Thirteenth Amendment Research Articles

미국 내전기간 제38차 정기의회의 전시 재건논의와 갈등

This critical essay aims at the understanding the Civil War and Reconstruction and finally President Lincoln’s thinking about the Thirteenth Amendment. President Issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863. and so all Confederate slaves but a few certain areas and borderlines states were freed. Therefore, so many black soldiers had taken part in battles such as Port Hudson and MilliKen’s Bend, Louisiana, and Fort Wagner, South Carolina. On December 8, Lincoln introduced so-called “Ten-Percent Plan of Reconstruction” and the Proclamation of Amnesty and Reconstruction. All these great reform movements and the military reconstruction had great affected into black people in the Confederate areas. And the reform-mind Congress had visioned a ultimate settlement, the Thirteenth Amendment, which had been approved and ratified and in the finally added into the U. S. Constitution. In the course of these increasingly added reform movements, I try to understand why President never accepted all the reform programs acquiescently and firstly in the very historic movement. why he taken more careful and extended observation about States Right, contrary to the past statements as the Emancipation Proclamation and Gettysburg Address.

Unravelling the constitutional settlement: devolution, democracy and patronage in eastern Sri Lanka

ABSTRACT Like other conflict-torn societies, Sri Lankans have long sought to build peace through constitutional re-design with devolution of power and minority protections. However, the preoccupation with legal norms and institutions runs counter to the widely-held conviction that politicians routinely transgress norms and twist institutions. It is thus imperative to study the lived political realities of power-sharing arrangements, rather than their intended design. The 1987 Thirteenth Amendment devolved state power to the provinces to assuage Tamil separatism. The limited academic work that exists on the Provincial Council system outlines its shortcomings and failures, but there is little scholarship of the councils as a political arena in their own right. This article discusses the politics around the Eastern Provincial Council, especially the brief but unique period between 2015 and 2017 when it was run by Tamil and Muslim parties. More specifically, the empirical material pivots on three Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim Ministers in the Eastern Province and two lower-ranking Muslim politicians. The Provincial Council has very different meaning, legitimacy and utility to these diverse political figures. I argue that we must consider these diverse ethno-nationalist manifestations of provincial politics to understand what the Provincial Council system entails in Sri Lanka.

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Pregnant Prisoners in Shackles

Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North by Crystal Lynn Webster

Reviewed by: Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North by Crystal Lynn Webster Vanessa M. Holden (bio) Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood: African American Children in the Antebellum North. By Crystal Lynn Webster. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 208. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $24.95.) Lucinda Ricks, a newly freed single mother, moved with her three children into the Shelter for Coloured Orphans in the City of Brotherly Love in 1827. Stephen, Simon, and Henry Ricks would initially live with their mother as boarders in the shelter, but, because of her precarious financial future, Lucinda surrendered her sons to the shelter and moved out into the city. The family’s story, including that of Simon and Stephen’s deaths while in the care of shelter workers, haunts Crystal Lynn Webster’s book, Beyond the Boundaries of Childhood. In it the Ricks navigate the changing landscape of Black freedom in a city noted in its time as a hub of free Black life. Webster tells their story and the stories of other free Black parents and children to demonstrate the important role that Black children and the contested meanings of their childhood played in shaping free Black life. Webster’s work offers a significant contribution to African American history. Few books have investigated the lives of free and enslaved antebellum Black children. Broadening our understanding of emancipation and free Black life, Webster argues that free Black children and command of their labor were central concerns of activist movements in the antebellum North. But beyond how adults contested the boundaries of Black childhood, Webster demonstrates how Black children acted politically and advocated for themselves. The book begins with an exploration of how white reformers and ante-bellum popular culture racialized childhood as a white and middle-class prerogative. Webster then demonstrates that while play was an essential hallmark of white childhood, Black children at play transgressed society’s expectations. While Black children were institutionalized at benevolent homes and orphanages, reformers instilled the middle-class values of industry and labor. These values were classed, raced, and imposed on the poor and racially marginalized. Benevolent homes, asylums, orphanages, almshouses, and reformatories run by white reformers and activists were sites of abuse, neglect, and suffering for many free children of color. Webster presents the bleak reality of children growing sick and dying. She also reads the building plans and [End Page 554] layouts of these institutions to demonstrate how literal structures reflected authorities’ ideas about the differences between white and Black children. Unlike their approach to white children, authorities also sent Black children to institutions intended for adults, rendering these youths vulnerable to even more abuse. Reformers and officials racialized and criminalized African American children and childhood, denying Black children the innocence and play afforded to white children. The line between placement in a benevolent home and incarceration in developing antebellum prisons was thin, and reformers often pushed Black children across it. For Black children, danger came from within and without institutions. Webster notes how whites targeted institutions for Black children with extralegal violence and destruction. Beyond brick-and-mortar institutions, Webster investigates a significant legal institution: indenture. With roots in systems of apprenticeship, the legal system of indenture bound an apprentice to a master for a set term of service. Ministers of the poor throughout antebellum America bound children, white and Black, to property-owning white adults who were obligated to provide their new wards with basic shelter, clothing, and food. In return, children were expected to work for their masters. As Webster points out, institutions often had stipulations that their charges would be placed through indenture with white adults. Officials also indentured Black children deemed destitute. Once their children were relinquished to or taken to an institution, Black parents faced considerable obstacles to retrieving them. Through this legal system of unfree labor, whites continued to control free Black children and profit from their exploitation. The system did not die when northern states began the process of emancipation, and it did not die in 1865 with the Thirteenth Amendment. Webster’s work presents important consideration of the value of Black children’s labor and the...

