Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

About the Author

The Thirteenth Amendment had no single author. Some of its key congressional creators and supporters were James M. Ashley, James F. Wilson, Lyman Trumbull, and Charles Sumner.

James M. Ashley was born in Pennsylvania in 1824. The mostly self-educated young man moved west to Ohio in 1848, where he became the editor of a Democratic newspaper and a close political ally of the antislavery leader and future Supreme Court chief justice Salmon P. Chase. Ashley was first elected to Congress in 1858, representing the Republican Party. During the Civil War, he played a leading role in winning support for the emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia before helping push for the Thirteenth Amendment. He would also favor a punitive Reconstruction policy, including confiscating the property of supporters of the Confederacy and taking away their political rights, which sometimes put him at odds with President Lincoln, who favored a more moderate and generous policy aimed at facilitating reconciliation and reunion. Ashley worked closely with Lincoln, however, in winning support among wavering members of both parties in order to ensure congressional passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Following the war, Ashley was one of the leaders in the movement to impeach President Andrew Johnson for obstructing Reconstruction, and he aired wild accusations that Johnson had been complicit in Lincoln's murder. He later served as territorial governor of Montana and as a railroad president. He died in 1896.

James F. Wilson, born in Ohio in 1828, was a Republican congressman from Iowa during the Civil War. He had moved to Iowa and begun practicing law and involving himself in politics in the early 1850s, and in 1856 he participated in the convention that revised the state's constitution. Wilson was first elected to Congress in 1861 when his district's former representative, Samuel R. Curtis, resigned to accept an appointment as a general in the Union Army. Once in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, Wilson was appointed chairman of the Judiciary Committee despite the seniority of other party members on the committee, a compliment to Wilson's legal knowledge, ability, and work ethic. Like Ashley, he also helped win support for ending slavery in the District of Columbia. Following the Civil War, he served in both the Senate and the House of Representatives and as director of the Union Pacific Railroad. Wilson once reputedly turned down an offer of the prestigious position of secretary of state by President Ulysses S. Grant, possibly a wise move given the scandals and misfortune that tarnished the Grant cabinet. Wilson died in 1895, having occupied a prominent place in the Iowa and national Republican leadership for forty years.

Lyman Trumbull, of Illinois, a Democrat turned Republican and one of the party's most forceful and respected national leaders during the Civil War era, was born in 1813. He was first elected to the Senate in 1855, triumphing over his rival, Abraham Lincoln, in one of the most bitter setbacks in the career of “Honest Abe.” Although Lincoln and Trumbull had an uneasy personal relationship following this contest—and Mary Todd Lincoln afterward refused to speak to Trumbull's wife, Julia, her former friend—the two men put aside their differences to champion Republican policies, including the Thirteenth Amendment, during the Civil War. Fiesty and bespectacled, Trumbull broke with Radical Republicans over Reconstruction and voted against the impeachment of Andrew Johnson in 1868. Thereafter, he variously supported the short-lived Liberal Republican movement, returned to the Democratic fold, and even advocated the Populist Party (defending the socialist labor leader Eugene V. Debs at a trial for the appeal of his conviction for violating a federal antistrike injunction). Trumbull died in 1896.

Charles Sumner first took his seat as a senator from Massachusetts in 1851 at the age of forty, representing first the Free-Soil Party and subsequently the Republican Party. He gained fame for his scholarly oratory and zealous abolitionism as well as for suffering a savage beating from a stout cane wielded by the proslavery South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks on the floor of the Senate in 1856. This famous incident led Sumner to become, in the eyes of many northerners, a heroic symbol of freedom of speech and opponent of southern proslavery barbarism. Sumner did not return to take his Senate seat for several years, though his physical injuries healed relatively quickly. He exercised particular clout in foreign affairs issues owing to his knowledge and wide circle of acquaintances abroad, and he both chaired the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and served as an adviser to Lincoln on international issues, often much to the annoyance of his long-time political rival Secretary of State William H. Seward. Sumner was one of the Thirteenth Amendment's first and most consistent advocates, and he remained committed to civil rights causes—often finding himself at odds with his fellow Republicans—until his death in 1874.