Booknotes: Emancipation War

New Arrival:

• Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment by Damon Root (Potomac Bks, 2026).

From the description: "Speaking to a fractured country for the first time as president, Abraham Lincoln endorsed a constitutional amendment designed to permanently safeguard slavery in every state in which the institution already existed. If that proslavery provision had been ratified, it would have become the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Three years later, Lincoln again threw his support behind a constitutional amendment to address slavery: this time to abolish it. Formally ratified in 1865, this is the Thirteenth Amendment we know today."

As was the case with all other major conciliatory proposals that preceded it, the idea that the 1861 version of what might have been a Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution being anything more than a legislative dead end seems very unlikely. Nonetheless, Damon Root's new book Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment seeks to provide answers to some key questions surrounding the matter: "What happened in those intervening years that led Lincoln to switch from supporting a proslavery amendment to embracing the antislavery provision that ultimately became enshrined in the Constitution? Why did the Thirteenth Amendment of 1864–65 win out over that of 1861?"

Following the multitude of forces involved "from both the top down and the bottom up," Root's Emancipation War "chronicles the great legal, political, and military struggle to amend the U.S. Constitution to outlaw slavery once and for all." It was those parts of a "wide-ranging movement against slavery―operating both inside and outside the halls of government power, fighting both on and off the battlefield―that made an antislavery constitutional amendment possible."