Lincoln, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Admission of Nevada

Abstract

THE SCHOLARS AND THE DEBUNKERS have pared away much of the legend-the hagiography which not only canonized the man but presented him posthumously with a united and sympathetic party. Today the schoolboy knows that Lincoln was both political manager and statesman, and he knows that Lincoln had bitter enemies and outspoken critics among those who elected him. But the legend dies hard: it is a blend of truth, error, and fabrication in which the revisionists themselves have not disdained to quarry. Most of them accept a story of the admission of Nevada whose best claim to acceptance is that it seems to confirm aptly both legend and revision. proposal of the thirteenth amendment was to President Lincoln one of the great political objects of 1864-1865. The passage of this amendment, he told Representative James Rollins of Missouri in January, 1865, clinch the whole subject. It will bring the war, I have no doubt, rapidly to a close' crucial vote was in the House, where the amendment failed on January 15, 1864,2 and passed on January 3 1, 1865, by the narrow margin of one hundred nineteen to fifty-six-two over twothirds. Ratification was easy and uneventful.! Charles Anderson Dana, assistant secretary of war under Stanton and later editor of the New York Sun, published in McClure's Magazine for April, 1898, a temptingly graphic and circumstantial story, which has led many to identify Lincoln's strategy toward the thirteenth amendment with the passage of the Nevada enabling act: