How Secession Destroyed Slavery in Five Years | America's Written Constitution

Lincoln took office with under 40 percent of the popular vote and no majority in either house. Akhil Reed Amar argues the South could have simply outwaited him, and explains what firing on Fort Sumter cost it instead. This lecture rejects the comfortable story that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments fulfilled the founders' design. Amar argues the opposite: the system grew more pro-slavery decade by decade, with a South that criminalized anti-slavery preaching, sent Preston Brooks back to Congress a hero, and pushed for expansion into Kansas, Cuba, and Mexico. He walks through Lincoln's shift from restoring the Union to emancipation, driven by two calculations, keeping Britain from recognizing the Confederacy and moving roughly 180,000 Black soldiers from one side of the ledger to the other. He then follows the arithmetic that made the Fourteenth Amendment necessary, since emancipation turned every three-fifths count into five-fifths and would have returned the South with more power than before. The lecture covers birthright citizenship overturning Dred Scott, privileges or immunities as a second Bill of Rights against the states, why voting was deliberately left out, how Section 2 and readmission terms produced the Fifteenth Amendment, and the "Shall I Trust These Men?" cartoon that closes the chapter. Chapters: 00:00 The story we would like to tell, and why it is false 02:22 How the South shut down its own debate 06:58 The strategy that could have beaten Lincoln 09:01 Fort Sumter, and a catastrophic miscalculation 13:14 Why Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation 16:53 The Thirteenth Amendment: immediate and uncompensated 20:33 The arithmetic problem that freedom created 22:06 The Fourteenth Amendment, sentence by sentence 28:19 How the Fifteenth Amendment became possible 31:24 "Shall I trust these men?" Learning objectives: After watching, you'll be able to: - Refute the claim that the Reconstruction Amendments fulfilled the founders' intentions - Explain the diplomatic and military reasoning behind the Emancipation Proclamation - Describe what made the Thirteenth Amendment radical by the standards of its time - Trace how ending the three-fifths discount created the need for the Fourteenth Amendment - Distinguish civil rights from political rights in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments 📺 Watch the full playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCq6-l8oFuvk 🎓 Enroll on Coursera for assessments and a certificate: https://www.coursera.org/learn/written-constitution 🌐 Explore more learning opportunities on Yale Online: https://online.yale.edu/courses/americas-written-constitution