Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment

Abstract

The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified by 27 states by December 1865, represents the beginning of a new constitutional order in the United States. The ostensive purpose of the Amendment was to abolish slavery and thus to eliminate, both symbolically and practically, the cause of the Civil War and threat to the stability of the Union. Although President Abraham Lincoln believed at the beginning of the war that preserving the union was a sufficient rationale for the fighting, by the time of the Gettysburg Address in November 1863, he was obviously of the opposite opinion that the postbellum legal order could not tolerate slavery. He reasoned that the phrase “all men are created equal” in the Declaration of Independence must be read to imply the injustice of subordinating one race to another. The new constitutional order was expressed not only in the guarantee of equality under the law but in the...