Slavery Abolition in the US

• Abraham Lincoln described the destruction of American slavery as "astounding" in his second inaugural address on March 4, 1865.
• Lincoln's choice of the word "astounding" was significant, as it appeared only three other times in his entire Collected Works.
• Abolition of slavery may seem inevitable in retrospect, but there were more slaves in the United States when the Civil War began than at any prior time.
• Slaveholders and their allies controlled the federal government for nearly the entire period since the founding of the republic.
• In 1858, the Chicago Tribune declared that "no man living" would see the end of American slavery.
• Abolition was a gradual process resulting from many causes and involving numerous individuals.
• The process began with slaves seeking refuge behind Union lines at the war's outset, ignoring Lincoln's initial focus on national unity.
• The Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, made the destruction of slavery an objective of the Union war effort but did not abolish slavery by itself.
• The New York Times noted that the proclamation "set free" slaves only in areas where the Union army had a presence.
• The final abolition of slavery across the reunited nation was achieved with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
• Without the amendment, slavery might have persisted for years in some parts of the United States.
• Freedom's Journal had called for an amendment to abolish slavery as early as 1827.
• Changing the Constitution is a complex process, with the last successful amendment prior to this being in 1804.
• Roughly 150 amendments to resolve the secession crisis were proposed during the winter of 1860-61.
• The Corwin Amendment would have prohibited future federal interference with slavery in the states.
• The Corwin amendment was approved by Congress on the morning of Lincoln's inauguration and mentioned favorably by him.
• With the outbreak of war, the Corwin amendment became moot.
• When Lincoln assumed office, slavery existed in fifteen of the thirty-four states.
• Abolishing slavery by constitutional amendment seemed impossible due to the requirement of approval by three-quarters of the states, including the Confederate states.
• Lincoln declared his hatred of slavery, but he was not an abolitionist and believed the Constitution must be followed.
• Lincoln supported halting the westward expansion of slavery but believed the North must follow constitutional provisions protecting slavery.
• Lincoln spoke of a future without slavery, with the Republican party aiming to put the institution on the road to "ultimate extinction," a phrase borrowed from Henry Clay.
• Ultimate extinction might take a long time.
• Lincoln's committment to the eventual end of slavery made him seem dangerous to the South, and his election provided the catalyst for secession, civil war, and abolition.
• Slavery can be abolished in several ways, including individual manumission and emancipation by legal means.
• Manumission frees slaves but unless it applies to all does not end slavery.
• Even without the Corwin Amendment, the Constitution nearly universally understood to bar national interference with slavery in the states.
• But slavery is created by state law and the law can be changed, as happened in the northern states after the American Revolution.
• Legal emancipation is feasible in "societies with slaves" where slavery is one element of the social and economic order, not its foundation.
• In "slave societies," slaveowners hold more power.
• The Old South was the largest, most powerful slave society in modern history.
• Lincoln believed abolition in the South could only be accomplished with the cooperation of owners.
• To secure this, Lincoln advocated a program of gradual emancipation coupled with monetary compensation and "colonization."
• Slaveholders would never consent to the creation of a vast new population of free African-Americans.
• A third mode of attacking slavery is military emancipation.
• War destabilizes and strips away constitutional protections.
• Contending sides make slavery a military target to weaken their opponents.
• They urge slaves of the enemy to run away and to enlist as soldiers, usually promising them freedom.
• Slaves freed through military action sometimes faced reenslavement if the war's fortunes shifted, as with the Haitian Revolution.
• Military emancipation freed numerous slaves during the Civil War, but it eventually required a constitutional amendment, a form of legal emancipation, to destroy the system for good.
• War broke the power of slaveholders, enabling ratification.
• For most of the Civil War, a constitutional amendment was not the most widely preferred route to abolition.
• The war did not begin as a crusade to abolish slavery.
• Abolitionists and Radical Republicans pressed for action against slavery as a war measure.
• Slaves began escaping to Union lines.
• Lincoln put forth his own ideas, returning to the plan of gradual, compensated emancipation coupled with colonization, which would make slaveowners partners in abolition.
• In November 1861, he proposed this to political leaders in Delaware, and in the following spring pressed it on Congress and the other border slave states that remained in the Union.
• The plan envisioned abolition by the states, with federal funding.
• The border states were intent on retaining slavery.
