Thirteenth Amendment

The Thirteenth Amendment (1865) to the Constitution of the United States formally abolished slavery in the United States. Although the words slavery and slave are not used anywhere in the Constitution, the Thirteenth Amendment abrogated those sections of the Constitution which had tacitly codified what white Southerners then referred to as the “peculiar institution”:

• Article I, Section 2, which declared that apportionment of representation in the House of Representatives shall be “determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons…three fifths of all other Persons provided for the appointment,” with “all other persons,” meaning slaves;
• Article I, Section 9, which established 1807 as the end date for the importation of “such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit,” meaning slaves; and
• Article IV, Section 2, which mandated the return of persons “held to Service or Labour in one State…under the Laws thereof” who had escaped into another state.

The Thirteenth Amendment was the first of three constitutional amendments from the Reconstruction era (1865–77) aimed at ending and redressing the inequities of slavery.

The Emancipation Proclamation, declared and promulgated by Pres. Abraham Lincoln in 1863 during the American Civil War, freed only those slaves held in the Confederate States of America and not those held in border states that had not joined the confederacy. In thus depriving the confederate states of their greatest economic resource—abundant free human labor—Lincoln’s proclamation was intended primarily as an instrument of military strategy. Only when emancipation was universally proposed through the Thirteenth Amendment did it become a national policy. Moreover, the legality of abolition by presidential edict was questionable. In addition, the amendment did not prohibit slavery in the Indian Territory, then an area in the central United States to which some Native American tribes had been forcibly migrated.

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The full text of the amendment is:

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.

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

The amendment was passed by the Senate on April 8, 1864, but did not pass in the House until January 31, 1865. The joint resolution of both bodies that submitted the amendment to the states for approval was signed by Lincoln on February 1, 1865. However, he did not live to see its ratification. Assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, he died on April 15, 1865, and the amendment was not ratified by the required number of states until December 6, 1865.

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