The men listed above were among the very few who could possibly have been present for the most critical moments in the life of the original 13th Amendment. Every attempt has been made to establish their location and the office they held at each of these moments, in an effort to resolve why the removal of the 13th Amendment from the U.S. Constitution did not raise a public furor across the country.
The original 13th Amendment did not appear, nor did it disappear, all at once. Since the United States Constitution already contained a prohibition against titles of nobility, etc., the concept was not at all foreign to the citizenry. An amendment imposing a penalty for violating the prohibition had already been proposed as early as 1788. This being the case, a new proposal in Congress in 1810 was no great surprise, and widespread approval was evident. When Bioren and Duane published the amendment a bit prematurely in 1815, no eyebrows were raised. It has been said that the amendment was simply ignored to death, but it might be more proper to say that the general
notion of the amendment was already so much a part of the American idealogy that it simply did not merit a great deal of sudden attention.
Once proposed, the amendment proceeded toward the expected rapid ratification until the War of 1812 broke out, disrupting the process for a period of time. Even though legislative interest in completing the ratification returned to normal some time after the war, the interest of the public was far more riveted on the issue of a new U.S. Bank.
Publication of the ratified amendment by Virginia raised no exceptional amount of public notice, either. There had apparently been some confusion over whether South Carolina had ratified the amendment, but this amounted to a moot point, as Virginia's publication carried the ratification.
As the amendment was now being published all over the country, no one thought more of it, until Justice Story published his "Commentaries on the Constitution" in 1833, some 14 years after the fact. Story claimed the amendment had not been ratified, but his book was primarily in use by the courts, not by the general public.
When Little and Brown removed the original 13th amendment from the Statutes at Large in 1845 (relying on Story), the event passed so quietly and enough time (34 years) had gone by, that the federal government simply published the new version of the Constitution again without raising any eyebrows. Many of the original legislators had already died off. Many of the states and territories continued to publish and teach the amendment as part of the Constitution.
The story that it was all a silly mistake continued to circulate in legal circles, where Story's book was still in heavy use - and which further now agreed with the United States Statutes at Large. Had there been any court cases brought which relied on the amendment, a good deal of public notice might have been raised. But since Story's book (and opinion) had long since become the authoritative work on the subject, no lawyer would have wished to try such a case.
During all the years from 1819 to 1861, no other constitutional amendments were passed. Over this period of some 42 years, most of the men who had been a part of the 13th Amendment's passage had died. Those who still lived in the final ratifying state of Virginia had become citizens of the Confederate States of America, as had nearly a third of the general population. Proposal of a "new" 13th amendment, which was not referred to by number, went unheeded by them, and passage of a 3rd 13th amendment did not arrive until 1866. By 1866, even fewer of the original legislators were left alive, the country was in a war torn political shambles, and anyone left who remembered the truth would almost certainly have fallen within the penalty provisions of the original 13th amendment.
As you will observe, only one of these men was demonstrably capable of knowing each and every event from first-hand knowledge. Bear in mind here, that these men were a very few amongst many who took part in various steps of the TONA's development. One might easily think that there were many people who took great notice of activities concerning the amendment.
However, a study of the membership of the Virginia House of Delegates and the United States Congress during the critical period of ratification in that state reveals that many who might have known of its ratification in Virginia were simply not on site or holding office in the state at the time of actual ratification.
Despite the fact that various printings of the United States Constitution had placed the TONA in its proper place as the 13th Amendment, during the time of its proposal and ratification it was never referred to by a number at all. Later presentation of another amendment numbered 13 would not have necessarily raised much attention in any case - but the amendment was not numbered. The general public would not have been suddenly tipped off to the disappearance of the original 13th amendment.
Then, too, those who held various offices were constantly changing from one career position to another. The age of the professional politician had already arrived, much to the chagrin of James Madison, himself a native Virginian. As to the later critical events of 1845, 1861, and 1865, we see that almost none of the original players had survived.
Of those who were still alive, they, as Virginians, became Confederates and no longer considered themselves part of the United States' government. It should not be surprising, then, that these men took exactly no public notice of the contrived 13th Amendment proffered in 1861. And by 1865, those who yet survived another 4 years had no other means of regaining representation in Congress for their states than by speedily adopting the "new" 13th Amendment.
Amongst all the dozens of witnesses and participants to each singular event, only two men were found who were both present and in a position to bear personal witness to the facts. Those men were William S. Archer and William C. Rives. As fate would have it, both are rather obscure figures of whom very little record is found. Both Archer and Rives were in the Virginia House of Delegates when the 13th Amendment was ratified, and both were serving in the U.S. Senate when the Little and Brown United States Statutes at large dispensed with printing the amendment.
As it happened, both men left office for the last time on the day the Little and Brown Statutes were officially published, and neither would have seen the deletion of the original 13th amendment. The U.S. Constitution was stashed many pages deep into a preface section, most certainly not read by either man. After all, neither one would have had any reason to suddenly doubt Little and Brown's ability to reprint the United States' Constitution accurately! Archer, like most of the other participants, died before the newer amendment of 1861 was written. Rives died in 1868, and had ample reason not to speak up publicly regarding this last 13th amendment, as his personal biography will attest. Thus we have eliminated the last possible eye-witnesses to the entire chain of events.
Of course, the fact that no single person was an eye-witness to the entire chain of events does not dismiss other paths of inquiry. After all, the ratification did not take place in a vacuum. The present antiquity and scarcity of the journals of the Virginia State Legislature are primarily to blame for the lack of public knowledge on the subject. But we have finally adequately explained why, if the amendment was thought to be a mere printing error, there would have been no public outcry. And, we have also explained, using the entire sequence of events, why there was no great outcry at its final disappearance in 1876, either.
