Most Americans are familiar with the vital 13th Amendment to the Consitution, which formalized that those so emancipated through the Emancipation Proclamation, were through this Amendment to the Consitution, no longer to ever be enslaved. What made the 13th Amendment so powerful was the fact that such emancipation of those previously enslaved was now formalized as part of Constitutional law, as opposed to it just being a measure enacted during wartime, as well as applying only to those States still in rebellion against the Union. What, though, most people do not know, and are unaware of, is that in 1861, in consideration that Lincoln had been just elected President, a proposed 13th Amendment was drafted, which stated, in essence, that Congress would not abolish or interfere with any State in regards to their domestic labor laws, which essentially meant that Congress would not have the ability to eradicate slavery in those States still permitting slavery to be part of their domain. This 13th Amendment did not pass both Houses and therefore was never enacted or ratified. Yet, one would think, that the Southern States if they had been fully alert to what this Amendment so proposed, of which, their peculiar institution would not thereby be messed with, by Congress or by the President, made a quite tragic error in not seeing that it be so passed; though they indeed made that error, of which, perhaps if they had not been so short-sighted, it is conceivable that the Civil War would not thus have occurred.
Indeed, the United States of America from its inception as a nation, had significant sectional differences between those that were in the North as compared to those that were in the South, and the Constitution so created, along with its original Amendments, reflected that reality. However, the United States went from having just thirteen colonies, that thereby became States, to expanding from just one coast to both coasts, so that there rose within America, a deep division, as to whether or not it was meant, or was appropriate, or was destined that new States should or could include slavery or not. So too, Supreme Court decisions, such as the seminal Dred Scott v. Sanford decision of 1857, exacerbated the issue of free persons and slavery, by declaring that the black man “… had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
So then, the proposed 13th Amendment of 1861, was initiated as a viable solution, to leave the institution of slavery alone in those States, which still recognized slavery, so as to keep this union of States, together. Instead, in part because this Amendment did not pass, and in consideration that the South was incorrigible and intransigence in their belief that they had a perpetual right to enslave human beings because of the color of their skin, and to even expand that into new territories and States, the inevitably of the Civil War was to come to fruition, leading then to this proposed 13th Amendment, never to be enacted, and replaced essentially by the very opposite sentiment. It can be said that the Southern States gambled it all in order to have slavery be the law of the land as they best saw fit, only in the end, to lose slavery and their slaves entirely as an institution, replaced instead by this new birth of freedom, irrespective of race.