The Thirteenth Amendment: Opposing Visions

In the wake of the presidential election of 1860 that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House, the slaveholding states of the American South, led by South Carolina, began withdrawing from the nation. In the midst of this constitutional crisis, President James Buchanan, still in office until Lincoln’s inauguration in March of 1861, tried to reassure the South that their slave property would remain safe, even under the incoming Republican administration that some slaveholders believed would be abolitionist. He asked Congress to draw up what he called an “explanatory amendment” to the Constitution that would explicitly recognize the right of states to sanction human bondage and protect the rights of slaveholders to maintain their human property. In response, the House of Representatives established a thirty-three member committee under the leadership of Representative Thomas Crown of Ohio to prepare a draft for the president’s consideration.

Within weeks, the committee delivered to the full House a document that many hoped would mollify the South. This proposed Thirteenth Amendment (GLC 09040) reflected the apprehension of all those who in late 1860 believed that they were witnessing the dissolution of the nation. Without using the word slavery or slave the proposed amendment would deny “to Congress the power to abolish or interfere, within any state, with the domestic institutions thereof, including that of persons held to labor or service by the laws of said state.” Curiously, there was no mention of the right of Congress to restrict the spread of slavery into national territories that might, at some future point, become states in the union. This had been the major point of contention since the Supreme Court’s 1857 decision in the case of Dred Scott. Scott was a slave who sought his freedom on the grounds that his master had allowed him to live in a free territory for a number of years. The Court rejected Scott’s claim of freedom, ruling that, under the Constitution, Congress had no right to exclude slavery from the territories.

Although president-elect Lincoln had let it be known that he would respect the right of slaveholders in states that currently sanctioned slavery, he and the Republican Party had taken a solid stand against the expansion of the institution into the territories. The South completely rejected any effort to limit slavery, however, arguing that slavery must expand or die. Slaveholders were so committed to this notion that they proposed the U.S. annexation of Cuba and parts of Latin America to insure the availability of regions well-suited to the use of large scale slave labor and thus to the continued economic and political power of the slaveholding South. However, the proposed Thirteenth Amendment took no position on this most divisive point of dispute.

Still, the amendment, officially designated Joint Resolution No. 80, passed the House of Representatives in late February by the convincing vote of more than two-thirds of the membership. It was delivered to the Senate just days before Lincoln’s inauguration and although most members of that body supported it, opponents were successful in blocking the amendment on a parliamentary technicality.

The effort to establish a constitutional guarantee for slavery was not dead however. Senator John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, committed to calming secessionist tempers, proposed a broad compromise calculated to appease the slave states. He proposed a set of constitutional amendments that would not only protect slavery in the South, but would also allow it to expand into the West. By constitutional amendment, the old Missouri Compromise that had been struck down by the court in the Dred Scott case would be reinstated. Further, Crittenden’s plan would extend a line from the southern border of the state of Missouri to California as the northern boundary of slavery. All regions south of that line would be open to slaveholder expansion.

President-elect Lincoln and other Republicans were not willing to allow slavery to move into the West, and the Crittenden compromise, as the plan was called, failed to gain the required support. This Thirteenth Amendment, originally proposed to appease the South was then dismissed. In 1865, at the end of the war, a very different constitutional amendment, bearing the same numerical designation, was proposed and finally passed.

The Thirteenth Amendment that was added to the Constitution outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude everywhere in the nation. It was the first change made to the Constitution in over sixty years and the first substantive change to the nation’s conception of individual freedoms since the Bill of Rights was adopted in 1789. In his Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln had declared the abolition of slavery in the states then in rebellion against the United States. He claimed the right to do this under the war powers of the president, but he believed that only a constitutional amendment could end slavery nationally. His reelection to the presidency in 1864 and the gain in Republican seats in the Congress provided the opportunity to move forward on such an amendment. The Thirteenth Amendment became a part of the Constitution in December of 1865, eight months after the surrender of the Confederacy and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. The Civil War was over and for the first time in history a U.S. president had been murdered. John Wilkes Booth, a Confederate sympathizer, had assassinated Lincoln because the president had publicly stated his commitment to freedom and citizenship for the former slaves. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth constitutional amendments, ratified in the decade after the war, wrote Lincoln’s commitment into the Constitution. Yet Southern state law, Northern apathy, the manipulation of constitutional interpretation and national racism blunted its practical effect. It would take another century of civil rights struggle for these protections to become more than constitutional promises.

James Oliver Horton
Benjamin Banneker Professor of American Studies and History
George Washington University

GLC 09040 Copy of Proposed Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, 30 April 1861.

For more information or to obtain copies, contact Ana Ramirez-Luhrs at reference@gilderlehrman.com or call (212) 787-6616 ext. 209.

Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, 2001.

William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress (Vintage Books, 1998).

James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (rev. ed., Hill & Wang, 1997).

Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (reprint, Louisiana State University Press, 1997).