This week marks the 160th anniversary of the passage of the 13th Amendment. Congress, dominated by free state Republicans after the secession of slaveholding states, worked for 18 months to secure enough votes to pass the amendment. The reconstruction of slaveholding states conquered before the end of the Civil War — Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee — ensured the amendment had the prerequisite number of states to ensure its ratification. Slavery in the United States was finished.
Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Republican and one of the leading architects of the amendment, believed he was participating in a revolution of the slaveholding South and in broader American society. “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed,” said Stevens, “and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic.”
People often don’t realize the revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment, and conservatives in particular downplay its revolutionary nature. American historians have for a long time treated the actions of the Republican Party, and the ending of slavery in particular, as a modest but nonetheless substantive political and social revolution.
Allan Nevins, whose eight-volume history of the sectional crisis and the Civil War won a string of awards in the middle of the 20th century, called the Civil War a revolution, as did Pulitzer-winning historian James McPherson, author of the 1989 book Battle Cry of Freedom, which is perhaps still the single best history of the Civil War. In fact, it’s hard to see how the Civil War and the abolition of slavery did not remake the United States.
The understandable desire to protect the legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and the tendency to view the Constitution as an almost sacred document that created an exceptional nation, are powerful but not always historically helpful ways to conceive of the 13th Amendment and the other two Reconstruction amendments. While slavery did not create the American republic, the Constitution undoubtably tolerated ownership of human chattel.
Where the 1619 Project and leftist intellectuals err in their ridiculous claim that the United States was founded on slavery, conservatives sometimes understate the extent to which the 1789 Constitution tolerated slavery, particularly in Southern states. When Lincoln told a group of Illinois Republicans in 1858 that a “house divided cannot stand,” he was speaking in a revolutionary way. The Constitution was built for a house divided. That the founders hoped slavery would eventually end, and most of them did, did not eradicate the reality that the constitutional order abided and protected slavery where it existed.
There was nothing inevitable about slavery’s end when the republic began, or even at the outset of the Civil War. Lincoln worried that Republican attempts to turn the war into an anti-slavery crusade would cause a mutiny in the North’s Army of the Potomac. Even cautious attempts to nudge the four Union slave states — Delaware, Kentucky, Maryland, and Missouri — toward programs of compensated gradual emancipation were shot down by those states’ governors and legislatures. It would take raw military and state power to coerce even Northerners into accepting a national program of manumission.
By the fall of 1863, the roots of the anti-slavery revolution were laid. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation went into effect on Jan. 1, and the Confederacy’s strategic stronghold of Vicksburg, Mississippi, fell on July 4. A day earlier, Robert E. Lee’s army of Northern Virginia lost thousands of men at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in a failed invasion of the Northern states. The massive amount of life lost in the Civil War could no longer be justified by a mere return to the pre-war union.
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When the war finally ended in the spring of 1865, there was little willingness among the victorious Northern populace to let slavery, the material cause of the war, survive the conflict. But slavery could not be ended without an extraordinary expenditure of military and political capital. The military expenditures had occurred by 1865. General William Sherman’s march through Georgia and the Northern Army’s transformation into an army of liberation secured the military aspect of the anti-slavery revolution. The 13th Amendment, passed in truly extraordinary circumstances, through extraordinary men, by extraordinary means, secured the political viability of the anti-slavery revolution.
People shouldn’t shy away from admitting the revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment. The remarkable nature of the constitutional order lies in its ability not to forestall revolutions, but to shear them of their violence and radicalness and turn them toward the natural ends of the United States’ fundamental laws. Thomas Jefferson’s election, Andrew Jackson’s rise to power, Lincoln’s war with slavery, Theodore Roosevelt’s masculine Americanism, FDR’s New Deal, Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” and even Donald Trump’s desire to “Make America Great Again” all are conservative revolutions that have shaped the United States, and there will certainly be more to come. Our constitutional order is great precisely because it allowed the 13th Amendment to revolutionize society for the better rather than curtailing it.
Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
