This policy was unacceptable to most Southern politicians, who believed that the growth of free states would turn the U. Shortly after his inauguration in , the Civil War began. Four more Southern states joined the Confederacy, while four border slave states in the upper South remained in the Union. Lincoln, though he privately detested slavery, responded cautiously to the call by abolitionists for emancipation of all enslaved Americans after the outbreak of the Civil War.
As the war dragged on, however, the Republican-dominated federal government began to realize the strategic advantages of emancipation: The liberation of enslaved people would weaken the Confederacy by depriving it of a major portion of its labor force, which would in turn strengthen the Union by producing an influx of manpower. With 11 Southern states seceded from the Union, there were few pro-slavery congressmen to stand in the way of such an action.
In , Congress annulled the fugitive slave laws , prohibited slavery in the U. As the Confederacy staggered toward defeat, Lincoln realized that the Emancipation Proclamation, a war measure, might have little constitutional authority once the war was over. The Republican Party subsequently introduced the 13th Amendment into Congress, and in April the necessary two-thirds of the overwhelmingly Republican Senate passed the amendment.
However, the House of Representatives , featuring a higher proportion of Democrats, did not pass the amendment by a two-thirds majority until January , three months before Confederate General Robert E. Alabama, a former Confederate state, was forced to ratify the amendment as a condition for re-admission into the Union. On December 18, the 13th Amendment was officially adopted into the Constitution— years after the first shipload of captive Africans landed at Jamestown , Virginia , and were bought as enslaved workers.
But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many masters owned fewer than 50 enslaved people. Land owners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement was restricted.
Many masters raped enslaved women, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished.
A strict hierarchy among the enslaved from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their masters.
Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families; most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.
Rebellions among enslaved people did occur—notably ones led by Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in —but few were successful. In the North, the increased repression of southern Black people only fanned the flames of the growing abolitionist movement. Free Black people and other antislavery northerners had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the s.
This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the s. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although estimates vary widely, it may have helped anywhere from 40, to , enslaved people reach freedom. Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was able to help quell the forces of sectionalism only temporarily. In , another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War.
Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed—in the new state of Kansas.
In , the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his master had taken him into free territory effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery. In , two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.
The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists, but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South. The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president.
Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America ; four more would follow after the Civil War began. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. The amendment was a top priority for the late President, Abraham Lincoln. It was approved in the Senate on April 8, , and by the House on January 31, On February 1, , Lincoln approved the Joint Resolution of Congress submitting the proposed amendment to the states, a little more than two months before his death at the hands of an assassin who supported slavery.
Still, 27 of the 36 states had to ratify the amendment for it to become part of the Constitution, and some of those states had been in rebellion during the Civil War. Lincoln and the Radical Republicans struggled to get the House to pass the amendment, but they finally succeeded in securing a —56 vote.
Secretary of State William Seward officially certified the amendment on December 18,
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