The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War

by Erik Larson

Senate received the amendment proposed by the Peace Convention and promptly voted it into oblivion, 28 to 7. It never went to the House. But a vestige survived in the form of a parallel constitutional amendment proposed in the House by Rep. Thomas Corwin of Ohio and in the Senate by William Seward that guaranteed that Congress would not interfere with slavery where it currently existed. This vestigial stub fared better. The House approved it by a vote of 133 to 65; the Senate did likewise, 24 to 12. Lincoln later forwarded the proposed amendment, the original thirteenth, to all state governors, including those in the Confederacy, for ratification by their legislatures. He neither endorsed it nor denounced it. As he saw it, the amendment merely made explicit—“express and irrevocable”—a principle already embodied in the Constitution and one he himself had espoused many times. Only a few states would ultimately ratify the amendment before events made it irrelevant. Known to future centuries as the Shadow or Ghost Amendment, it remained an active congressionally approved but unratified amendment into the twenty-first century, theoretically still open to a final vote by the states.