• Lincoln's plan failed to win support among African-Americans, very few of whom were willing to leave the land of their birth.
• Colonization must be voluntary.
• Military emancipation and emancipation by statute proceeded.
• By 1862 the army was no longer returning fugitive slaves to their owners.
• Congress freed all slaves who came within Union lines, abolished slavery in Washington, D.C., and the nation's western territories.
• These measures freed many slaves but did not abolish the institution of slavery.
• A powerful combination of events moved Lincoln to adopt a new policy toward slavery.
• They included congressional enactments, the failure of conventional military strategy, the desire to forestall European intervention, the need to enlist black soldiers, and the growing numbers of slaves escaping to Union lines.
• In September 1862, in the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln announced his change in policy.
• This was, in effect, a warning to Confederates that if they did not lay down their arms, Lincoln would decree emancipation.
• In December, in his annual message to Congress, he again presented his old plan for state-by-state abolition.
• He asked for changes in the Constitution, not to abolish slavery immediately but to authorize the appropriation of funds for any state that provided for abolition by the year 1900.
• The money would help compensate the former owners and colonize the emancipated slaves outside the country.
• It was a final offer of abolition with the cooperation of slaveowners.
• Neither Congress, the border states, nor the Confederacy paid any attention to these proposals.
• With the Emancipation Proclamation, national policy toward slavery changed dramatically.
• The proclamation was an act of military emancipation, grounded in Lincoln's constitutional authority as commander in chief.
• Despite popular legend, Lincoln did not free four million slaves with a stroke of his pen.
• The proclamation had no bearing on the slaves in the border states.
• Lincoln also exempted certain areas of the Confederacy that had fallen under Union military control, including parts of Virginia and Louisiana and the entire state of Tennessee.
• Perhaps 800,000 of the nearly four million slaves were not covered by the proclamation.
• Despite its limitations, this was the largest act of slave emancipation in world history, with 3.1 million slaves declared free on a single day.
• The proclamation did not immediately end slavery but it sounded the institution's death knell, assuming that the Union won the war.
• If the Confederacy had won, slavery would undoubtedly have lasted for a long time.
• As a presidential decree, the proclamation could presumably be reversed.
• Apart from its exemptions, the proclamation emancipated people but did not abolish the legal status of slave or the state laws establishing slavery.
• Emancipation is not quite the same thing as abolition.
• Something more would be necessary to rid the country entirely of slavery.
• As Frederick Douglass put it, in calling for a constitutional amendment, the proclamation was "a vast and glorious step in the right direction," but it "settles nothing."
• The Emancipation Proclamation was a dramatic departure from Lincoln's previous statements and policies regarding slavery.
• It was immediate, not gradual, contained no mention of compensation for slaveowners, and made no reference to colonization.
• Since emancipation no longer required the consent of slaveholders, these inducements were now irrelevant.
• The proclamation authorized the enrollment of black soldiers into the armed forces, setting in motion the process by which 200,000 black men served in the Union army and navy.
• Putting black men in the armed forces suggested a different racial future than encouraging them to leave the country.
• The proclamation placed the question of the civil and political status of the emancipated slaves on the national agenda.
• By making the destruction of slavery an objective of the Union army, the Emancipation Proclamation fundamentally altered the character of the Civil War.
• Military and legal emancipation now proceeded together.
• Lincoln redoubled his efforts to create Unionist state governments.
• These governments could rid their states of the laws that established slavery.
• Lincoln's Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction, issued in December 1863, envisioned abolition by state action.
• It required southern states that desired readmission to the Union to adopt new constitutions abolishing slavery.
• Lincoln seemed to assume that the only slaves truly emancipated were those who physically came within Union lines.
• In August 1864, Lincoln urged Frederick Douglass to organize a group of "scouts" to encourage slaves to run off to the Union army.
• Lincoln feared that the proclamation's constitutionality might be called into question after the war ended.
• His proposed amnesty oath for Confederates required support of congressional acts and presidential proclamations relating to slavery, unless "modified or declared void by decision of the Supreme Court."
• The Supreme Court still had a Democratic majority, and Roger B. Taney, of "Dred Scott infamy," remained chief justice until his death late in 1864.
• Litigation challenging the proclamation was inevitable and could cause problems for federal policy after the war ended.

