successful—just as Congress was considering the Corwin Amendment.
  Response by Presidents
  Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, said of the Corwin Amendment:[2][17]
  Kentucky — April 4, 1861[22][23]
  Ohio — May 13, 1861[24] (Rescinded ratification – March 31, 1864[25])
  Rhode Island — May 31, 1861[22][26]
  Maryland — January 10, 1862[19][27] (Rescinded ratification – April 7, 2014[28])
  Illinois — February 14, 1862[15] (Questionable validity[lower-alpha 1])
  The Restored Government of Virginia, consisting mostly of representatives of what would become West Virginia, voted to approve the amendment on February 13, 1862.[22] However, West Virginia did not ratify the amendment after it became a state in 1863.
  In 1963, more than a century after the Corwin Amendment was submitted to the state legislatures by the Congress, a joint resolution to ratify it was introduced in the Texas House of Representatives by Dallas Republican Henry Stollenwerck.[30] The joint resolution was referred to the House's Committee on Constitutional Amendments on March 7, 1963, but received no further consideration.[31]
  A competing theory, however, suggests that a later amendment conflicting with an already-ratified Corwin Amendment could either explicitly repeal the Corwin Amendment (as the Twenty-first Amendment explicitly repealed the Eighteenth Amendment) or be inferred to have partially or completely repealed any conflicting provisions of an already-adopted Corwin Amendment.[32][33]
  ↑ As Congress submitted the amendment to the state legislatures for ratification and Illinois lawmakers were sitting as delegates to a state constitutional convention rather than as members of the legislature when they ratified the amendment, the state's ratification of the Corwin Amendment is of questionable validity.[19][29]
  1 2 "Constitutional Amendments Not Ratified". United States House of Representatives. Archived from the original on 2012-07-02. Retrieved 2013-11-21.
  1 2 Walter, Michael (2003). "Ghost Amendment: The Thirteenth Amendment That Never Was". Retrieved 4 August 2016.
  ↑ David Waldstreicher, Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (NY: Hill & Wang, 2009), "Prologue: Meaningful Silences", 3-10, 98-9, 113. "Madison succeeded only in getting through a semantic change ... that kept the slave-trade clause from stating directly 'that there could be property in men.'"
  1 2 3 Ewen Cameron Mac Veagh, "The Other Rejected Amendments", The North American Review, vol. 222, no. 829, December 1925, 281-2
  1 2 Orville James Victor, The History, Civil, Political and Military, of the Southern Rebellion (NY: James D Torrey, 1861), I, 463
  1 2 Brandon, 219-20
  ↑ Lupton, John A (2006). "Abraham Lincoln and the Corwin Amendment". Illinois Periodicals Online. Retrieved 4 August 2016.
  1 2 3 Harold Holzer, Lincoln President-Elect: Abraham Lincoln and the Great Secession Winter 1860-1861 (NY: Simon & Schuster, 2008), 429
  1 2 3 Crofts, Daniel W. (2016). Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 245–250. ISBN 9781469627328.
  ↑ Resolution 10. Acts of the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, Passed at the Called Session which was Begun and Held in the City of Frankfort, on Thursday, the 17th Day of January 1861 and Ended on Friday, the Fifth Day of April 1861. Frankfort: Commonwealth of Kentucky. 1861. pp. 51–52 – via Google Books.
  ↑ "Adoption of the Corwin Amendment". Providence Evening Press. 3 June 1861. p. 2 – via GenealogyBank.com.
  ↑ "Slavery: Just a "Detail"?". The Progress Report. Retrieved June 21, 2015.
  ↑ Linder, Douglas. "What in the Constitution Cannot be Amended?". Arizona Law Review: 717. . See also: Michael Stokes Paulsen, "A General Theory of Article V: The Constitutional Lessons of the Twenty-Seventh Amendment", Yale Law Journal, vol. 103, no. 3, December 1993, 699n79, 702-4, 754n258: "[I]f the meaning of the amendment is judged by its text, rather than by historical evidence of those proposing it, the Corwin Amendment merely prohibits prospectively the enactment of new constitutional amendments giving Congress power to abolish slavery. ... The Corwin Amendment by its terms, is not a slavery-entrenching amendment, but a status-quo-entrenching amendment; and the legal status quo today is that slavery is prohibited." (emphasis in original)
  ↑ Albert, Richard (2013-02-27). "The Unamendable Corwin Amendment". Int'l J. Const. L. Blog. Retrieved 2 March 2013.
  Crofts, Daniel W (2016). Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other Thirteenth Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union. University of North Carolina Press Books. ISBN 978-1-4696-2731-1. ; comprehensive scholarly history of Corwin amendment.
  Martin, Philip E. (1966). "Illinois' Ratification of the Corwin Amendment". Journal of Public Law. 15: 18–91.