The Thirteenth Amendment: Abolishing Slavery

From the beginning of the American republic, slaves argued that they, too, were included in the Declaration of Independence’s self-evident truth that “all men are created equal.” Sectional division over the “peculiar institution” of American slavery would plague the nation until at last it culminated in a civil war that cost more than six hundred thousand lives. But out of that war came a constitutional amendment resolving, once and for all, that slavery could not exist in a government created by “we the people.”

SECTION 1

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in 1865, resulted from more than two hundred years of failed compromises over slavery in America. Congress, acting under the Articles of Confederation, had banned slavery in federal territory in 1787, but the new Constitution written later that year did not outlaw slavery. The arrival of the cotton gin in 1795 drastically expanded the profitability of slave labor in the South, and with westward expansion came intense pressure to keep the balance between the free states of the North and the slave states of the South. Trying to resolve this conflict, the Supreme Court made a controversial ruling in 1857 about the status of slaves, and instead precipitated civil war.

Roots of American Slavery

Approximately eleven million African slaves arrived in the New World-transported principally by Portuguese, British, Spanish, and French slave traders. By far most of these slaves were delivered to the sugar plantations of Brazil and the West Indies (today’s Caribbean nations), where they quickly died of disease and maltreatment.

About five hundred thousand of the African slaves arrived in British North America. Slavery had existed thoughout human history, but in America slavery was established as a permanent and inheritable legal condition defined by the color of a person’s skin. The first Africans to settle in British North America arrived on a Dutch ship in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 one year before the Mayflower landed at Plymouth, Massachusetts. At first, such Africans may have been treated like indentured servants, who were free to work for pay and own land after their term of service was over. But Massachusetts legalized slavery in 1641, the first English North American colony to do so; Connecticut acted similarly in 1650; and Virginia followed in 1661. In 1663, Virginia courts declared that a child born to a slave mother automatically became a slave. Slavery was legal in all thirteen states when the Declaration of Independence was written in 1776.

Westward Expansion. Abolitionist forces grew after the Revolutionary War, and Congress in 1787 outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory, created by the cession of western lands from the original states. The new Constitution in 1787 both recognized and limited slavery in certain ways and the framers generally believed that only the states, not the federal government, had the power to abolish slavery. Additionally, Eli Whitney’s invention of the cotton gin made slavery much more profitable in the South. When Congress outlawed the international slave trade in 1808, as permitted by the Constitution, the market for domestic slaves increased dramatically. Slaves from Maryland and Virginia were sold to new owners raising cotton farther south and west.

After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, the creation of new states from these western territories strained the uneasy balance between slave and free states in the Union. Under the Missouri Compromise in 1820, Maine was admitted as a free state and Missouri was admitted as a slave state, with slavery forbidden elsewhere in the Louisiana Territory above Missouri’s southern border. After the Mexican-American War in 1848, the United States acquired more western lands, leading to more sectional crisis over slavery. Finally, in the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted as a free state while the residents of the Utah and New Mexico territories decided for themselves about slavery. Perhaps the most controversial provision in this compromise was the Fugitive Slave Act, which for the first time authorized federal agents to detain and return fugitive slaves.

Article IV of the Constitution had required states to relinquish fugitive slaves, but juries in free states were reluctant to find in favor of slaveholders.

Now slave catchers could bypass state courts entirely, and they were often accused of kidnapping free blacks.
Dred Scott and His Family. In 1846, a slave named Dred Scott sued for his freedom in Missouri, along with his wife and two daughters. Scott’s lawsuit charged that he was free because his owner had taken him and his family into free territory for a time. Indeed, that was the usual outcome of such cases under Missouri law. But with increased tensions over slavery, Dred Scott lost and his case eventually became embroiled in a national controversy.
The Supreme Court first heard Dred Scott’s case in early 1856, but then ordered that it be reargued after the presidential election of 1856. In an action that would today be regarded as clearly unethical, president-elect James Buchanan secretly lobbied certain justices to overturn the Missouri Compromise in the Dred Scott case. He hoped thereby to resolve the political controversy over slavery with a legal ruling based on the Constitution. Buchanan was inaugurated on March 4, 1857, and on March 6 Chief Justice Roger Taney issued the decision Buchanan wanted.

In Dred Scott n Sandford (a spelling error on the Court’s part; Scott’s owner was named Sanford), the Court made several controversial rulings. First, Taney’s opinion stated that African Americans, free or slave, could never be citizens of the United States. He maintained that blacks were “beings of an inferior order” who “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” Since Dred Scott was not a citizen, he could not bring suit in federal court and the Court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case.

Chief Justice Taney could have ended his opinion there. However, he went on to hold that, based on the Due Process Clause, Congress could not deprive slaveholders of their property anywhere in the United States, including federal territories. Therefore, the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional. Under the Dred Scott ruling, federal territories could not outlaw slavery until they became states-at which point slaveholders could have formed a majority in the territory. Critics charged that the Dred Scott decision in effect nationalized slavery, by allowing slaveholders to bring slaves into any part of the Union.

Secession and War

The nation was in an uproar after the Dred Scott ruling. In Illinois, the Supreme Court’s decision became the focal point of the legendary 1858 debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln for a seat in the U. S. Senate. During his campaign, Lincoln declared: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe that this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.” Lincoln lost the Senate, but he won the presidency in 1860. However, he did so without any votes from the South, and in December South Carolina seceded from the Union. By the time Lincoln was inaugurated on March 4, 1861, the Confederate States of America had been formed. The Civil War began on April 12, 1861, when Confederate forces fired on Fort Sumter.

