The Thirteenth Amendment
Ratified in December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States. It was the first of three Reconstruction Amendments and the formal end of the constitutional accommodation of slavery.
For more than seventy years, the Constitution had accommodated slavery without naming it. The three-fifths clause counted enslaved persons for purposes of representation. The fugitive slave clause required their return. The slave trade clause forbade Congress from prohibiting the international slave trade before 1808. The framers had compromised on the existence of slavery as the price of union. The Civil War ended that compromise. The Emancipation Proclamation, issued by President Lincoln in 1863 as a wartime measure, freed enslaved people in territory still in rebellion. Its constitutional status was uncertain. A more permanent answer was required.
The Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate in 1864 and the House in January 1865, after Lincoln personally lobbied wavering members. Ratification by the states was completed in December 1865, eight months after Lincoln's assassination. The amendment reads: "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." Section 2 grants Congress the power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation.
The amendment was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments. The Fourteenth, ratified in 1868, granted citizenship and required equal protection of the laws. The Fifteenth, ratified in 1870, protected the right to vote regardless of race. Together they remade the constitutional order. The Thirteenth Amendment is unusual among constitutional provisions in that it binds private parties as well as governments. It is the only provision of the Constitution that directly outlaws certain private conduct. The exception for criminal punishment has had its own troubled history, as Southern states used vagrancy and similar laws after the war to compel involuntary labor from formerly enslaved people. Modern jurisprudence has read the amendment to authorize federal legislation against the badges and incidents of slavery, a category the Supreme Court has interpreted broadly in some eras and narrowly in others.