As this bill languished, the Radical Republicans’ plan to require abolition as a term of readmission was rendered moot on January 31, 1865, when Congress passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. The new amendment declared, “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.” This, not Lincoln’s magical Emancipation Proclamation, is what, legally, finally outlawed slavery in the United States.* And with that came freedom, but
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