HOW THE SUPREME COURT DISTORTED TEXT, IGNORED HISTORY, AND GASLIGHTED THE BOLD PROMISE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866 A Comcast Case Study

HOW THE SUPREME COURT DISTORTED TEXT, IGNORED HISTORY, AND GASLIGHTED THE BOLD PROMISE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT OF 1866 A <i>Comcast</i> Case Study

Beyond the Metaphor of Slavery

Beyond the Metaphor of Slavery

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Prisoners’ Rights, Resistance, and the Law in Postwar Texas Prisons

Black Bodies in America as the Metaphors for Oppression, Poverty, Violence, and Hate: Searching for Sustainable Solutions Beyond the Black-letter Law

Black people in America have often been labeled outlaws, deviants, and nonconformists who are disinterested in complying with the laid down rules. However, from a long range experience dating back to slavery, they recognize that rules in the American context whether the Slave Codes, Black Codes, Jim Crows, or the contemporary law, are machinations of the legal system to perpetuate oppression and violence against Blackness. Toward self-preservation, they have learned to radically resist acts of oppression such as wrongful arrests by the police and the functional denial of their rights to be presumed innocent, protest and bear arms, even if such resistance necessitates a stark disobedience to the law enforcement. The Stono Rebellion of 1739 and other slave uprisings used resistance to achieve the abolition of chattel slavery. In the contemporary times, the Black radical tradition pursues the eradication of criminal enslavement by promoting Black protests and resistance against wrongful arrests: wrongful arrests have been identified as the preliminary steps toward mass Black incarceration. In opposition to the mainstream perspective in American literature, this paper uses a functional-analytical approach to legal reasoning to analyze key legal, historical, and sociological issues surrounding the existence of Black people in America in order to show that slavery is still functionally alive: it argues positively for the legitimacy and appropriateness of the Black radical tradition as a reliable means of effectuating the myriad black-letter rights that started in 1865 under the Thirteenth Amendment.

Roe and the Original Meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment

Roe and the Original Meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment

Expanding the Definition of Freedom: "Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment", by Christian G. Samito; "Lincoln and the Immigrant", by Jason H. Silverman

Expanding the Definition of Freedom: "Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment", by Christian G. Samito; "Lincoln and the Immigrant", by Jason H. Silverman

