Cheers signalled the end of US slavery

THE Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution passed the House of Representatives in Washington DC 150 years ago today.

History: Contrabands, escaped slaves at Cumberland Landing, Virginia in 1862. Out of copyright

On this day, 150 years ago, just after 3pm, the jam-packed floor and galleries of the US House of Representatives in Washington erupted in jubilation.

Men and women hugged each other as tears rolled down their faces. The customary restraint observed in the House was gloriously trampled, as hats and handkerchiefs were thrown in the air amid thunderous cheering.

The House voted by acclamation to adjourn for the rest of the day “in honour of this immortal and sublime event” — the passage by members’ vote of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, banning slavery throughout the United States of America.

The day had begun in tension, with no guarantees the amendment would get through. The Republicans, of course, would stand firm behind president Abraham Lincoln. But the Democrats could not be relied on to vote in the affirmative, in spite of an onslaught of government lobbying.

The final tally of votes announced by Speaker Schulyer Colfax was 119 ayes and the 56 no, with eight abstentions. It was a huge victory for Republican sentiment on an issue which was a major cause of the Civil War, then coming to a close.

Contemporary journalist Noah Brooks described the scenes in the House just after Colfax’s announcement: “For a moment there was a pause of utter silence, as if the voices of the dense mass of spectators were choked by strong emotion. Then there was an explosion, a storm of cheers, the like of which probably no Congress of the United States ever heard before.”

Cannons on Capitol Hill fired a salute, Brooks wrote, “to notify all who hear that slavery was no more”.

The Thirteenth Amendment read: “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.”

Notwithstanding its historic, legal and moral force, Lincoln knew the Thirteenth Amendment was no panacea. It could never hope to immediately raise America’s black slaves to the economic and social level occupied by the nation’s whites. And it didn’t.

History records the subsequent evils of white supremacy, racial segregation, and the so-called Black Codes introduced by some southern states. The Black Codes criminalised small misdemeanours committed by black people, exploiting that part of the Thirteenth Amendment which allowed slavery as a punishment for a crime.

But Lincoln believed slavery was an affront to a basic tenet of the Declaration of Independence of 1789 that “all men are created equal”. For Lincoln, the issue of slavery was part of “the eternal struggle between these two principles — right and wrong — throughout the world”.

Slave imports began in North America in 1619 and were banned in 1808. But various developments, including the invention of the cotton gin in 1793, made negro slave labour increasingly essential to agricultural production. By the time the Thirteenth Amendment was passed, there were four million black slaves in America — one eighth of the nation’s population.

Needless to say, black slaves’ lives were hell. They were treated like animals, chained, worked without mercy, and could be bought and sold. Black families were often broken up in this way, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, tapped into a growing revulsion — at least in the anti-slave northern states — for the non-Christian values inherent in slavery.

In the 1860 presidential election, Lincoln’s Republicans campaigned against the expansion of slavery into US territories. The subsequent election of Lincoln as president was the spark that lit the Civil War, the slave-owning Confederate states going to battle with the north in a conflict that would cost 750,000 soldiers’ lives.

During the Civil War, Lincoln had used his war powers to issue the Emancipation Proclamation that “all persons held as slaves within any state or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, henceforward, and forever free”.

But Lincoln worried that the proclamation, which applied only to Confederate-controlled slave states, could be found invalid after the Civil War. He believed the only way to ban slavery for good was to amend the Constitution.

The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified by the end of 1865, when Georgia became the 27th State to sign it. By that time, Lincoln had been assassinated. But his determination to right the wrong of slavery had already born fruit.

Originally published as Cheers signalled the end of US slavery