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This chapter examines the badges and events of slavery in the history of America. It presents some suggested lessons that can be taken from American history to inform the movement to put an end to modern slavery. It discusses the drafting of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which signalled the legal end of slavery in the country. It then shows how the history and context of this Amendment gave relevant lessons for efforts to end slavery in the contemporary world. This chapter also emphasizes the need for modern advocates, judges, and lawmakers to recognize that abolishing slavery needs a wide and developing understanding of the conditions that emerge from enslavement.

Veto players and win sets in a pluralitarian democracy, compared to those in a proportional regime; and in a unitary compared to a federal regime. Duverger's Law. Constitutional moments in the United States. The unconstitutionality of the great constitutional changes there.

The immediate origins of the 1866 Act lie in the Thirteenth Amendment, but its content goes back to the Privileges and Immunities Clause in the original Constitution. The interpretation of that clause in the antebellum decision of Corfield v. Coryell offered a list of rights broadly similar to those protected by the act but was necessarily limited to rights already conferred by state law on state citizens. Under Dred Scott v. Sandford, African Americans were excluded from the coverage of the clause and all other federal protections of citizenship. Although the Thirteenth Amendment negated the practical effect of Dred Scott, it left to Congress the task of officially overruling the decision and bridging the gap between freedom and citizenship. As the 1866 Act bears witness, Congress took an active role from the very beginning in exercising its enforcement powers to determine the meaning and effect of the Thirteenth Amendment.

The central question in the debates over the 1866 Act concerned the scope of the civil rights that it protected. The term itself had no special meaning before the act was passed, and afterward, it quickly changed to its current meaning of rights protected from discrimination on the basis of race. This chapter traces the historical meaning of “civil rights,” first back to the common law and then to Roman law, finding them to be the rights of citizens protected by private law. The particular rights enumerated in the 1866 Act conform to this definition and also to the immediate purpose of the 1866 Act: to overrule the black codes passed in the South to deprive African Americans of the full rights of citizenship. The act also followed the model of common law rights by providing detailed provisions for federal jurisdiction and judicial proceedings, in contrast to the temporary legislation authorizing the Freedmen's Bureau, which adopted an administrative model of enforcement. Opponents of the act nevertheless argued that it exceeded the power of Congress and supporters of the act relied, in addition to the power to enforce the Thirteenth Amendment, upon the implied powers of Congress. These fundamental issues of federalism have persisted to this day.

The The Civil Rights Act of 1866 was passed in the chaotic aftermath of the Civil War, addressing the pressing question of the status of the newly freed slaves—one that had not been resolved for all the bloodshed and devastation of the war. The Thirteenth Amendment also left this question unresolved, deferring to Congress by conferring on it the power to enforce the amendment “by appropriate legislation.” The 1866 Act was the first exercise of this power and it rapidly led to profound constitutional changes, the most important of which was the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. The act was then reenacted, and over the decades, it has continued to receive judicial and legislative attention. This chapter offers a synopsis of this history and the act's continuing influence.

In a long period of quiescence, three intertwined issues preserved the vitality of civil rights as a source of progressive law. Aliens become covered by the 1866 Act in amendments made in 1870, and in litigation reaching the Supreme Court in Yick Wo v. Hopkins, they successfully invoked the act and the Equal Protection Clause to bar invidious discrimination on the basis of race. Litigation at the time, and much later also, sought to protect aliens in their right to pursue a livelihood, by also invoking rights against discrimination. All of this was in contrast to decisions under the Thirteenth Amendment, which remained narrowly focused in this period on protection against slavery and peonage. One of the rights denied to aliens was the right to hold property, but it figured prominently in decisions concerned with racially restrictive local ordinances and covenants. The former constituted government action well within constitutional prohibitions against racial discrimination, but the latter could be construed to be private action, rather than state action, and so outside the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment. The decisions in this period eventually extended the state action doctrine to prevent enforcement of private contracts that contained racially restrictive covenants that barred racial minorities from entire neighborhoods. The 1866 Act furnished an alternative ground for these decisions, one that pointed the way toward circumventing the state action restriction of claims directly under the Fourteenth Amendment.

