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

During the sesquicentennial celebrations for various Civil War milestones, the Thirteenth Amendment has often seemed to get lost in the mix. Significant remembrances were staged of the firing on Fort Sumter, numerous battles, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and the surrender at Appomattox, yet celebration of the constitutional amendment that ended slavery has been muted. In his latest work, Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment, Leonard L. Richards aims to place the Thirteenth Amendment at center stage.

Unlike previous studies, such as Michael Vorenberg’s Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (New York, 2001) and James Oakes’s Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York, 2013), that focus on party politics and Lincoln’s role in the process, Richards’s study skillfully recounts the inner workings of the congressional process and the difficulties faced by the amendment’s lead advocate, Republican congressman James M. Ashley. In the first three chapters Richards sets the stage by recounting slaveholders’ grip on Congress, analyzing Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and describing the impact that arming black troops had on both the war and support for the amendment.

After the amendment was passed by the Senate but defeated in the House on June 15, 1864, Ashley faced an uphill battle. It is at this point readers will make note of Richards’s adept writing abilities. He not only makes the legislative process understandable for the uninitiated but also presents a captivating story. One aspect of the process readers will find interesting was that Ashley voted against his own amendment before he voted for it. After determining that his initial effort to pass the amendment would fail, Ashley used a legislative procedure to ensure he could bring the measure up again in the lame-duck congressional session after the fall elections of 1864.

The most interesting chapter of the book is the climax of the story, examining that lame-duck congressional session. Ashley needed only eleven votes for the amendment to pass, and in the end, he was able to garner enough support that the amendment passed with two votes to spare. Celebrations began in Washington, D.C., as human chattel slavery was abolished in the United States. Richards’s book successfully reestablishes the Thirteenth Amendment as a fundamental aspect of the story of the Civil War, yet it does not fully answer the question posed in the book’s title. Clearly, Ashley played a significant role in the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. However, scholars of slavery, abolitionism, and Abraham Lincoln may argue that by limiting the focus to Ashley’s legislative fight, much of the groundwork laid by others that made his efforts possible is ignored.

Nevertheless, Richards has produced a solid contribution to the scholarly literature on the Thirteenth Amendment. One troubling aspect of the book should also be noted. The historiographical essay included as Appendix B begins with a paragraph shockingly similar to the first paragraph of a review written in 2002 for H-Net by the late David Kyvig. One hopes this was an accidental lapse and that it is modified prior to future printings of an otherwise solid study.