DBWI: The Corwin amendment never became law

Would a Civil War have broken out had the states not ratified the 13th amendment, also known as the Corwin Amendment?

That's a good question.....though it would have been for the better had the Corwin Amendment not come to pass, even if a Civil War had occurred(as tragic as that would be). Because we likely would have avoided not only the humiliations of the 1880s, or the Panic of 1898, but also the domestic tragedies of the first decade of the 20th Century(like the Ellis Island bombing of 1908 which killed 284 people and injured many hundreds more, just weeks before the Corwin Amendment was repealed), too, as well as the horrendous street-level bloodbaths that followed the decade after(and did not stop with our entry into the Great War in 1913, nor end after it's conclusion in 1915-16), as reactionaries and radical progressives fought each other nearly every day of the week somewhere in the country.

Granted, the good guys ultimately won, but not before some 150,000 innocent lives had been claimed by political violence by 1919(and that's going by official U.S. gov't statistics that don't include lynchings, of which at least 18,000 are known to have occurred between 1860 and 1908, half of them African-Americans, including a few thousand enslaved). And so much of that can be traced, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, right back to the Corwin Amendment. I can only be thankful that we learned our lesson, even if rather late.....

OOC: TBH, I really don't think the Corwin Amendment could have succeeded with a POD after 1859-60; anti-slavery sentiment was just too strong in too many of the states north of the Mason-Dixon at that time IOTL. Maybe something closer to, say, 1854-55 might work?
 
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Well, if your POD is that it never became law.. then we get OTL since we never did make it law.

OOC: Just so you know, this is a DBWI, btw. You probably know about regular WIs, right? Well, DBWIs are like that, but set in a universe where something that didn't happen IOTL did happen in that universe. For example, in a universe in which the Patriots lost the Revolutionary War, we might be asking, "What if they had succeeded?", and so on. I hope that helps. :)
 
Did the Corwin Amendment really make much difference?

It didn't prevent the de facto banning of slavery from the Territories, in blatant disregard of the Dred Scott ruling, nor the watering down of the Fugitive Slave Law. All it did was prevent the Federal government from banning slavery in the states where it existed, which was in any case impossible short of civil war. So unless the South did something really stupid, like trying to secede, not much could happen anyway.
 
Did the Corwin Amendment really make much difference?

It didn't prevent the de facto banning of slavery from the Territories, in blatant disregard of the Dred Scott ruling, nor the watering down of the Fugitive Slave Law. All it did was prevent the Federal government from banning slavery in the states where it existed, which was in any case impossible short of civil war. So unless the South did something really stupid, like trying to secede, not much could happen anyway.

In regards to the permanent banning slavery from all the territories, however: that took until 1872 to become reality, and there was a lot of bloodshed in Kansas and Nebraska in particular-esp. Kansas-before those two territories finally banned slavery on their own accord. A not insignificant amount also took place in the New Mexico and Jefferson Territories as well prior to Chase v. Davis.
 
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