Who Freed the Slaves? The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment.
By Leonard L. Richards. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015.
Pp. 306. Cloth, $30.00.)
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 DayLewis?) 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
b o o k r e v i e w s 2 91
JCWE 6.2 2nd pages.indd 291
4/29/2016 4:28:35 PM
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 it for him and,
also, that he promised to fulfill whatever bargains they made”—or, in modern parlance, he assured himself of plausible deniability (205).
Richards provides information and analysis that have been missing or
understated in other sources. In discussing the role that military service
played in reducing the opposition to black suffrage, Richards notes the
importance of not only the army, but also the too frequently ignored navy
(thus making conservative secretary Gideon Welles a stronger supporter
of racial advancement than many historians and Welles himself may have
realized). Richards also evaluates the second sentence of the amendment,
involving the issue of enforcement, and how it affected ratification.
The book has its imperfections. Niggling errors will annoy those with
knowledge of the field—the wrong names for Senators David Rice Atchison
of Missouri and Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, as well as editor Joseph
Medill of the Chicago Tribune; tacking ten years onto Trumbull’s age; and
making it seem as though Lincoln had criticized General Henry Halleck
as the commander in the western theater when his comments came as a
result of Halleck’s dubious tenure as general-in-chief. More significantly,
although Richards certainly credits African Americans for taking actions
that promoted emancipation, he never tackles the value (or lack thereof )
of the self-emancipation thesis. While his attentiveness to the ideology and
hurly-burly of politics suggests that political maneuvering was the subject
292 jou rnal of t h e c iv i l wa r e ra , volum e 6, i s s u e 2
JCWE 6.2 2nd pages.indd 292
4/29/2016 4:28:35 PM
that most interested him, he could have done more in the historiographical
note in the appendix to analyze what his fellow scholars have said.
None of this criticism diminishes Richards’s achievement. He has woven
an excellent account of the road to the Thirteenth Amendment. That road
had many bumps and detours, and thanks to this book, we now know better how it was traveled.
Michael S. Green
michael s. green is an associate professor of history at the University of
Nevada, Las Vegas, and the author of several books and articles on the Civil War
era, including Lincoln and the Election of 1860 (Southern Illinois University Press,
2011). He is currently editing Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to Abraham Lincoln
(forthcoming).
*****End of excerpt *****
If you are not already a subscriber, please visit our subscription page.
The Journal of the Civil War Era also is available electronically, by
subscription, at Project Muse.
b o o k r e v i e w s 2 93
JCWE 6.2 2nd pages.indd 293
4/29/2016 4:28:35 PM