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Thirteenth Amendment
2 articles on Thirteenth Amendment
Thirteenth Amendment
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1419 Includes: BibliographyOn 1 January 1863 President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed slaves living within the Confederacy. This proclamation applied to the vast majority of American slaves but did not affect slaves in the loyal slave states of Maryland, Kentucky, Delaware, and Missouri, as well as parts of Virginia and Louisiana that were under the control of the United States. The constitutionality of the proclamation was questionable, however. At the beginning of the Civil War virtually all legal scholars agreed that neither Congress nor the president had the power to end slavery in the states. The Supreme Court, in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), had emphatically supported this position, asserting that slaves were a form of property explicitly protected by the Constitution. In issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln relied on his ...
Read full articleThirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (1865)
Word Count: 414The Thirteenth Amendment was the first of the three “Reconstruction Amendments” added to the U.S. Constitution after the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. It was passed by the Senate on 8 April 1864 and by the House of Representatives on 31 January 1865. By 16 December 1865, twenty-seven of the thirty-six states in the Union had voted to ratify the amendment. Several states later ratified the amendment even though it had already passed, including Oregon, California, Florida, Iowa, and Texas. The states that originally rejected the amendment were New Jersey, Delaware, Kentucky, and Mississippi. New Jersey ratified the amendment in 1866, Delaware in 1901, Kentucky in 1976, and Mississippi in 1995.The Thirteenth Amendment ...
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