The journey of this constitutional amendment from passage by Congress to ratification by the required number of states took just 10 months. Congress passed it on January 31,1865, and President Abraham Lincoln signed it the following day. But while the annals of American history— as reflected by the ongoing celebration this year of the 250th anniversary of this nation’ s founding— remember this moment, it seems to have forgotten the attempt four years earlier to address the issue of slavery with a different 13th amendment.
That attempt, too, had the backing of Lincoln. But it held a more menacing fate for the nearly four million people of African descent who were then enslaved in the United States. On February 26, 1861, Ohio Rep. Thomas Corwin introduced a bill that, if passed by Congress and ratified by the states, would