Amendment

Abraham Lincoln endorsed an amendment to the Constitution directly relevant to slavery, but it might not be what our listeners think it was.

If this had been ratified by the states, this would have been the 13th Amendment to our Constitution, and this is a pro-slavery amendment.

The uproar that it sparks, as dark as this moment seems, this is going to be the undoing of slavery.

William Lloyd Garrison, the great Boston abolitionist, he calls it a covenant with death and an agreement with hell, and he publicly burns the Constitution.

Powell Welcome to the Liberalism.org show.

I'm Aaron Ross Powell, Senior Director of Liberal Projects at the Institute for Humane Studies.

I'm joined today by Damon Root, Senior Editor at Reason and the author of the new book, Emancipation War, The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the 13th Amendment.

There were two 13th Amendments.

This is a story where if you're gonna start now, you have to stick with me, or if you come in later, you're gonna have to go back and listen to the beginning.

I say that because what I'm about to tell you about Amendment 84 is going to raise the hackles of everybody, hunters, fishermen, the PETA people, everybody's gonna be pissed off about this because of how I've broken it down, and this fight is going on on social media.

It's all over X, it's all over Facebook, it's all over Nextdoor, it's all over...

It's, it's everywhere.

So I'm gonna take you all the way down this path, because by the end, I don't think you're going to be angry at one man, I think you're going to be worried about a sentence.

Here's what we're voting on.

It's Amendment 84 on our November ballot.

A citizen wrote it, gathered the signatures, and put it in front of you, which means it doesn't just need 50% to pass, it needs 55.