Mr. Yeaman, from Kentucky

Mr. Yeaman, from Kentucky Forrest Roberts (bio) In January 1865, a young congressman from Kentucky was faced with a decision many politicians face—whether to do what was politically expedient or what was right. George Yeaman chose the path often not taken and voted according to his principles, even though it was not advantageous to him politically. Yeaman's affirmative vote for the Thirteenth Amendment destroyed his political career and made him many enemies, but his courage allowed him the opportunity to have a role on an international stage and to be immortalized in Steven Spielberg's movie Lincoln as one of the congressmen whose vote was critical for the passage of the amendment. George Helm Yeaman was born on November 1, 1829 in Hardin County, Kentucky, the second of seven children. His mother, Lucretia Helm Yeaman, was the brother of John Helm, who was twice governor of the state. Despite this political connection, the Yeamans were not well off. George's father, Stephen Minor Yeaman, was a member of the Kentucky Bar, but did not practice much law. He taught school for a while and obtained two patents, one for a wheat winnowing machine and another for a straw cutter. In the census of 1850, he was listed as a "fan maker."1 [End Page 5] Yeaman described his childhood as having "no early facilities—the old story of born to poverty and 'pursuing knowledge under difficulties.'" He received a grammar school education and then read law on his own before being admitted to the Kentucky Bar at the age of twenty-three. He moved to Owensboro, the county seat of Daviess County, and opened a law practice. To supplement his income, Yeaman worked as the editor of the Owensboro Gazette.2 In August 1854, at the age of twenty-four, Yeaman was elected county judge of Daviess County. The county judge's responsibilities consisted of keeping the peace, maintaining and building public structures, including a county jail, and overseeing the fiscal affairs of the county, which involved imposing and collecting a county levy. The county judge also had judicial responsibilities and presided over the Quarterly Court, which had jurisdiction for civil matters not exceeding $100 and which did not involve a land boundary. The county judge also presided over the County Court, which along with two justices of the peace, could hear appeals of cases from the Justice of the Peace Courts ranging from four to sixteen dollars. Once a year the county judge, along with most of the county's justices of the peace, presided over the Court of Claims, which transacted the business of the county. After serving a four-year term, Yeaman did not seek re-election and concentrated his energies on his law practice.3 Yeaman married Lelia Pegram Triplett in 1855. Lelia was the daughter of Robert Triplett, one of the richest men in Daviess County, who owned manufacturing and coal interests in Bon Harbor, west of Owensboro. The 1850 U.S. Census listed the value of Robert Triplett's real estate holdings at $167,000, a sum equal to over $5.8 million in 2021. George and Lelia were married in her parents' home, called Haphazard, [End Page 6] which still sits on a ridge overlooking the Ohio River east of Owensboro. The Yeamans built a home on the same ridge, which runs along what is now East Fourth Street, where three of their five children were born.4 Yeaman's personal political beliefs in the 1850s are not well documented, but by conjecture it can be assumed he was a Whig. Daviess County was a Whig county, and it would not be unreasonable that the county judge's politics would be the same as his constituents. Also, in the 1860 presidential election Yeaman supported the John Bell and Edward Everett ticket, of the Constitutional Union party. Even if Yeaman did not consider himself to be a Whig, his beliefs aligned with those of that party.5 The Constitutional Union party was formed in 1860 on three principles: the U.S. Constitution, the union of the states, and the enforcement of all laws. The party was made up of voters who rejected...

The Badges and Incidents of Criminality

The United States Constitution guarantees all citizens the same basic rights and privileges; however, citizens with criminal convictions are subject to a number of regulatory restrictions on fundamental rights (such as disenfranchisement, ineligibility for public housing and benefits, employment discrimination, etc.) regardless of the seriousness of the offense. These restrictions are called collateral consequences, and they effectively relegate citizens with criminal convictions to a state of second-class citizenship. The U.S. Supreme Court has published several opinions construing Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment, also known as the Enabling Clause, as not only abolishing slavery but also empowering Congress to eradicate all badges and incidents of slavery. However,&nbsp;the U.S. Supreme Court has provided little guidance on what constitutes the badges and incidents of slavery, and Congress has scarcely used its authority under the Enabling Clause. The countless collateral consequences that follow criminal convictions are many of the same “badges and incidents of slavery” imposed on slaves during the institution of slavery, and Congress has the authority to eradicate them via the Enabling Clause.This Comment urges Congress to eliminate all collateral consequences that follow criminal convictions and puts forth a three-part analysis to aid courts in identifying modern badges and incidents of slavery.

The Persistence of Unfree Labor in the American Southwest

Abstract This article explores the continuities of forced labor in the Southwest, where peonage and the partido system lasted for more than a century after the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, and places it within the broader context of modern global slavery. Debt peonage and peasant sharecropping—known locally as the partido—are usually classified as two different forms of unfree labor, but in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southwest they had much in common and were oftentimes mutually reinforcing. Through the legal and cultural intricacies of the partido system, thousands of landless Hispanos in the northern half of New Mexico and southern reaches of Colorado worked full-time in exchange for a small share of the annual wool harvest. Many of those same men became debt-bound to the tiny percentage of wealthy families who owned the sheep herds and grazing ranges. Through these means, partidarios (sheep renters) lost much if not all of their autonomy and became, to varying degrees depending on the disposition of their creditor and benefactor, debt peons.

