17
SPRING 2018
Did the U.S. government's inability to compromise
over slavery trigger the Civil War, as White House
Chief of Staff John Kelly suggested last year?
Or had first-term President Abraham Lincoln,
in fact, publicly supported a constitutional
amendment to leave slavery untouched where
it already existed? In his award-winning book,
Lincoln and the Politics of Slavery: The Other
13th Amendment and the Struggle to Save the Union,
excerpted here, Professor Emeritus of History
Daniel W. Crofts disrupts the contemporary
narrative surrounding the Great Emancipator.
THE GREAT
COMPROMISER
Words by DANIEL W. CROFTS Pictures by REGAN DUNNICK