The Thirteenth Amendment

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On December 6, 1865 the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by the required number of states to make it law. ( Sorry I didn't post this yesterday :redface: ) This was the official ending of slavery in the United States.
"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." With these words, the single greatest change wrought by the Civil War was officially noted in the Constitution.

The ratification came eight months after the end of the war, but it represented the culmination of the struggle against slavery. When the war began, some in the North were against fighting what they saw as a crusade to end slavery. Although many northern Democrats and conservative Republicans were opposed to slavery's expansion, they were ambivalent about outlawing the institution entirely. The war's escalation after the First Battle of Bull Run, Virginia, in July 1861 caused many to rethink the role that slavery played in creating the conflict. By 1862, Lincoln realized that it was folly to wage such a bloody war without plans to eliminate slavery. In September 1862, following the Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in Maryland, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring that all slaves in territory still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, would be declared forever free. The move was largely symbolic, as it only freed slaves in areas outside of Union control, but it changed the conlfict from a war for the reunification of the states to a war whose objectives included the destruction of slavery.

Lincoln believed that a constitutional amendment was necessary to ensure the end of slavery. In 1864, Congress debated several proposals. Some insisted on including provisions to prevent discrimination against blacks, but the Senate Judiciary Committee provided the eventual language. It borrowed from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, when slavery was banned from the area north of the Ohio River. The Senate passed the amendment in April 1864.

A Republican victory in the 1864 presidential election would guarantee the success of the amendment. The Republican platform called for the "utter and complete destruction" of slavery, while the Democrats favored restoration of states' rights, which would include at least the possibility for the states to maintain slavery. Lincoln's overwhelming victory set in motion the events leading to ratification of the amendment. The House passed the measure in January 1865 and it was sent to the states for ratification. When Georgia ratified it on December 6, 1865, the institution of slavery officially ceased to exist in the United States.
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13th amendment has gone into disuse...

As Foner would emphasize, all of these moments – the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 – represented not final solutions but resting places in a dynamic process, especially given the defeats these advances met at the Supreme Court. The Court interpreted the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in the narrowest possible manner, and both were seen as implying limiting definitions, rather than additional specifications, over the Thirteenth Amendment. At the overturning of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, Justice Marshall Harlan lamented that the Court had sacrificed both the substance and spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment, which — as seen before the Civil War – “did more than prohibit slavery.” Although the Court had a long jurisprudence before the Civil War of securing rights of owners, it did not extend this jurisprudence to the rights of the now-freed slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment fell into disuse, and with the notable exception of a 1968 private housing discrimination case was hardly ever cited by the Justices in either opinions or dissents.

As Foner concluded, he proposed a re-discovery of the Thirteenth Amendment that might inspire a re-thinking of the dichotomy between state action and private action – which, he suggested, few historians take seriously anymore. In Lincoln’s second inaugural address, he identified slavery as the cause of the Civil War and challenged the nation to “strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.” Foner left the audience by renewing this same challenge.

http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/12/the-road-to-and-past-the-thirteenth-amendment/
 
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