The Thirteenth Amendment abolishes slavery in the United States

Date

6 December 1865

Category

Politics & governance

Region

United States

Era

Modern

Significance

Ratified on 6 December 1865 and proclaimed on 18 December, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime, throughout the country and its territories.

Passed by Congress on 31 January 1865 in the closing months of the Civil War, it gave permanent constitutional force to the emancipation that President Abraham Lincoln had begun with the wartime Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The amendment freed some four million enslaved African Americans and dismantled the legal foundation of the slaveholding South, whose defence of slavery had been the central cause of the war. As the first of the three Reconstruction Amendments, it was followed by measures guaranteeing citizenship and voting rights, though the promise of full equality was soon undermined by the collapse of Reconstruction, racial violence and the rise of segregation and exploitative labour systems. Even so, the abolition of slavery in the United States removed one of the largest slaveholding regimes in the world and reshaped the nation's economy, politics and society, leaving only Brazil and a handful of other states in the Americas yet to abolish the institution.

Empires active in 6 December 1865

• French Colonial Empire (Second)
  1830 CE – 1962 CE
• Russian Empire
  1721 CE – 1917 CE
• British Empire
  1583 CE – 1997 CE
• Qing Dynasty
  1636 CE – 1912 CE
• Spanish Empire
  1492 CE – 1976 CE
• Portuguese Empire
  1415 CE – 1999 CE

Related politics & governance events

• The Meiji Restoration
  1868 (proclamation 3 January 1868)
• Garibaldi's Expedition of the Thousand and the Kingdom of Italy
  May–September 1860; Kingdom of Italy proclaimed 17 March 1861
• Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the birth of the British Raj
  1857–1858 (rebellion); Government of India Act 2 August 1858
• Commodore Perry forces the opening of Japan
  1853–1854 (Treaty of Kanagawa, 31 March 1854)
• The Revolutions of 1848 (the Springtime of Peoples)
  1848–1849
• Berlin Conference and the partition of Africa
  15 November 1884 – 26 February 1885

Further reading

Empire of the Summer Moon

The wider story

Empire of the Summer Moon

S. C. Gwynne

Bestselling narrative of Comanche power on the plains.

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