Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution

(Redirected from 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution)

Amendment XIII (the Thirteenth Amendment) of the United States Constitution states:

Section 1

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.

Section 2

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States was proposed to the legislatures of the several States by the Thirty-eighth Congress, on January 31, 1865, and was declared, in a proclamation of Secretary of State William Henry Seward, dated the December 18, 1865, to have been ratified by the legislatures of twenty-seven of the thirty-six States. The dates of ratification were:

Illinois, February 1, 1865
Rhode Island, February 2, 1865
Michigan, February 2, 1865
Maryland, February 3, 1865
New York, February 3, 1865
Pennsylvania, February 3, 1865
West Virginia, February 3, 1865
Missouri, February 6, 1865
Maine, February 7, 1865
Kansas, February 7, 1865
Massachusetts, February 7, 1865
Virginia, February 9, 1865
Ohio, February 10, 1865
Indiana, February 13, 1865
Nevada, February 16, 1865
Louisiana, February 17, 1865
Minnesota, February 23, 1865
Wisconsin, February 24, 1865
Vermont, March 9, 1865
Tennessee, April 7, 1865
Arkansas, April 14, 1865
Connecticut, May 4, 1865
New Hampshire, July 1, 1865
South Carolina, November 13, 1865
Alabama, December 2, 1865
North Carolina, December 4, 1865
Georgia, December 6, 1865

Ratification was completed on December 6, 1865. The amendment was subsequently ratified by:

Oregon, December 8, 1865
California, December 19, 1865
Florida, December 28, 1865 (Florida again ratified on June 9, 1868, upon its adoption of a new constitution)
Iowa, January 15, 1866
New Jersey, January 23, 1866 (after having rejected the amendment on March 16, 1865)
Texas, February 18, 1870
Delaware, February 12, 1901 (after having rejected the amendment on February 8, 1865)
Kentucky, March 18, 1976 (after having rejected it on February 24, 1865).

The amendment was rejected by Mississippi on December 4, 1865. It was not ratified there until 1995.

Interpretation and history

This amendment completed the abolition of slavery, which had begun with President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had only applied to slaves being held within states that were part of the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Slaves in states that did not attempt to leave the Union were not freed until this amendment was enacted.