In Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment, Michael Vorenberg makes an “attempt to place the [thirteenth] amendment in its proper historical context by recreating the climate in which the measure was drafted, debated, and adopted” (pg. 2). He argues, “To understand the making of the amendment is to understand the fluid interaction between politics, law, and society in the Civil War era” (pg. 3). Finally, he writes, “The real nature of politics during this period, the unpredictability and occasional incoherence, is better revealed by studying the complexity both within and between parties on one issue – in this case, slavery – over a brief period of time. If one premise of the book is that politics can be understood only by examining all the parties at once, another is that political history must include as wide a population as possible” (pg. 5).
Vorenberg argues, “Only the antebellum failure to resolve slavery disputes under the existing Constitution, followed by the wartime struggle to set the Union on new constitutional foundations, made it possible at last for Americans to contemplate an antislavery amendment” (pg. 9). Of Lincoln, Vorenberg writes, “In all matters concerning slavery, Lincoln was more restrained than most of his Republican colleagues. Although he allowed Butler to practice his contraband policy, he cut short General John C. Frémont’s effort in August 1861 to free by military order all rebel-owned slaves in Missouri” (pg. 25). During the Civil War, “as the conflict had evolved, more and more northerners had come to accept the idea that the Union’s preservation required emancipation in some of those places where slavery had long existed. But many northerners doubted the constitutionality of emancipation in nonrebellious areas, and even more questioned whether black freedom would be constitutional after the war had ended” (pg. 35).
Looking at the Constitution, Vorenberg writes, “Most Republicans shared [Attorney General Edward] Bates’s preference for some method of emancipation that left the constitutional text untouched” (pg. 41). He continues, “For all of their technical differences, the radical programs shared two basic tenets. First, emancipation, by way of reconstruction, lay solely within congressional jurisdiction; the president and state governments were excluded. Second, the unamended Constitution provided more than enough justification for congressional legislation abolishing slavery in the southern states” (pg. 41). Vorenberg argues, “The time between the introduction of the amendment to the Senate and the congressional debates was truly a formative period for the measure and for African American rights in general” (pg. 61). Despite this, “The Senate had not begun to resolve the ultimate legal status of the freed people. The amendment’s advocates avoided any sustained consideration of the amendment’s long-term legal consequences, preferring instead to treat it only as an immediate remedy to the problem of the present war” (pg. 114). Further, “The making of the amendment into an election issue before American fully deliberated its legal meaning led to a future in which the struggle over that meaning would divide the country” (pg. 140). Vorenberg writes, “As before, the amendment’s backers held diverse, sometimes competing notions about the measure’s scope and meaning. Yet, even more striking than this division of opinion was the shared realization among the amendment’s supporters – and even some of its opponents – that the amending process was a means not only of social reform but of making history” (pg. 176).
Following ratification, Vorenberg writes, “Because of unforeseen events, Americans now had to clarify the scope of the amendment, and those with opposing agendas and political persuasions would compete to offer the dominant interpretation. Contests over the amendment were fought out on an ever changing terrain, shaped as much by shifting ideology as by the day-to-day unfolding of events” (pg. 212). Vorenberg writes of the early years of Reconstruction, “Together, the Civil Rights Act and the Freedmen’s Bureau Act were less than a pure revolution in law but more than a mere clarification. They simultaneously looked backward to the Thirteenth Amendment and forward to the Fourteenth Amendment” (pg. 235). Vorenberg concludes of the historiography, “An unfortunate though understandable teleological quality taints this new scholarship on the Thirteenth Amendment” (pg. 249). Further, “We lose sight of the fact that the amendment emerged slowly, unpredictably as the preferred method of abolition, and that its adoption was contingent on developments that had nothing to do with slavery, emancipation, equal rights, or the law” (pg. 249). ( )