The Thirteenth Amendment

Ratified on December 6, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution ended the practices of slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States. This amendment, drafted before the Civil War ended, allowed the United States to link the reason for war to the larger concept of abolition, effectively expanding the war's goals from a defense of the Union to the much more radical ending of slavery and the transformation of the social landscape in the South.

The roots of the Thirteenth Amendment lay in President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of September 22, 1862. The Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves in states in rebellion as of January 1, 1863. Specifically, Lincoln exempted slaves in the border states that had not left the Union, Tennessee, and the portions of Louisiana and Virginia that were under Union occupation. Although these exemptions essentially limited emancipation to areas not under Lincoln's control, the power of the Emancipation Proclamation permeated the South and motivated slaves to rebel against their owners and flee toward Union lines. More importantly, the Proclamation changed the course of the Civil War by adding the quest for emancipation to the already stated purpose of maintaining the Union. Northerners gradually accepted slavery's end as an important motivation for continuing the war.

By the end of 1863, abolitionist groups and abolitionist politicians in Washington realized that a constitutional amendment to end slavery needed to be passed to capitalize on the new role emancipation played in the politics of the war. On December 14, 1863, James Ashley (R-OH) and James Wilson (R-IA) introduced two bills to the House of Representatives calling for a constitutional amendment to end slavery. Wilson's bill particularly interested political leaders because it introduced the idea of an enforcement mechanism, one that would give Congress the power to enforce emancipation with appropriate legislation.

In the Senate, Lyman Trumball (R-IL) introduced a joint Resolution on February 10, 1864, that combined Wilson's enforcement provision with language from Ashley's bill and from a bill conceived by Senator John Henderson (D-MO). This new resolution contained the text that eventually became the Thirteenth Amendment. The fight to advance Trumball's version of the text placed Trumball and Senator Charles Sumner (R-MA) at odds with each other. Sumner and other more radical Republicans wanted the amendment to not just end slavery but guarantee equality for blacks. Trumball, for his part, realized that Democrats, who at this point opposed not only emancipation but the war in general, needed to be coaxed into supporting the amendment in order for it to have any chance of passing. He feared that war Democrats from the border states would vote against the amendment if it contained a strong section on equality for blacks.

Republicans in the Senate argued that the amendment would attack the slave power, the party responsible for causing the war. Daniel Clark (R-NH) claimed that the slave power "has set armies in the field and she now seeks the nation's life and the destruction of the government" (Vorenberg 2001, p. 94). Without the amendment, Clark (and other Republicans) claimed, the South's hands would be left "unlopped, to clutch again such unfortunate creatures as it could lay hold upon" (ibid). Democrats opposed the amendment because they felt it would divide the country even further, in addition to advancing the cause of black equality. Senator Thomas Hendricks (D-IN) argued that abolition would remove blacks from supervision from superior whites, leading them to succumb to "their natural downward tendency" (Vorenberg 2001). However, Republicans eventually convinced many war Democrats to join them and the amendment passed the Senate 38 to 6 on April 8, 1864.

IN PROTEST OF THE THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT

The debate in the U.S. senate over approval of the Thirteenth Amendment pitted representatives from free states against those border states that did not leave the Union and still relied on slave labor. As reported in Harper's Weekly, Garrett Davis, of Kentucky, declared the constitutional abolition of slavery "a wicked and unjust act, against which he was aware the protest of an angel would be of no avail; forgetting that the only angel who would have wished to protest was named Lucifer, and fell from heaven" (p. 258).

Sen. Davis's remarks highlight that many Americans did not approve of a constitutional amendment to end slavery in the United States and that the end of slavery in the nation could harm the process of reunion that would have to take place at the end of the Civil War. Davis argued that using the federal Constitution to eliminate slavery was unjust, an idea fought against by the Republican Party.

SOURCE: Harper's Weekly, April 23, 1864.

