Constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery.
After South Carolina seceded from the Union in December 1860, several attempts at reconciliation occurred. One proposal was an amendment, the Thirteenth Amendment, that would have guaranteed the continuation of slavery. After Civil War fighting commenced, the Northern Republican Congress passed two Confiscation Acts declaring slaves in areas of open rebellion to be free. President Abraham Lincoln finally issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1,1863, declaring that all slaves in areas of open rebellion were free. (Confiscation Acts passed between 1861 and 1864 had stated that all slaves in all states, including those loyal to the Union, were free, and Lincoln did not enforce those acts.) After the Civil War, Congress quickly passed the Thirteenth Amendment outlawing slavery altogether and submitted it to the states for ratification on January 31, 1865. The states ratified it on December 6, 1865. Congress issued an official proclamation to that effect on December 18, 1865. This amendment outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States, thus ending a system of involuntary labor that divided the states and became an issue of the American Civil War. By the time the states ratified this amendment all but two states had outlawed slavery, and most slaves had already gained their freedom. New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky initially rejected the proposed amendment but later accepted it. Only Mississippi has never ratified this constitutional change. Passage of this amendment signals the beginning of Reconstruction and the process of unifying the nation.
In 1918 in Arver v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled that the “involuntary servitude” clause of the Thirteenth Amendment did not extend to the military draft.