This chapter is devoted to the initiation of expatriation laws in the United States. Since the Civil War, U.S. policies have fluctuated between different (and sometimes opposing) principles and forms of expatriation, for example, revocation as punishment, revocation during military conflicts, and the differential treatment of women's citizenship. This chapter seeks to identify patterns in this history, as well as the diversity of causal factors. Although the American political philosophy that led to the separation of the colonies from Britain accepted the transfer of national allegiance, representatives of the American state were suspicious of divided national allegiance. An examination of the complete list of bills introduced regarding the loss of citizenship demonstrates that the United States enacted grounds for expatriation in order to regulate the exclusivity of American nationality. The chapter presents the various expatriation acts initiated or legislated by the U.S. Congress to take away citizenship, such as the original Thirteenth Amendment and the Expatriation Act of 1907.

This chapter provides a broad survey of the US context, identifying the manifold ways in which migrant workers are excluded from the basic floor of US labour rights. It examines in particular the consequences of irregular migration status since the US Supreme Court ruling in Hoffman Plastic (2002). It argues that US law thereby creates a class of workers who labour ‘below the floor for free labour’ and whose treatment should therefore be scrutinized under the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, the prohibition against slavery and involuntary servitude. The argument does not trade on an analogy with chattel slavery, but rather notes that the Thirteenth Amendment was intended not merely to end slavery but to maintain a system of ‘completely free and voluntary labor’.

Epilogue One enlarges on the now-familiar story, as dramatized by film director Steven Spielberg—how Congress, during the last year of the war, approved the real Thirteenth Amendment that abolished slavery. Ohio congressman James M. Ashley, who denied that slavery ever had constitutional legitimacy, spearheaded the struggle to make the actual words of the national charter square with his long-held beliefs. Ashley’s role, even if marginalized in Spielberg’s movie, Lincoln, was absolutely central. “The passage of the Thirteenth Amendment,” concludes Ashley’s biographer, Robert F. Horowitz, “owes more to him than to any other man.” Both in early 1861 and in early 1865, secretive political horse-trading was needed to cobble together two-thirds majorities, and the chief trader for both of the diametrically opposite amendments proved to be William H. Seward, aided by surreptitious lobbyists.

Chapter 2 describes the protective principle and in dubio pro operario in Latin America, namely, in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay. It also describes worker protection in International Labor Organization (ILO) instruments and other international human rights texts. It then searches for the protective principle and in dubio pro operario in the United States. It argues that the protective principle can be found in the Thirteenth Amendment, the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), and the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The Thirteenth Amendment bans involuntary servitude and mandates Congress to protect free labor. The chapter even finds something akin to in dubio pro operario in the general way that U.S. jurisprudence calls for “liberal” interpretations of statutes that derogate the common law. It further finds the protective principle in U.S. purposive methods of statutory interpretation, applied by some judges. However, those broad, purposive, worker-protective interpretations of the law have given way to more reluctant and narrow readings of the labor laws—and without good reasons. Finally, we address how employment at will narrows worker protection in the United States. While U.S. labor law has grown less labor protective, judges could reverse existing jurisprudence through the existing legal texts. Some statutory reform is, however, desirable, especially if anchored in the Thirteenth Amendment and if it derogates employment at will.

This chapter examines how congressional politicians envisioned the political community as a collection of male family members—fathers, sons, brothers—using gender to define postwar political actors. On December 18, 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution was ratified. The amendment was a triumph for advocates of American freedom, but its ratification also generated a profound political crisis that required further constitutional amending to remedy. In outlawing slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment overturned the Constitution’s organization of congressional representation. This chapter argues that Republicans in the Thirty-Ninth Congress used the metaphor of male familial roles to explain their right to alter the Constitution and justify expanding rights to the newly emancipated, claiming themselves as worthy sons of the founding fathers and black southern men as legitimate political brothers. Within this family politic, there could be no room for mothers, daughters, or sisters.

This chapter begins in August 1865, when Buckner was elected to the Kentucky General Assembly, and narrates Buckner’s role in the critical 1865–1867 legislative session. He was integral to the important yet understudied efforts by conservative unionists to maintain whites’ power in the state and to concede as few civil rights to freedpeople as possible. In Kentucky, those years saw the Thirteenth Amendment rejected, the rebels reenfranchised, and outspoken proslavery unionist Garrett Davis returned to the U.S. Senate. Most importantly, this chapter reevaluates the narrative of a Confederate takeover of the Kentucky state government after 1865. Buckner shows that rather than being overtaken by returning rebels, most wartime loyal masters embraced them as allies in the fight against civil rights and social equality for blacks. The chapter concludes with an 1867 battle for custody of the Union regimental flags, showing how Republican-leaning Unionists took rhetorical control of the Union cause.

