There were many other propositions offered, considered, and defeated, to wit: Propositions from the Senate Committee of thirteen appointed December 18, 1860; propositions of Douglas, Seward, and others; also propositions from a meeting of Senators and members from the border, free, and slave States, all relating to slavery, and proposed with a view of stopping the already precipitated secession of States.(119) Some of these propositions were exasperatingly humiliating, and only possibly justifiable by the times. Though Lincoln's election as President was claimed to be a good cause for secession, and though much of the compromise talk was to appease his party opponents as well as the South, he was opposed to bargaining himself into the office to which the people had elected him. With respect to this matter (January 30, 1861) he said: "I will suffer death before I will consent, or advise my friends to consent, to any concession or compromise which looks like buying the privilege of taking possession of the government to which we have a constitutional right." We have now done with legislation, attempted legislation, and constitutional amendments to protect and extend slavery in the Republic. Slavery appealed to war, and by the inexorable decree of war its fate must be decided. The _Emancipation Proclamation of Abraham Lincoln_ (January 1, 1863) and the _Thirteenth_ Amendment to the Constitution (1865) freed all slaves in the Union; the _Fourteenth_ Amendment (1868) provided that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside"; and the _Fifteenth_ Amendment (1870) gave the right to vote to all citizens of the United States regardless of "_race, color, or previous condition of servitude_." These are all simply the decrees of war, written in the organic law of the United States at the end of the national four years' baptism of blood. Embodied in them are no concessions or compromises; the evil was torn out by the roots, and the Christian world, the progressive civilization of the age, and the consciences of enlightened mankind _now_ approve what was done. The war, with its attendant horrors and evils, was necessary to terminate the deep-seated, time-honored, and unholy institution of human slavery, so long embedded in our social, political, and commercial relations, and sustained by our prejudices, born of a selfish disposition, common to white people, to esteem themselves superior to others. The history of emancipation and of these constitutional amendments belongs, logically, to periods during and at the end of the war. There are, however, two important acts relating to slavery which passed Congress during the War of the Rebellion, not strictly the _result_ of that war, though incident to it, which must be mentioned.