Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Context

Early in the Civil War, the North was divided on the issue of emancipation. The Republican Party and its leader, President Lincoln, opposed the expansion of slavery into the western territories but generally conceded that the Constitution protected the “peculiar institution” in the states where it already existed. A vocal minority of abolitionists within the party called for immediate emancipation, although they differed even among themselves about whether this desirable outcome could best be achieved by executive, legislative, or judicial action. The Democratic Party generally opposed emancipation, although as the war wore on many of its members grudgingly came to accept that the measure in some form might be necessary—to win the conflict, to remove the underlying cause and prevent its recurrence, and to punish the recalcitrant southern slave owners for their continued, and immensely destructive, defiance.

During the “secession winter” of 1860–1861, before the outbreak of the war, Lincoln and other Republicans announced their support for a proposed amendment that would have guaranteed that the federal government could never abolish slavery in the southern states; Lincoln and his fellow Republicans were even willing to make this amendment unamendable in the future. Confederate leaders, convinced that secession and an independent southern nation would prove to be the best means of protecting slavery, scorned this offer. (Ironically for them, the true Thirteenth Amendment, which went into effect at the end of the war, took a form much less favorable to slave owners.) In July 1861 Congress passed, with overwhelming support, the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution, stating that the northern war aims would include the restoration of the Union but not the emancipation of southern slaves.

In the same cautious spirit, Lincoln resisted overt action against slavery in 1861 and for much of 1862. Concerned with maintaining support for the Union in the conflict-ridden border slave states (Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, and tiny Delaware), the president overruled early emancipation declarations by General David Hunter in South Carolina and General John C. Frémont in Missouri. Lincoln encouraged the leaders of border states to adopt policies of voluntary, compensated emancipation, but without success. General Benjamin F. Butler adopted an effective expedient in May 1861 when he began refusing to return runaway slaves to their masters, characterizing them essentially as spoils of war. By thus treating slaves as property, he avoided the controversy associated with an announced policy of emancipation; while this did not entirely satisfy abolitionists, it was accepted by most northerners as a useful and clever compromise. The influx over Union lines of large numbers of African Americans fleeing slavery and seeking refuge put considerable additional pressure on government leaders to come up with a solution to this colossal problem, with huge moral and practical implications for the future of the nation's existence. Legislators were eventually bombarded with petitions and letters from constituents demanding action to end slavery. Congress essentially affirmed Butler's policy with the passage of the First Confiscation Act in August 1861, authorizing representatives of the federal government to confiscate the slaves of disloyal citizens used in support of the rebellion.

The emancipation question was inseparable from the problem of precisely how to reconstruct southern state governments and oversee their restoration to the Union after the war. Ensuring that these states would be free of slavery seemed essential to many (though not all) northerners, but how to accomplish that aim was less obvious. Congress began to take more aggressive steps against slavery in 1862, while radicals like the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner both publicly and privately maintained pressure on President Lincoln to use his war powers as commander in chief to do likewise. The Second Confiscation Act, of July 1862, provided for the forfeiture of slaves, as well as other property, belonging to those supporting the Confederacy. The lack of effective enforcement mechanisms along with doubts held by Lincoln and others regarding the act's constitutionality made the act somewhat irrelevant, but it did represent another tentative step toward a federal emancipation policy.

The most famous, though not the final, blow against American slavery was struck on September 22, 1862, when President Lincoln, shortly following the Union victory at the battle of Antietam, issued his famous Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all the slaves in areas of the South not occupied by federal troops as of the coming January 1. As this proclamation did not apply to the border slave states that had not seceded—and might ultimately have been regarded by the courts as a temporary war measure only—Lincoln and many of his fellow Republicans recognized that further action would be needed to end slavery and remove the root cause of the conflict between the North and the South. Although many Americans were reluctant to alter the text of the Constitution, which had not been amended for over sixty years and was widely regarded as permanent and sacred, an emancipation amendment seemed to offer the best and most definitive solution to this troublesome issue. As early as 1839 the staunch slavery opponent John Quincy Adams had introduced such a constitutional amendment to bring about abolition; although his proposal had made no headway at the time, the idea had been percolating among his successors in the political antislavery movement.

