You are ignoring the political realities of Congress in question. You cannot lump in all the senators or congressmen, even from free states, together. There were Democrats and Republicans---conservatives, moderates, and radicals.

Allan Bogue conducted a thorough study of the Republican Senate during the Civil War, and breaks down the various positions of the senators in the 37th Congress, 2nd session, according to key votes---including emancipation in West Virginia, emancipation in DC, and votes related to the confiscation bill and the Militia Act.

He found an interesting scale from radical to conservative. Only 9 out of 39 voted (according to Bogue's study) purely radical, or placed an "antisouthern" vote on each of the 6 representative issues he lists. Six senators placed 5 "antisouthern" votes and 1 "prosouthern" or status quo vote, 2 recorded 4 "antisouthern" and 2 "prosouthern" votes, and 10 split down the middle with 3 "antisouthern" and 3 "prosouthern" votes. Four senators only supported 2 "antisouthern" votes while taking a "prosouthern" position 4 times. Fully 8 senators supported only "prosouthern" positions during these 6 representative votes.

So, 17 out of 39 senators voted primarily "antisouthern" in six key issues, 10 senators were moderates (splitting their votes right down the middle), and 12 senators voted primarily "prosouthern" in the sampling. (Allan Bogue, _The Earnest Men: Republicans of the Civil War Senate_ (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 94-95).

Bogue interprets this data, and other, in a variety of ways. I bring it up here to show that there were real and measurable ideological differences even within a Republican-dominated Senate during the Civil War. One cannot assume that all of these men (Democrats and Republicans; conservatives, moderates, and radicals) should have acted in unison early in the war to enact a sweeping ban against slavery.

You said: "Many of these men were put into office by abolitionist groups whose goal was to have a nation free of slavery."

Do you have statistics of how many senators or congressmen were placed into office specifically or primarily by abolitionist groups?

You said: "Your thesis is an assumption is these Congresses would not have ever been exposed to the idea on a nation wide ban on salvery, therefore they never would have thought of proposing it, until sometime around 1865."

No, that is not my thesis at all. I argue that few people (and virtually no person in Congress) in 1860 and 1861 considered national emancipation to be proper. This changed as the war crisis continued, and more northerners turned against the institution for practical and ideological reasons. The issue here is not whether men in Congress were aware that a constitutional amendment against slavery was possible, but when they were ready to enact such a monumental move.

You said: "My thought is they were well exposed to the idea, had been for nearly thirty of more years, and they clearly had debated it, and could have proposed ended slavery nationwide, and did, well before 1865."

I would ask at which point "before 1865" do you believe Congress as a whole could have or should have enacted national emancipation? The first attempt to pass the 13th Amendment took place in April 1864. It passed the Senate but failed to get the 2/3 majority in the House (the vote was 93-65). It finally passed a few months later in January 1865.

Also, we cannot ignore the fact that major steps towards abolition DID take place even earlier during the war. Congress passed two confiscation acts (which reversed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution of 1861) and paved the way for the Emancipation Proclamation. And Congress abolished slavery in Washington DC in 1862.

The fact of the matter is that the national (and forcible) end of slavery in the US was a monumental act. That national emancipation passed through Congress (by a 2/3 vote) in 1865 only four years after Congress had originally declared that the war would not interfere with the institution is remarkable. There were always some people in the North who wanted such a radical move, but they were a distinct minority. Most Northerners opposed slavery, but were initially unwilling (for a variety of reasons) to enforce national emancipation. That changed during the war---in a span of 4 years.