What is the 13 amendment?
Where it happendSouth Carolina released its own interpretive statement after ratifying the Amendment in November 1865, stating that "any effort by Congress to legislate upon the political status of former slaves, or their civil relations, will be contrary to the Constitution of the United States."
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Slavery in the usSince 1804, states have been divided into those that promote slavery and those that forbid it. Slavery was expressly acknowledged in the original Constitution in clauses such as Article I, Section 2, Clause 3, also known as the Three-Fifths Compromise, which specified that three-fifths of each state's enslaved population (“other persons”) must be added to its free population for the purposes of calculating the population of each state.
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Effects
The amendment had the immediate effect of making the whole pre-war system of chattel slavery in the United States unconstitutional. [Page 83] The effect of slavery's abolition was immediate. With the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Lincoln's 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was expanded to cover the entire nation.
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