Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment by Leonard L. Richards (review)

Long after his Senate tenure, discussing the Thirteenth Amendment’s passage, Lyman Trumbull would tell law students, “Gentlemen, this good right hand wrote this amendment to the Constitution.” More than a century later, people who marveled at the brilliance of Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln (or was it Lincoln’s performance as Daniel Day-Lewis?) without having studied the amendment’s passage in depth might have believed that maneuvering and bribery by a few shrewd political operators ended slavery. In both cases, the story was far more complex. A few historians have tried to unpack what actually happened. Their interpretations range from Michael Vorenberg suggesting that War Democrats deserve far more credit than they have received, to James Oakes emphasizing that Republicans had long been more united on the goal of ending slavery than scholars have believed, to scholars of slavery arguing for the “self-emancipation thesis”—that slaves, acting on what they knew politicians ultimately would have to do, forced Lincoln’s hand.

Leonard L. Richards has waded into the debate with a combination of narrative and analysis focusing mainly on the political players and factors that shaped the movement toward the amendment. Richards laments the popularity of the mistaken belief that the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery. Interviews with teachers led him to conclude that “few knew anything about the Thirteenth Amendment, and virtually no one knew that getting it through Congress was an uphill battle” (x). To explain that battle, Richards finds the pivot for his story in the efforts of James Ashley, a Radical Republican congressman from Ohio who had been a stalwart early opponent of slavery. Throughout the book, Ashley’s story unfolds, including the political difficulties he faced at home, the principles he upheld (and his regret when he failed to uphold them), and his support for and management of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives.

After the House rejected the amendment in 1864, Ashley became more strategic. The two chapters that Richards devotes to the radical congressman’s efforts to round up votes provide a valuable lesson in politics. Richards focuses on Ashley’s quest for border-state support from two political enemies, Frank Blair of Missouri and Henry Winter Davis of Maryland, bringing to life this “odd couple,” as he calls them, with the same verve with which he portrays Ashley. The border-state congressmen included lame ducks whose distaste for emancipation could be overcome with persuasion or patronage. Richards simply states that “Ashley got the support of eighteen of the nineteen men that Blair and Davis helped him line up. Had three of those men voted no, the amendment would have gone down to defeat” (153). Similarly, Ashley looked for help from northern Democrats and got it, whether they voted yes or simply did not vote. Richards is unsparing in his description of their party’s willingness to play the race card, and his examination makes clear that northern Democrats were crucial to passage but had little genuine desire to end slavery and thereby, as Democrat-turned-Republican Montgomery Blair suggested, eliminate the issue that had deprived them of power.

The elder Blair was utterly loyal to Abraham Lincoln, and Richards is judicious and thoughtful in parsing the president’s role. He tends to let Lincoln’s failures speak for themselves, subtly criticizing the border states for their obstinacy on compensated emancipation and Lincoln for sticking to that idea and colonization. He also demonstrates that these ideas were hardly original to Lincoln. He is fair in discussing Lincoln’s emphasis on keeping Kentucky in the Union at the expense of moving faster against slavery, as Ashley and his allies wished. Richards also assesses the charges that corruption helped ensure the amendment’s passage: “Although there is no proof ‘beyond a shadow of doubt’ that Lincoln himself made deals, there is ample reason to believe that he allowed others to do...