Thirteenth Amendment (1865): The Abolition of Slavery in the US

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the country, except as punishment for a crime. Congress passed it on 31 January 1865, in the last months of the Civil War, and it was ratified on 6 December 1865. It was the first change to the Constitution in more than sixty years and permanently ended an institution that had held about four million people in bondage in 1860.

Background: slavery and the Constitution

The original Constitution of 1787 never used the word “slavery”, but it protected the institution in several ways, including the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause. Any change required two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states, which made a constitutional ban on slavery almost unthinkable while slave states held so much power.

In 1861, as Southern states seceded, Congress even passed the Corwin Amendment, which would have forbidden federal interference with slavery in the states. It was never ratified. The war changed everything. As Union armies advanced, enslaved people fled to their lines in large numbers, and in 1863 Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Why an amendment was needed

The proclamation had serious limits. It was a war measure based on the president’s powers as commander-in-chief, it applied only to areas still in rebellion, and it did not cover the loyal border slave states of Kentucky, Delaware, Maryland and Missouri. Many feared that after the war courts might rule that it no longer had force, or that a future Congress could undo it.

Some border states were already acting on their own. Maryland abolished slavery through a new state constitution in November 1864, Missouri followed in January 1865 and Tennessee in February 1865. Slavery nevertheless remained legal in Kentucky and Delaware, and only a national amendment could end it everywhere at once.

Abolitionists therefore pressed for a permanent solution. The Women’s National Loyal League, organised by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, gathered around 400,000 signatures on petitions calling for the abolition of slavery and presented them to Congress in 1864.

Drafting and the Senate vote

In January 1864 Senator John B. Henderson of Missouri introduced a joint resolution to abolish slavery. The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, drafted the final wording, borrowing the phrase “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which had banned slavery in the territory north of the Ohio River.

The Senate approved the amendment on 8 April 1864 by 38 votes to 6. In the House of Representatives, however, it fell short of the necessary two-thirds majority on 15 June 1864, with 93 votes in favour and 65 against, as most Democrats opposed it.

The fight in the House

Lincoln decided to make the amendment a central issue. At his request, the 1864 Republican (National Union) platform endorsed it, and after his re-election in November he argued that the voters had spoken. In his annual message to Congress in December 1864 he urged the House to pass it without waiting for the new, more Republican Congress to meet.

Representative James M. Ashley of Ohio managed the measure in the House, and the administration worked hard to win over lame-duck Democrats and border-state members. Historians have documented promises of patronage and other favours, though the full details of the bargaining remain unclear.

On 31 January 1865 the House passed the amendment by 119 votes to 56, just above the two-thirds needed, with several members abstaining. Spectators in the galleries, including Black Americans, broke into cheers. Lincoln signed the resolution the next day, on 1 February, even though the Constitution gives the president no role in amendments.

Ratification

Illinois became the first state to ratify, on 1 February 1865. Lincoln did not live to see the process completed; he was killed in April, and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln brought Andrew Johnson to the presidency.

Johnson required the reconstructed Southern governments to ratify the amendment as a condition of returning to the Union, and several did so. Georgia’s vote on 6 December 1865 gave the amendment the support of 27 of the 36 states, the required three-quarters. Secretary of State William H. Seward certified its adoption on 18 December 1865.

News of freedom reached some enslaved people only slowly. On 19 June 1865 Union General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, and announced that all slaves there were free, a date later celebrated as Juneteenth and made a federal holiday in 2021. The amendment then removed any remaining legal doubt about emancipation in every state.

Some states rejected it at first. New Jersey ratified in January 1866 after an earlier refusal, Delaware only in 1901 and Kentucky in 1976. Mississippi voted to ratify in 1995, but its ratification was not formally recorded until 2013.

What the amendment says

The amendment has two short sections. The first provides that “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 second gives Congress the power to enforce it by appropriate legislation.

The enforcement clause was itself significant. It was the first amendment to include such an enforcement clause, and Republicans used it to justify the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

The exception clause

The words “except as a punishment for crime” had a long and painful afterlife. After the war, Southern states passed Black Codes and vagrancy laws that made it easy to arrest freed people for minor offences. Convicted prisoners, overwhelmingly Black, were then leased to plantations, mines and railways, or forced into chain gangs, under conditions that historians have described as close to slavery.

The convict-leasing system lasted in some states into the 1920s, and Alabama ended it only in 1928. In recent years the clause has become a subject of public debate, and several states have removed similar exceptions from their own constitutions.

Consequences and legacy

The amendment freed the remaining enslaved people in Kentucky and Delaware, numbering in the tens of thousands, and ended any legal doubt about emancipation elsewhere. It did not, however, define the rights of the freed people. White Southern resistance quickly showed that more was needed, leading to the 14th Amendment of 1868 and the 15th Amendment of 1870 during the Reconstruction era.

Courts have also used the amendment against forced labour. In Bailey v. Alabama (1911) the Supreme Court struck down laws used to trap workers in debt peonage, and in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968) it held that Congress could ban racial discrimination in housing as one of the “badges and incidents of slavery”. The amendment came three decades after Britain’s Slavery Abolition Act, and Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, followed in 1888.

Timeline

• 1864, 8 April: The Senate passes the amendment by 38 votes to 6.
• 1864, 15 June: The House fails to reach a two-thirds majority.
• 1864, 8 November: Lincoln is re-elected on a platform supporting the amendment.
• 1865, 31 January: The House passes the amendment by 119 votes to 56.
• 1865, 1 February: Lincoln signs the resolution; Illinois ratifies first.
• 1865, 6 December: Georgia’s ratification completes the three-quarters requirement.
• 1865, 18 December: Secretary of State Seward certifies the amendment.

Why it matters

The Thirteenth Amendment turned wartime emancipation into permanent national law and made slavery unconstitutional everywhere in the United States. It was the first of the three Reconstruction amendments that reshaped American citizenship, though its exception for criminal punishment left a loophole whose consequences are still debated.