Thirteenth Amendment — Abolition of Slavery in the United States
Slavery was abolished in the United States by constitutional amendment in December 1865, eight months after the war ended. The Emancipation Proclamation had been a war measure applying only to areas in rebellion, and its legal force after the fighting stopped was doubtful. Lincoln wanted a permanent instrument that could not be reversed by a court or a later Congress. The Senate passed it in April 1864 and the House failed to reach the two-thirds required. Lincoln made it the central plank of his re-election platform and then, after winning, pushed the lame-duck House to pass it in January 1865 rather than wait for the new Congress — using patronage, appointments and pressure on individual members in ways his own party found uncomfortable and which were entirely effective. It passed 119 to 56, and the galleries and the floor erupted. Ratification by the states came in December, with Georgia supplying the twenty-seventh. The text is two sentences: neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. That exception was used almost immediately. Southern states passed Black Codes criminalising vagrancy and breach of labour contract, and convict leasing put tens of thousands of Black men into forced labour in mines and on plantations for decades, in conditions that were frequently worse than slavery because the lessee did not own them. The clause is still in the constitution. Mississippi, which had rejected it in 1865, ratified it symbolically in 1995 and failed to file the paperwork until 2013. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments followed within five years and were largely nullified in practice for another eighty.
- Year: 1865 CE
- Category: Political
