re: #435 CapeCoddah

Good afternoon everyone.. Just a few quotes from President Lincoln..:

Not only was Lincoln a racist, he allowed the Confederacy to keep slavery:

“No amendment shall be made to the Constitution which will authorize or give Congress the power to abolish or interfere within any state with the domestic institutions thereof, including that a person’s held to labor or service by laws of said State.”
-Abraham Lincoln-March of 1861

Factcheck:

This is not attributable to Abraham Lincoln. It is in fact attributable to Thomas Corwin and it is from the Corwin Amendment which reads:

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.

Lincoln did support it in 1861 in order to avoid hostilities with the South:

Abraham Lincoln and the Corwin Amendment

In his inaugural address, Lincoln noted Congressional approval of the Corwin amendment and stated that he “had no objection to its being made express and irrevocable.” This was not a departure from Lincoln’s views on slavery at that time. Lincoln followed the Republican platform from the Chicago convention. He believed that the major problem between the North and South was the inability to reach agreement with respect to the expansion of slavery. Lincoln did not believe that he had the power to eliminate slavery where it already existed. However, Southerners feared that a Republican administration would take direct aim at the institution of slavery. By tacitly supporting Corwin’s amendment, Lincoln hoped to convince the South that he would not move to abolish slavery and, at the minimum, keep the border states of Maryland, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and North Carolina from seceding.

However we also find in the same article:

…While personally opposed to slavery, Lincoln believed the Constitution supported it. His support of the Corwin amendment attempted to codify that belief, but the Civil War changed his opinion on presidential power. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1862, and in 1865, vigorously worked to pass the actual thirteenth amendment, which declared slavery illegal.

Otherwise, the attribution of this amendment to Lincoln is 100 percent false and belongs none other than to Ohio Representative Thomas Corwin.