All These Considerations

• Led to increased support for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.

• As soon as the Thirty-eighth Congress convened in December 1863, plans began to circulate.

• Representative James M. Ashley introduced the first such proposal on December 14.

• Francis Lieber composed a set of no fewer than seven amendments.

• Lieber's intense nationalism drove the first four amendments, and only his proposed Seventeenth Amendment got around to "slavery shall be forever abolished."

• Lieber's Eighteenth established the principles of birthright citizenship and equality.

• Widely circulated in pamphlet form by the Loyal Publication Society, Lieber's proposals seem to have influenced discussions of both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

• Abolitionists launched a "fresh moral agitation" toward the goal of an amendment abolishing slavery.

• A campaign that was coordinated by the Women's Loyal National League, founded in 1863.

• For the time being women activists suspended the movement for woman suffrage to press for an end to slavery.

• By early 1864, some two thousand men, women, and children were at work circulating petitions.

• Initially, they called for Congress to legislate complete abolition, something most members believed was beyond their constitutional authority, but at the suggestion of William Lloyd Garrison, "added the Constitutional amendment to their prayer."

• In February 1864, two tall black men carried a monster petition with 100,000 signatures onto the Senate floor and deposited it on Charles Sumner's desk.

• Sumner thereupon introduced an amendment based on the 1791 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

• The proposal went on to give Congress the power to "make all laws" necessary to carry the prohibition into effect.

• Abolitionists and Radical Republicans such as Sumner were already looking beyond the end of slavery to racially biased discriminatory laws.

• Wendell Phillips, for example, called for two amendments, one abolishing slavery and another barring any state from making "any distinction among its citizens on account of race and color."

• Later that spring, Sumner again urged his colleagues to incorporate "the equality of all persons before the law" into the Thirteenth Amendment.

• The statement led him to deliver a history lesson about the French Revolution.

• The final wording, modeled on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, was hammered out in the Senate Judiciary Committee, headed by Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois.

• The wording was as follows: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted".

• Thus the amendment for the first time introduced the word "slavery' into the Constitution.

• Trumbull also incorporated a second clause, inspired by language proposed by Sumner and Congressman James F. Wilson of Iowa.

• The second clause stated: "Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

• This addition was influenced by John Marshall's decision in McCulloch v. Maryland.

• When he presented the amendment to the Senate, Trumbull pointed out that, though various Acts of Congress and the Emancipation Proclamation had freed many slaves, they had not destroyed slavery's legal foundations.

• Trumbull rejected the idea that the war power itself, or the Constitution's clause guaranteeing a republican form of government to each state, gave Congress the power to abolish slavery by statute.

• Trumbull declared "it has been an admitted axiom from the foundation of this government that Congress had no authority to interfere with slavery in the states where it existed."

• He also rejected the idea of pulling language for the Constitution from the French experience, and preferred “good Anglo-Saxon language employed by our fathers in the ordinance of 1787."

• The Northwest Ordinance language was familiar and "well understood" by the people in the States.

• It was appealing to Republicans as it contained prohibition of slavery in the Old Northwest as evidence of the founders' supposed hostility to slavery.

• Not all Republicans initially supported the proposed amendment, preferring abolition through state action.

• The party soon rallied around the Thirteenth Amendment.

• Much of the congressional discussion covered familiar ground.

• Slavery not only violated fundamental rights but endangered the liberties of whites.

• Republicans condemned slavery not simply as a violation of human rights but as an affront to the nation.

• The amendment's second section, granting enforcement, embodied a new sense of national empowerment.

• The New York Herald observed it guaranteed that Congress shall have the power to arrange the new conditions of society in the South, especially so far as it relates to the condition of the Negro race.

• The Chicago Tribune observed that "events have proved that the danger to freedom is from the states, not the federal government".

• The Fourteenth Amendment has often been viewed as instituting a dramatic change in the federal system, but it was the Thirteenth.

• It was the first amendment to expand the power of the federal government rather than restraining it that initiated this redefinition of federalism.

• The second clause envisioned future action to secure the end of slavery and the advent of freedom.

• Said James G. Blaine, "the relation between the national and state governments, respecting the question of human liberty, was radically changed[...]Freedom of the person became henceforth a matter of national concern".

• Like the Emancipation Proclamation, the amendment was immediate, not gradual.

• Provided no monetary compensation.

• It applied to the entire country and for the first time made abolition an essential part of the nation's legal order.

• It added a new fundamental right to personal freedom in the US, applicable to all persons regardless of race, gender, class, or citizenship.

• There was Democratic opposition to the amendment.

• Early in 1864, the amendment might garner support form northern Democrats.

• As election-year politics moved to the fore, Democratic support waned.

• Without the South represented in Congress, few members directly defended slavery.

• The party's congressmen fell back on familiar arguments against abolition, notably the alleged incapacity of blacks.

• Democrats warned that future congresses would wield the "revolutionary power" of Section 2 to force black citizenship, black suffrage, racial "amalgamation," and black land ownership upon the states.

• Others claimed that abolition threatened private property in general.

