This is The Reason interview with Nick Gillespie. My guest today is Damon Rood, a long-time legal affairs writer, constitutional scholar for Reason magazine. He's worked elsewhere as well at the Columbia House Record catalog. CD. CD to the month, 12 CDs for a penny.

Yeah.

Can't beat it.

Well, we'll talk mostly about that, but we'll also squeeze in a little bit about conversation about his latest book, Emancipation War, the fall of slavery and the coming of the 13th Amendment. Damon, thanks for talking to reason. Thank you, Nick. Great to be here. Okay. Emancipation War is about the 13th Amendment, which bans slavery in the United States and all of its territories.

You start off writing the book early in 1861, and it's Abraham Lincoln is talking about how, yeah, he's for the 13th Amendment, but the 13th Amendment he's talking about would preserve slavery and the, or I would say the federal government has no ability to change slavery status.

You know, what's going on? Set the stage.

This is this sort of forgotten or maybe misremembered part of the first inaugural address where Lincoln endorses this constitutional amendment that has just passed Congress and it says that the federal government can never touch

slavery in the states. It would be illegal to be unconstitutional to amend the Constitution

to go after slavery in the states. And that is sort of this gesture of trying to prevent the civil

war, trying to keep the country from falling apart over the issue of slavery. And so if that had been

ratified by the states, that would be the 13th Amendment in our Constitution. But instead,

a couple of years later, 1864, Lincoln endorses another constitutional amendment. This is the one

we know today to abolish slavery everywhere. So this book. And then that starts the reconstruction amendments that kind of actually bring African-Americans

and foreigners apparently, or, you know, anchor babies into American citizenship rights and things

like that. Well, we can talk about the 14th Amendment for sure. The amendment had passed Congress, but it had not gone to the states and the southern states started, southern states

started to succeed, right? Is that why it was never voted on? Right. It never goes through that

state ratification process. And so then when the real 13th amendment, the final 13th amendment

comes up in Congress,

one of the first things that Congress has to do is have an official repeal of this earlier

one.

And so various senators and Congress people who had voted for that said, well, you know,

I would have been willing to do anything to prevent the outbreak of war a couple years ago.

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