What is the Thirteenth Amendment?

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the United States and any place subject to its jurisdiction. Ratified on December 6, 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War, the amendment declares that 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, and gives Congress power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments and the most decisive constitutional reckoning with the institution that had divided the country since its founding.

President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, freeing enslaved people in territory still in rebellion, but that wartime executive order did not reach the loyal border states and could be challenged after the war. Lincoln pressed Congress for a permanent solution. The Senate passed the amendment on April 8, 1864, and the House followed on January 31, 1865 by a vote of 119 to 56, just barely meeting the two-thirds requirement. Lincoln signed the joint resolution on February 1, 1865, even though the Constitution did not require presidential approval for amendments. Georgia became the twenty-seventh state to ratify on December 6, 1865, completing the process.

The amendment freed approximately four million enslaved people, including about three million in former Confederate states and several hundred thousand in the border states of Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri that the Emancipation Proclamation had not covered. Section 2 of the amendment, granting Congress enforcement power, became the basis for the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and was reinterpreted in the twentieth century to support broad federal anti-discrimination legislation, especially in Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. (1968), which upheld the 1866 act as a legitimate exercise of Thirteenth Amendment power against private racial discrimination in housing.

The exception clause permitting involuntary servitude as criminal punishment fueled the postwar convict leasing system in the South and continues to shape debate over prison labor today. The Thirteenth Amendment did not by itself end racial subjugation. The black codes passed by southern states after the war, the rise of sharecropping, and the eventual triumph of Jim Crow segregation showed that legal abolition required further constitutional reform, which arrived with the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 and the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. Naturalization candidates should recognize the Thirteenth Amendment as the constitutional end of slavery in the United States.