• Senator Willard Saulsbury asked if property could be abolished without monetary compensation, why not others? Would Congress confiscate Factories of New England?

• Democrats saw the amendment as overturning essential principles that had governed the nation since its founding.

• They condemned the Constitution's ratification as a revolution in federal-state relations.

• The issue, declared Anton Herrick of New York, was not slavery but "the right of states to control their domestic affairs." "Give up our right to have slavery," proclaimed Robert Mallory of Kentucky, "and in what rights are we secure?"

• Samuel J. Randall of Pennsylvania called it striking at the root of all state institutions.

• Democrats spoke of restoring the Union "as it was"—that is, with slavery intact.

• On April 8, 1864, the Senate approved the amendment by a vote of thirty-three to six.

• Three Democrats from the North, along with five Unionists and Republicans from the border, cast votes in favor.

• For that it envisioned immediate abolition, the New York Herald called the vote a rebuke to Lincoln and a declaration by Congress that "his Petty tinkering devices of emancipation will not answer."

• As these events unfolded, Lincoln remained noncommittal.

• What finally moved him to a public embrace of the amendment was the nomination of John C. Frémont for president in late May 1864.

• Lincoln directed Edwin D. Morgan to make the pending Thirteenth Amendment the "key note" of his speech opening the party's national convention.

• Republican platform demanded the "utter and complete extirpation".

• During the campaign of 1864 some Republicans saw the amendment as a winning issue, but others feared that it might "frighten some voters".

• In the aftermath of his reelection, Lincoln declared that "the voice of the people" had been heard and called on the House to vote again on the amendment.

• Lincoln threw his support to the effort to secure passage, intervening more directly

• He pressure border Unionists and lame-duck Democrats to change their votes.

• Lincoln authorized Speaker of the House Schuyler Colfax to announce a special session.

• The result hung in the balance until the very end, on 12, 1865.

• On January 31, the House approved the Thirteenth Amendment.

• The outcome was greeted with wild celebration and visions of millennial change.

• Lincoln offered remarks to a group at the White House and declared it went well beyond the Proclamation and "is a King's cure for all the evils".

• Though the Constitution doesn't allow for the President's input on amendments, he signed an official copy.

Part Of The Constitution

• To become part of the Constitution, the Thirteenth Amendment required ratification by three-quarters of the states. The admission of Nevada on the eve of the 1864 election, increased the number of states to thirty-six
• It seemed unlikely. that the three northern (Kentucky, Delaware, and New Jersey), would ratify.
• On the other hand, by early 1865 seven former slave states had abolished slavery by statute, constitutional amendment, or popular convention.
• Lincoln's home state of Illinois was, appropriately, first to ratify
• Delaware, the border state where Lincoln had begun his initiative, rejected the amendment.
• When Lincoln was assassinated in April 1865, twenty-one of the required twenty-seven states had approved the amendment.
• Andrew Johnson secured final ratification.
• He authorized conventions to write new constitutions
• Under its terms, conventions elected by and composed of white southerners who had taken oaths of future loyalty were to write new constitutions for the southern states.
• Johnson insisted that these conventions abolish slavery his own and urge their approval.
• Johnson was racist and his plan offered no protection to the slaves
• Johnson did not include a caveat as had Lincoln in his proclamation anticipating the Supreme Court might invalidate the Proclamation
• All seemed to cause wrangling, not approval of slaves

Johnson's Requirements

• Johnson's requirements led to unseemly wrangling
• The amendment's second section, conferring enforcement power on Congress, sparked considerable alarm in the South.
• Johnson did not include a caveat as had Lincoln in his proclamation anticipating the Supreme Court might invalidate the Proclamation
• All seemed to cause wrangling, not approval of slaves
• On December 18, 1865, Secretary of State William H. Seward that the Amendment had become part of the US constitution.
• That date the United States will be forever, wrote the New York Times
• When Lincoln was there would be two anniversaries of the slave events

What It Meant

• What Freedom meant for them from a question
• But if the resolution, the Thirteenth Amendment resolved one slavery the question from, said Senator “everything connected with pertaining".
• Wilson wrote and declared Congress those questions These rights all belong to all
• At a stage all the rights
• He said civil rights, to do everything they need the enjoyment Of movement
• Johnson still was the new. The substance meant they Had not made a decision
• All the rights were already declared
• They were created to say what was a natural man was. The
• Congress was there if there was a problem to take action.
• Johnson would do whatever was best for the former slave
• The most were very had the civil labor and other -The freedom came with and the
• He wanted very many in
• In 1867
• He could fix things so nobody else
• They wouldn’t