page_title: Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
section_title: Effects
hierarchical_section_title: Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution / Effects
caption_attribution_description: English: 13th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Español: Decimotercera enmienda de la Constitución de los Estados Unidos.
context_page_description: The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime. The amendment was passed by Congress on January 31, 1865, and ratified by the required 27 of the then 36 states on December 6, 1865 and proclaimed on December 18. It was the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments adopted following the American Civil War.
  President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863 declared that the enslaved in Confederate-controlled areas were free. When they escaped to Union lines or federal forces advanced south, emancipation occurred without any compensation to the former owners. Texas was the last Confederate territory reached by the Union army. On June, 19, 1865 - Juneteenth - Union Army general Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas, to proclaim the war had ended and so had slavery. In the slave-owning areas controlled by Union forces on January 1, 1863 state action was used to abolish slavery. The exceptions were Kentucky and Delaware where slavery was finally ended by the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.
context_section_description: The immediate impact of the amendment was to make the entire pre-war system of chattel slavery in the U.S. illegal. The impact of the abolition of slavery was felt quickly. When the Thirteenth Amendment became operational, the scope of Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was widened to include the entire nation. Although the majority of Kentucky's slaves had been emancipated, 65,000–100,000 people remained to be legally freed when the amendment went into effect on December 18. In Delaware, where a large number of slaves had escaped during the war, nine hundred people became legally free.
  In addition to abolishing slavery and prohibiting involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, the Thirteenth Amendment nullified the Fugitive Slave Clause and the Three-Fifths Compromise. The population of a state originally included (for congressional apportionment purposes) all "free persons", three-fifths of "other persons" (i.e., slaves) and excluded untaxed Native Americans. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a provision in the Constitution that required three-fifths of the population of slaves be counted for purposes of apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and taxes among the states. This compromise had the effect of increasing the political power of slave-holding states by increasing their share of seats in the House of Representatives, and consequently their share in the Electoral College (where a state's influence over the election of the President is tied to the size of its congressional delegation).
  Even as the Thirteenth Amendment was working its way through the ratification process, Republicans in Congress grew increasingly concerned about the potential for there to be a large increase in the congressional representation of the Democratic-dominated Southern states. Because the full population of freed slaves would be counted rather than three-fifths, the Southern states would dramatically increase their power in the population-based House of Representatives. Republicans hoped to offset this advantage by attracting and protecting votes of the newly enfranchised black population.
caption: Amendment XIII in the National Archives, bearing the signature of Abraham Lincoln
exif: {"Image ImageDescription": "13th Amendment", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "150", "Image YResolution": "150", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop 7.0", "Image DateTime": "2006:03:10 11:17:37", "Image ExifOffset": "184", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "322", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "10440", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "2672", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "3414"}