This chapter analyzes the implications of the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution on January 31, 1865 which ended slavery. Democrats warned that one great change would require others. An amendment stripping the states of their power over a defining domestic institution would breed others, a whole nest-full of cockatrice's eggs. On the opposite extreme, radical Republicans and abolitionists hoped for more than a bare freedom in law. In the amendment's second provision, giving Congress the power to pass appropriate legislation, they saw the authority to end the myriad discriminations that the law placed on free blacks, and not just in the slave South.

The book explores the complex ways that slavery ended over the course of the Civil War, focusing particularly on the actions and experiences of black Americans, both enslaved and free in the North as well as the South. It emphasizes the elusive nature of freedom and the many obstacles in its winding path. Time moved erratically, and even space took on unforeseeably new characteristics in the turmoil of war. At bottom, the emancipation struggle involved a contest over the complex relationships that linked individuals to families, neighborhoods, and ultimately the nation, the resolution of which had implications that reached far beyond enslaved people and enslavers. The Union's victory over the Confederacy and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery, but its baleful effects have hung like a cloud over succeeding generations right into the twenty-first century.

This chapter is devoted to the initiation of expatriation laws in the United States. Since the Civil War, U.S. policies have fluctuated between different (and sometimes opposing) principles and forms of expatriation, for example, revocation as punishment, revocation during military conflicts, and the differential treatment of women's citizenship. This chapter seeks to identify patterns in this history, as well as the diversity of causal factors. Although the American political philosophy that led to the separation of the colonies from Britain accepted the transfer of national allegiance, representatives of the American state were suspicious of divided national allegiance. An examination of the complete list of bills introduced regarding the loss of citizenship demonstrates that the United States enacted grounds for expatriation in order to regulate the exclusivity of American nationality. The chapter presents the various expatriation acts initiated or legislated by the U.S. Congress to take away citizenship, such as the original Thirteenth Amendment and the Expatriation Act of 1907.

Self-determination or independence of the Confederacy was not what Lincoln and his planners advocated. Although the term “self-determination” was not then in use, southern secession was in essence an assertion of that right. However, this movement had its oddities. In a nutshell, the white South's drive for independence was its perception of Lincoln as a threat to its slave labor system. Lincoln anticipated the end of slavery for the first time after the victory of the Union at Gettysburg. Historically, the success of movements for self-determination has had little to do with justice or the morality of individuals. Success has depended on the good will of the national state involved, as can be observed from the internal issues of the United States.

This chapter discusses changes introduced by three Reconstruction-era amendments and their consequences for the census. These amendments include the suppression of slavery by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865; the redefinition of American citizenship at the federal and state levels by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868; and guaranteeing black men’s right to vote under the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870. These amendments had two major consequences for the census: on the one hand, the end of the Three-Fifths Compromise; on the other, the development of the census itself into the instrument of control and sanction of the limitation of former slaves’ right to vote. The 1870 census thus had to measure with much difficulty both the distribution of the population for the apportionment of seats in the House of Representatives and the enforcement of these amendments. States where the voting rights of blacks were denied would see their representation diminished accordingly.

This chapter explains the emancipation of nearly four million slaves, finalized by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 in the lives of reformers, including the Hutchinson Family Singers. It was one of those successes fraught with failure. The abolition of slavery in the United States relied upon the actions of the slaves, politicians, the military, and antislavery activists. Antislavery advocates such as the Hutchinsons held an unwavering belief that moral suasion and the aegis of a redemptive, indwelling God assured the triumph of Good over Evil. At the close of the nineteenth century, the Hutchinsons still foisted upon their listeners this ideology, derived from the Second Great Awakening. Comparing their plights in 1890 and in 1840 provides a fresh look at what happened to one of the most hallowed generations in American history.

This chapter explains the stages of the legacy of the Hutchinson Family Singers and of antislavery reform. The Danvers Historical Society had brought everyone together for an Antislavery Commemorative Meeting, the celebrants at which surrounded themselves with suggestive imagery. The fifty-year span following the Hutchinsons' 1843 decision to perform antislavery music unveiled a fast-changing nation whose needs for social reform transformed with matching speed, especially after 1865. The ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment removed a foundational evil from American society without bringing about the apocalyptic change that the Hutchinsons' and many of their antislavery friends had once predicted. The Hutchinsons' abolitionist music was fresh and exciting when they first performed it in 1843, and it was anything but an inevitable event; however, as we shall learn, by 1842 their antislavery leanings were hardly novel.