The Anti-Republican Origins of the At-Will Doctrine

Abstract This article highlights the origin of the employment at-will rule by providing the contextual contrast of Reconstruction free labor republicanism. To date, no work has situated the doctrine’s emergence in the heady Reconstruction discussions of labor reform that immediately preceded it. This article briefly summarizes how the at-will rule functions to subordinate employees. The article then elaborates upon the pervasive, overarching anti-subordination themes of the Radical Republican debates in Congress as well as their specific initiatives targeted at equalizing power disparities. Further, the article examines the paradox that the Thirteenth Amendment’s minimum constitutional guarantee that workers have a right to quit became doctrinally embedded in the at-will rule’s justification. Third, the article explores the contemporary post-bellum republican alternatives, both in treatises and in the dissent’s critique in the seminal case of Payne v. Western and Atlantic Railroad. While one treatise writer, Horace Wood, advanced the at-will rule, another, James Schouler, imbued with a sense of republicanism, advanced a different rule of duration based upon custom and pay period. Finally, the article examines an early critique that at-will circumstances were so insubstantial as to fail to amount to any contract at all. Overall, this article provides a different perspective from which to view the doctrine’s emergence, that is, as a retrenchment of railroads’ authority over their day laborers at the very time that Reconstruction’s egalitarian reform efforts were fading. Utilizing contract terminology, the constitutionally guaranteed right to quit was bootstrapped into a justification for the prerogative of employers to fire employees at will. Eventually, this legal construct became the predominant employment doctrine, and it continues today.

Brief of Amici Curiae Thirteenth Amendment Scholars in Support of Plaintiff-Appellee and Affirmance

In the case of United States v. Hatch, the defendant in a hate crimes prosecution brought the first major challenge to the constitutionality of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009. This amicus brief argues that the Act is constitutional under the Thirteenth Amendment

Help Me to Find My Children: A Thirteenth Amendment Challenge to Family Separation

The Trump Administration’s forced separation of migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border is an international fault line in the global human rights framework. The scope, severity, and urgency of the issue speak clearly to the need for a diversity of strategies to protect migrant groups. With that in mind, this Article draws attention to a thus-far overlooked source of protection for migrant families facing separation — namely, the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. While it is familiar history that the Thirteenth Amendment was passed to eradicate the system of slavery and involuntary servitude, courts, scholars, and practitioners continue to underappreciate the extent to which the Amendment prohibits practices with a colorable referent to those that sustained the institution of slavery. Indeed, a central aspect of slavery was the denial of dignity and the fundamental human right to the sanctity of the family, and a central preoccupation of the Thirteenth Amendment’s architects was to prevent enslaved families from being ripped asunder. Highlighting parallels between the breaking up of Black families that reinforced the institution of slavery and the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border, this Article argues the involuntary separation of migrant families falls within the heartland of the Thirteenth Amendment’s protections and should be outlawed as an “incident of slavery” by Congress or the courts. If one thing should be intuited from the current national reckoning with racism in the United States, it is that efforts to dismantle systems of oppression should proceed with due attention to the historical context from which the systems exist. A Thirteenth Amendment lens for evaluating the Trump Administration’s family separation practices achieves two goals: (1) it ties the violation to historical practices that impacted marginalized groups other than migrant families and accordingly may help to broaden the coalition of advocates fighting to shore up protections for migrant groups; and, (2) it makes the Congressional or judicial response more meaningful as a matter of public morality because it advances a narrative that centers the breaking up of migrant families as a failure by Congress and the courts to satisfy their constitutional duty to eliminate the kind of subjugation that was a hallmark of America’s original sin.

Better Than Jail: Social Policy in the Shadow of Racialized Mass Incarceration

Racialized mass incarceration enables forms of economic exploitation that evade traditional worker protections despite being integrated into conventional labor markets. Such exploitation is legitimated by normalizing incarceration as the baseline against which these practices are judged. In contrast, conventional social policy imagines an “economy” separate from state violence, opposing “free labor” to “involuntary servitude.” The emergent “carceral baseline” recharacterizes labor practices as subjects of criminal justice policy, not economic regulation, especially in “alternatives to incarceration.” Examples of this baseline’s deployment are drawn from regulation of child support work programs, Thirteenth Amendment challenges to community service “working off” criminal legal debts, minimum wage claims by workers in diversion programs, and legislative proposals to exclude formerly incarcerated workers from labor protections. Implications include the need to integrate insights from theories of nonmarket work and of racial capitalism that challenge the dominance of markets as objects of description and critique in law and political economy analysis.

Race and The Cycles of Constitutional Time

My 2020 book, The Cycles of Constitutional Time, argues that we can understand American constitutional development in terms of three different kinds of cycles. The first is the rise and fall of political regimes featuring dominant political parties. The second is a very long cycle of polarization and depolarization that stretches from the Civil War through the present. The third cycle is a series of episodes of constitutional rot and constitutional renewal. This essay shows how each of these cycles has deep connections to successive political struggles over race and racial equality in the United States. Each regime’s winning coalition is shaped by the politics of slavery (in the antebellum period) or race (after the Thirteenth Amendment). In several cases, the dominant coalition eventually breaks down because of disputes about slavery or race. The cycle of polarization is also highly correlated with attempts by politicians to make race, and more generally, identity, the central questions that divide the two major political parties. Finally, polarization over race and identity-- along with increasing income inequality--has been an important factor in each period of constitutional rot in the country's history. I do not claim that race is either the sole or the dominant explanation for the cycles of constitutional time in the United States. Nevertheless, race is a powerful factor, and the politics of race are an important driver of the cycles of regimes, polarization, and rot described in the book. My purpose in this Article is to highlight the role that racial politics plays in the transformations described in The Cycles of Constitutional Time, and to show how questions of race are important at each stage of the story.

