1865
THE 13TH AMENDMENT
While America’s founding fathers enshrined the importance of liberty and equality in the nation’s founding documents—including the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution—they conspicuously failed to mention slavery, which was legal in all 13 colonies in 1776 and remained legal in the U.S. until the 13th Amendment was passed in 1865.
The 13th Amendment states: “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.”
Many of the founders themselves had owned enslaved workers, and though they acknowledged that slavery was morally wrong, they effectively pushed the question of how to eradicate it to future generations of Americans.
Thomas Jefferson signed a law banning the importation of enslaved people from Africa from 1807 on. Still, the institution became ever more entrenched in American society and economy—particularly in the South.
By 1861, when the Civil War broke out, more than 4 million people (nearly all of them of African descent) were enslaved in 15 southern and border states.
Despite the long history of slavery in the British colonies in North America—and the continued existence of slavery in America until 1865—the 13th Amendment was the first explicit mention of the institution of slavery in the U.S. Constitution.
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