In December 1863 competing antislavery amendments were introduced in the House of Representatives by the Republican congressmen James M. Ashley, of Ohio, and James F. Wilson, of Iowa. Both men introduced their bills in the context of ongoing debate over how to reconstruct the southern states and bring them back into the Union. They advocated a constitutional amendment barring slavery as a means to ensure republican government in those states. Wilson's proposed amendment included an enforcement clause, empowering Congress to pass legislation to ensure compliance. In this session, however, the House passed neither an emancipation amendment nor any of the envisioned supplemental legislation intended to protect civil rights.

Charles Sumner initially took the lead in pushing for an abolition amendment in the Senate. He hoped not just to end slavery but also to ensure full legal and practical equality for African Americans. Even many fellow members of the Republican Party hesitated to push so far, worrying that the party's fragile wartime coalition of different ideological factions, as bolstered by an important bloc of Democrats who supported the war effort, might be damaged by overly radical legislation. On February 8, 1864, Sumner introduced a constitutional amendment outlawing slavery, hoping that it would be referred to a committee that he chaired on issues related to slavery and freedmen. Following standard legislative practice, however, the amendment was instead referred to the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Lyman Trumbull, of Illinois. Trumbull, a less radical Republican than Sumner, oversaw the crafting of a document with less explicit guarantees that former slaves would be granted full citizenship rights and protections.

Sumner's arrogant, humorless personality made it difficult for him to win colleagues over to his more radically egalitarian vision of the proposed amendment. Trumbull, meanwhile, insisted during debate that the more neutral language in his committee's version (much of it borrowed from the well-known Northwest Ordinance) would fully accomplish the same object of ensuring equality for all regardless of race. This claim was likely disingenuous, however. Trumbull and other Senate Republicans were hoping to avoid charges of favoring excessive and revolutionary social and political upheaval on the order of the French Revolution. One senator even expressed the fear that Sumner's amendment's promise that all individuals would be equal before the law could be applied to women, a measure that did not have widespread political support, at least among the men who held a monopoly on voting rights at the time.

The proposed antislavery amendment provoked extensive congressional debate, intended more to inspire supporters back in home districts who would later read published accounts of the speeches than to convince the fellow members, who rarely listened to colleagues' speeches in any event. As 1864 was an election year, the amendment was a particularly potent political issue, and with Lincoln's approval it became part of the Republican Party's campaign platform. The amendment passed the Senate on April 6, 1864, by a vote of 38 to 4; after a fierce struggle and considerable lobbying at the president's behest, it passed the House of Representatives on January 31, 1865, by a vote of 119 to 56, with enough Democrats joining with the Republican majority to ensure the measure's victory. Lincoln enthusiastically indicated his pleasure at this outcome by signing the amendment when it was presented to him, although he was not legally required to do so for it to go into effect.

One of the most difficult issues facing the supporters of the Thirteenth Amendment was that of ratification. Constitutional amendments needed to be ratified by three-quarters of the states in order to go into effect. Would the seceded states be counted toward this total? Most Republicans, following the lead of Lincoln, argued that secession was illegal and that the states had not technically left the Union. This presented a dilemma, as some southern states would then have to vote for the abolition amendment in order for it to go into effect. Charles Sumner proposed leaving the Confederate states out of the ratification calculations, but Trumbull and other Republicans successfully opposed this plan, as some worried that the amendment might seem to lack legitimacy if the southern states were not included in the ratification process.

In one of his final speeches, only a few days before his assassination, Lincoln indicated that he agreed that all of the states must be allowed the opportunity to ratify the amendment. His successor, Andrew Johnson, implored conventions in the southern states to meet and voluntarily ratify the amendment, which indeed resulted in enough states ratifying the amendment for it to become law. Ominously, however, several of the ratification conventions in the former Confederate states warned that they did not accept the legitimacy of the clause giving Congress the right to pass supplemental legislation ensuring civil rights for African Americans. This significant distinction, generally overlooked by the administration and congressional leaders at the time, suggested that many southern whites were determined to prevent the establishment of equality for African Americans, despite the Thirteenth Amendment's promise of freedom.