Measuring Value: The Legacies of Slave Racial Capitalism after Emancipation

Measuring Value:The Legacies of Slave Racial Capitalism after Emancipation Amanda Laury Kleintop (bio) Aaron Carico, Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 296 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Aaron Carico, Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 296 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Since the publication of Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams (2013), Ed Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), and Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton (2014), the new history of capitalism has contributed to scholarly and public conversations about enslavement's relationship to the growth of capitalism in the United States. These histories highlight the complex legal and financial systems that the peculiar institution engendered. Before the Civil War, people could buy, sell, and mortgage property in humans, generating massive profits for enslavers, bankers, and others. In light of this research, a growing group of scholars has reconsidered the process of emancipation in the South. Formal abolition may have ended the legalized trade in Black bodies, but what happened to the legal and financial practices that the value of enslaved people necessitated? Aaron Carico's Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865 is one of the first books to answer this question. Carico argues that formal abolition did not end the commodification of Black bodies or their representations as relations of exchange, accumulation, and domination in U.S. culture. "Though no longer chattel," he says, "blacks in America weren't relieved of the commodity's mark. Blackness is realized in a historical matrix of economic exchange and cultural production, a real abstraction" (p. 9). Black Market is a work of cultural criticism that contributes to American Studies and interdisciplinary studies of racial capitalism. Carico explores eclectic texts like court cases, paintings, performances, photographs, novels, poetry, and music. This broad source base puts the book in conversation with U.S. and art historians, legal and literary scholars, and especially historians of capitalism. The book's theoretical framework relies on analyses of slave racial capitalism, a coin termed by Johnson in River of Dark Dreams to denote how race-based enslavement enabled and required westward expansion in the antebellum era. Carico also pulls from Black radical thinkers and Afro-Pessimists [End Page 561] like Cedric Robinson, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly his Black Reconstruction (1935). Carico seeks to refocus scholars' attention from bondage and racist violence in the post-emancipation era to an exploration of what Black people's value meant in American culture after 1865. He writes, "to focus on physical bondage and racist violence misrecognizes the systemic nature of slavery as an institution" and portrays it as a localized problem endemic to the South (p. 7). By making enslavement a Southern problem rather than a national one, northerners and eventually white Americans writ large could justify pernicious legal, financial, and cultural practices that exploited Black labor after the Civil War. White Americans' cultural productions celebrated emancipation as the realization of universal freedom in American life and glorified the United States as the beacon of economic, industrial, and democratic progress. By extolling freedom, these narratives obscured the history of enslavement and justified the United States' imperialist ventures across the continent and abroad. The book follows a roughly linear chronology. Its four chapters, each of which could stand alone for research or teaching, are organized around close readings of a wide array of engaging source materials from the antebellum era through the New Deal. Over the course of the book's first two chapters, Carico explores how white cultural producers reshaped and profited from portrayals of Blackness after 1865. In Chapter 1, Carico lays the historical groundwork for the book's arguments. Here, he treads familiar territory for historians. He contends that capitalists continued to develop coercive modes of accumulation influenced by practices created under enslavement after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Legal freedom meant, at most, the freedom to contract, and so the "political economy of abolition determined that ex-slaves would...

Law and Anti-Blackness

This Article addresses a thin slice of the American stain. Its value derives from the conversation it attempts to foster related to reckoning, reconciliation, and redemption. As the 1930s Federal Writers’ Project attempted to illuminate and make sense of slavery through its Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives From 1936-1938, so too this project seeks to uncover and name law’s role in fomenting racial division and caste. Part I turns to pathos and hate, creating race and otherness through legislating reproduction— literal and figurative. Part II turns to the Thirteenth Amendment. It argues that the preservation of slavery endured through its transformation. That the amendment makes no room for equality further establishes the racial caste system. Part III then examines the making of racial division and caste through state legislation and local ordinances, exposing the sophistry of separate but equal. Part IV turns to the effects of these laws and how they shaped cultural norms. As demonstrated in Parts I-IV, the racial divide and caste system traumatizes its victims, while also undermining the promise of constitutional equality, civil liberties, and civil rights.