As the amendment made its way to the House of Representatives, the 1864 election weighed increasingly on the minds of Washington politicians. The Republican Party tried to tie the antislavery fight to its party platform, whereas Democrats attacked the amendment, claiming the Republicans were fighting the war for the wrong reasons. Bitter partisanship locked the House in debate over the amendment, with Democrats not willing to vote for the amendment as they had in the Senate, because to vote for the amendment would be to support a major plank of the opposition party's political platform. Because of this bitter partisanship, the amendment failed by thirteen votes on June 15, 1864.

After Republican victory in the election of 1864, Lincoln renewed efforts to pass the Thirteenth Amendment in the House. Lincoln got directly involved in the House debate and used his own personal power to convince those congressmen who had voted against the amendment in June to support it. Essentially, Lincoln claimed that he would not look kindly on anyone who voted against emancipation and used political favors to try to gain support from as many congressmen as possible. Coupled with this, Republicans reiterated that the amendment was not about a radical restructuring of society, but the inclusion of blacks within the larger existing framework. On January 31, 1865, the House voted 119 to 56 in favor of the amendment, two votes more than the two-thirds required for passage. After the House passed the amendment, African Americans celebrated this confirmation of the Emancipation Proclamation. Charles Douglass wrote to his father, Frederick Douglass, "I wish that you could have been here, such rejoicing I have never before witnessed" (Basler 1953–1955, vol. 8, pp. 254-255).

Although supporters of the amendment celebrated, ratification of the amendment still needed to be undertaken at the state level. Areas with little Democratic influence, such as New England, easily ratified the amendment, while states in the Midwest and the border states had a much harder time with ratification. Indeed, Delaware rejected the amendment in February 1865, as did New Jersey in March. The tough fight for ratification in the Northern states was only compounded by the requirement that three-quarters of the states, including those Southern states that had rebelled against the Union, needed to approve the amendment. Lincoln allowed Unionist legislatures in Tennessee, Virginia, and Louisiana to approve the amendment, while Arkansas, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia all approved the amendment at President Andrew Johnson's insistence during the first phase of Reconstruction. Johnson argued that the amendment had the potential not only to destroy the slave power, but also to bring the Union back together under a new, larger idea of freedom.

However, many ex-Confederates in the South opposed the amendment because it might, as Governor Benjamin Perry of South Carolina claimed, "be construed to give Congress power of local legislation over the negroes and white men" (McPherson 1871, p. 23). Whites in the South feared the amendment would allow Congress to legislate on local issues involving blacks. Many states included these fears in their ratifying resolutions, including Alabama, which claimed the amendment did not "confer upon Congress the power to legislate upon the political statues of freedmen in this State."

On December 8, 1865, Georgia became the twentyseventh state to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. With Georgia's ratification, the amendment became a part of the U.S. Constitution and slavery officially became outlawed across the nation. Although the Thirteenth Amendment itself did not give blacks any new political or social power, it affirmed their right to be free as embodied in the Emancipation Proclamation. African Americans knew the power that their newly gained freedom brought and took little time to both celebrate it and shape that freedom to their needs.

African Americans across the South marked Emancipation Day (January 1), as well as the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment, with parades, parties, and revelry. African American leaders used these ceremonies to define themselves as American, showing their patriotism and support for the government and the war. Indeed, black leaders constantly referred to black military service during the war as an example of how distinctly American ex-slaves were and how they were entitled to the rights of free people. The enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment led many blacks to agree with AME minister Henry Turner, who claimed that "the time has come in the history of this nation when the black man can assert his rights and feel his manhood" (Clark 2005, p. 80). Freedom from slavery meant that African Americans could fight for their political, social, and economic rights.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Basler, Roy P., ed. The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953–1955.

Berry, Mary Frances. Military Necessity and Civil Rights Policy: Black Citizenship and the Constitution, 1861–1868. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1977.

Clark, Kathleen. Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863–1913. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.

McPherson, Edward, ed. The Political History of the United States of America during the Period of Reconstruction. Washington, DC: Philp & Solomons, 1871.

Vorenberg, Michael. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

                                         James J. Gigantino II