At first, Lincoln tried to ameliorate the slaveholding states, hoping to restore the Union quickly.

Lincoln even supported the Corwin Amendment, passed by Congress in 1861, which if ratified would have added an unamendable provision to the Constitution forbidding Congress to outlaw slavery. But the slaves themselves began to flee to Union lines, prompting a crisis of what to do with such “contraband.” In 1862, Congress authorized the confiscation of all rebel property-including slaves.

In late 1862, Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863. It freed all slaves in Confederate states not under Union control. According to historian James McPherson: “The old cliche that the proclamation did not free a single slave because it applied only to the Confederate states where Lincoln had no power, completely misses the point. The proclamation announced a revolutionary new war aim the overthrow of slavery by force of arms if and when Union armies conquered the South.”

The Second American Revolution

Lincoln and others became convinced that only a constitutional amendment would finally end slavery.
After Lincoln won reelection in 1864, and Union hopes of victory improved, Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865.

Although Lincoln lived to see the Confederates defeated, he was assassinated in April before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified at the end of that year. The Thirteenth Amendment freed almost four million slaves. Many historians refer to the Civil War as the second American Revolution, because by abolishing slavery the United States at long last began to fulfill the Declaration of Independence’s promise that “all men are created equal.”
Sidebar: An Unalienable Right to Freedom Petition bv Massachusetts Slaves Echoing the words of the Declaration of Independence, the slaves of Massachusetts petitioned the state legislature for freedom in 1777.

The petition of a great number of blacks detained in a state of slavery in the bowels of a free and Christian country humbly show that your petitioners apprehend that they have in common with all other men a natural and unalienable right to that freedom which the Great Parent of the Universe has bestowed equally on all mankind and which they have never forfeited by any compact or agreement whatever. They were unjustly dragged by the hand of cruel power from their dearest friends and some of them even torn from the embraces of their tender parents from a populous, pleasant, and plentiful country, and in violation of the laws of nature and of nations and in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity brought here to be sold like beasts of burden and like them condemned to slavery for life, among a people professing the mild religion of Jesus….

Your petitioners… cannot but express their astonishment that it has never been considered that every principle from which America has acted in the course of their unhappy difficulties with Great Britain pleads stronger than a thousand arguments in favor of your petitioners.

In this excerpt from her well-known essay, historian Barbara Fields emphasizes that Abraham Lincoln was slow to the cause of emancipation, and it was the slaves themselves who won their own freedom.

A black soldier in Louisiana, born a slave, dismissed with contempt those northerners, including Abraham Lincoln, who proposed to save the Union without disturbing slavery: “Our union friends says the[y] are not fighting to free the Negroes; we are fighting for the union…. Very well, let the white fight for what the[y] want and we Negroes fight for what we want…. Liberty must take the day, nothing shorter.”…

The slaves decided at the time of Lincoln’s election that their hour had come. By the time Lincoln issued his Emancipation Proclamation, no human being alive could have held back the tide that swept toward freedom…. The government discovered that it could not accomplish its narrow goal union without adopting the slaves’ nobler one universal emancipation.

SECTION 2

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Thirteenth Amendment is the first constitutional amendment to give Congress specific power to enforce it. After the end of the Civil War, some 210 Radical Republicans argued that the Thirteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to give freed slaves equal rights, not just end the legal relationship of slavery. But Congress decided that the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, was necessary to grant freed slaves citizenship and “equal protection of the laws.”

In the Civil Rights Cases (1883), the Supreme Court ruled that under Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment Congress
had the power to remove the “badges and incidents” of slavery. However, the Court defined that phrase narrowly, and held that Section 2 did not apply to private discrimination. But in 1968, the Court reversed itself and ruled that Section 2 did allow Congress to prevent discrimination in private real estate transactions. The Court has also held that the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on “involuntary servitude” included peonage laws-which forced laborers to work to pay off debts that were often fraudulent and prevented them from quitting their jobs.

Reparations

At his second inauguration in March 1865, President Abraham Lincoln saw the Civil War as a just God’s retribution for slavery – which might continue “until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” But some Americans believe that the “badges and incidents” of slavery have continued long past the Civil War, and that the nation owes a financial and moral debt to African Americans that should be paid. These scholars argue that just as the United States compensated the heirs of survivors of the Japanese American internment camps, it should find a way to establish a fund to repay African Americans for the negative effects of slavery. Such scholars point to high rates of poverty and incarceration among the black community as evidence of the ongoing impact of both slavery and more than one hundred years of state-sponsored racial discrimination afterward.

Opponents of reparations charge that many Americans came to the country long after slavery ended, and that they should not be held accountable for its effects. They also believe that government programs should focus on all those who need help to overcome poverty and discrimination, not African Americans who are already successful. In addition, these critics argue that reparations have in the past gone only to direct victims of government abuse and their immediate heirs, not those who suffered from generations of injustice.

As of 2001, more than one hundred thousand federal tax returns have claimed a “reparations credit” for slavery. Scam artists convinced many African Americans that they were due such reparations on their taxes, and the Internal Revenue Service erroneously paid out more than $30 million in refunds in 2000 and 2001. However, Congress has not passed any authorization for slavery reparations.