Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Impact

The Thirteenth Amendment was widely hailed upon its passage and ratification for effectively ending slavery and bringing the United States into closer proximity to its ideals of freedom and democracy. The decree left open, however, the questions of whether former slaves would possess the full rights of citizenship and of what precisely those rights were. Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, felt that no further federal civil rights legislation was necessary. On the other hand, congressional Republicans, who were displeased with the slow pace of change in the postwar southern states—and with those states' implementation of racist Black codes in attempts to create slavery-like status for African Americans—increasingly used the enforcement clause of the Thirteenth Amendment to justify further action to ensure that slavery would be fully abolished.

Among the first legislative efforts along these lines were the Freedmen’s Bureau Acts, passed in 1865 and 1866, and the Civil Rights Act, passed in 1866, all aimed at ensuring that the former Confederate states did not violate the rights of African Americans. Johnson vetoed the two 1866 bills, breaking decisively with his former Republican allies on Reconstruction and civil rights, but Congress overrode both vetoes. The Civil Rights Act represented an attempt by Republicans to define just what the freedom they had offered the former slaves in the Thirteenth Amendment would look like. The Civil Rights Act defined all native-born Americans as citizens of the United States, negating the Supreme Court's suggestion in the 1857 Dred Scott case that African Americans could not lay claim to citizenship rights. These rights, as envisioned in the Civil Rights Act, did not necessarily include voting rights.

Subsequent constitutional amendments would go further to define the legal rights of African Americans. Ratified in 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment specified that as citizens, African Americans were entitled to due process and the equal protection of the law; ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment outlawed the use of race to disqualify citizens from voting. Together, the Thirteenth Amendment and its two successors were truly revolutionary, laying the foundation for a more egalitarian and democratic nation. Widespread resistance to implementing these amendments among white southerners—and their continued use of force, intimidation, and other extralegal methods of denying civil rights to African Americans—ultimately led to the collapse of the Reconstruction state governments in the South by 1877. Afterward came the gradual restoration of white supremacy in the form of a new system of discriminatory segregation. This Jim Crow era lasted for the better part of a century, with the promise of the Thirteenth Amendment left unfulfilled, until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

Indeed, for decades after its passage, as segregation was brutally imposed on African Americans, the Thirteenth Amendment was rarely cited by the courts. Generally, in the late nineteenth century the Supreme Court defined the freedom offered by the Thirteenth Amendment very narrowly and was reluctant to concede to the federal government sufficient power to enforce it. In 1872 the Court ruled in Blyew v. United States that states could refuse to allow African Americans to deliver trial testimony. The 1873 Slaughter-House Cases ruling gave states virtually free rein in defining what the rights of state citizenship for African Americans consisted of, taking the teeth out of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. The Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896 allowed segregation, in a notorious phrase, as long as the facilities offered to African Americans were “separate but equal.” The ruling was ominously silent on how this “equality” would be determined and enforced. Further, in the 1906 case of Hodges v. United States, the Court averred that state courts would have the sole responsibility of identifying and addressing violations of the Thirteenth Amendment, a power that, needless to say, Jim Crow–era southern states were not aggressive in exercising.

Ultimately, a late-twentieth-century Supreme Court case resurrected the dormant amendment. In the Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Company ruling of 1968, the Court insisted that the constitutional rights of an African American man had been violated when he was barred from buying property in a private housing development owing to his race. The Thirteenth Amendment, the court ruled, had given African Americans freedom and the same status as all other Americans, making such discrimination illegal. Coming in the wake of other judicial and legislative civil rights rulings of the 1950s and 1960s, this case suggested that the full promise of the Thirteenth Amendment would finally be fulfilled.