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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34.1 (2003) 104-106



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Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. By Michael Vorenberg (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2001) 305pp. $29.95

In early 1864, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee began drafting an anti-slavery constitutional amendment. No records remain of those discussions. But a wealth of other sources exist (ranging from copious records of congressional debates to private correspondence disclosing the politicking behind the legislative process). In Final Freedom, Vorenberg mines those sources well to produce an authoritative account of the making of the Thirteenth Amendment. The account centers on the [End Page 104] years just before and after the Amendment's ratification in 1865, but it also addresses debates still ongoing about the legacy of the Amendment. The concern is with the linkages among politics, constitutional law, and society.

Some of Vorenberg's findings are not altogether surprising, though important nonetheless. That he would describe the Thirteenth Amendment as, "above all, a product of historical contingency." is to be expected, given that the Amendment's framing was shaped by the tides of warfare and partisan political rivalries, as well as by the aspirations of diverse constituencies across the nation (3). He explains that as late as 1864 it was hardly obvious that slavery would be abolished at all, much less by a constitutional amendment. There was no natural progression from the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation to the Thirteenth Amendment. Nor, argues Vorenberg, challenging the conventional scholarly wisdom, did the Amendment simply embody the ideology of the Republican Party. Rather, he concludes, it was the outcome of political compromise and by no means possessed a single, straightforward meaning. "No single wartime doctrine regarding constitutional change, not even a set of competing doctrines, dominated the intellectual landscape" (61). In other words, this is a cautionary tale about the possibility of discovering original intent in constitutional interpretation.

Other aspects of Vorenberg's account are more unexpected. He shows the key role played by many leaders of the Democratic Party, terming their support for an anti-slavery amendment "one of the most peculiar phenomena in northern public life during the war" and attributing this odd turn of events to the fluidity of popular sentiment and national politics (72). On the other hand, abolitionists were not unified in backing the Amendment, and African-Americans, according to Vorenberg, were among those least interested in formal guarantees of abolition through constitutional reform, principally because their sights were set on more radical demands for civil, political, and economic equality. Notably, the proposal in January 1864 for a joint resolution amending the Constitution to bar slavery and involuntary servitude in the United States was uttered by John Henderson, a Missouri senator, a Democrat and former slaveholder.

One of Vorenberg's most significant contributions is to illuminate changing attitudes among both lawmakers and the public regarding the legitimacy of amending the Constitution and the sanctity of the Constitutional text itself. The antebellum era witnessed the "atrophying" of the Constitutional amendment process, he writes, due to the "widespread belief among all Americans that the constitutional text should remain static" (11, 15). But secession generated a multitude of amendment proposals, most of which aimed to protect slavery in the southern states. Although the subsequent wartime and Reconstruction amendments have been much studied, the concern has mainly been with the changing conceptions of freedom written into the Constitution. Vorenberg's focus is on the understanding of the amendment process itself. He emphasizes [End Page 105] that abolition by constitutional amendment was a distinctive feature of slave emancipation in the United States, and he concludes that it stemmed from new public acceptance of the idea of achieving fundamental reform through the amendment process. A Democrat, not a congressional Republican, affirmed the principle in 1865 that the power of amendment was "an element of democracy" (196). Among Vorenberg's most important achievements is to reveal how, in the age of the Civil War, the Constitution came to be seen by lawmakers and citizens alike as...

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