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Whie tptacek has basically the right answer here, it's worth reading the actual text of the Corwin Amendment: > No amendment shall be made to the Constitution
by Sniffnoy 9y ago
Whie tptacek has basically the right answer here, it's worth reading the actual text of the Corwin Amendment:
> 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.
What the Corwin Amendment does, then, is ban further amendments that would abolish slavery. But since the prohibition against slavery is now already part of the constituion, it would, AFAICT, not be affected by the hypothetical ratification of the Corwin Amendment.
- curun1r 9y ago> is ban further amendments I'm not sure it even does that. Reading the passage you quoted, it seems like it only bars amendments that give Congress the power to interfere with state slavery laws. But the amendment that freed the slaves didn't give Congress that power, it just freed the slaves itself. It sounds like The Corwin Amendment only covers attempts to abolish slavery that wouldn't go through the process of ratification by the states.
- adrianratnapala 9y agoThe slave states would have have said that this was just bolstering an existing, common understanding that the US was voluntary association of states, and hence even the US constitution could not override basic state powers. And before the Civil War, that understanding might well have held in both the North and the South. Indeed northern states often thumbed their noses at the federal fugitive slave laws -- including the Constitution. By the time of the war though, the political state of play was that state sovereignty and the abolition of slavery were at loggerheads -- and abolishing slavery was far more important.