Innocence Guitar Tab

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Following its ratification by the requisite three-quarters of the states earlier
in the month, the 13th Amendment is formally adopted into the U.S. Constitution, ensuring
that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude... shall exist within the United
States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Before the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and other leaders of the anti-slavery
Republican Party sought not to abolish slavery but merely to stop its extension into
new territories and states in the American West. This policy was unacceptable to most
Southern politicians, who believed that the growth of free states would turn the U.S.
power structure irrevocably against them. In November 1860, Lincoln's election as
president signaled the secession of seven Southern states and the formation of the
Confederate States of America. Shortly after his inauguration in 1861, the Civil War
began. Four more Southern states joined the Confederacy, while four border slave states
in the upper South remained in the Union.

Lincoln, though he privately detested slavery, responded cautiously to the call by
abolitionists for emancipation of all American slaves after the outbreak of the Civil
War. As the war dragged on, however, the Republican-dominated federal government
began to realize the strategic advantages of emancipation: The liberation of slaves
would weaken the Confederacy by depriving it of a major portion of its labor force, which
would in turn strengthen the Union by producing an influx of manpower. With 11 Southern
states seceded from the Union, there were few pro-slavery congressmen to stand in the
way of such an action.

In 1862, Congress annulled the fugitive slave laws, prohibited slavery in the U.S.
territories, and authorized Lincoln to employ freed slaves in the army. Following
the major Union victory at the Battle of Antietam in September, Lincoln issued a warning
of his intent to issue an emancipation proclamation for all states still in rebellion
on New Year's Day.

That day--January 1, 1863--President Lincoln formally issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
calling on the Union army to liberate all slaves in states still in rebellion as "an act
of justice, warranted by the Constitution, upon military necessity." These three
million slaves were declared to be "then, thenceforward, and forever free." The proclamation
exempted the border slave states that remained in the Union and all or parts of three
Confederate states controlled by the Union army.

The Emancipation Proclamation transformed the Civil War from a war against secession
into a war for "a new birth of freedom," as Lincoln stated in his Gettysburg Address in
1863. This ideological change discouraged the intervention of France or England on
the Confederacy's behalf and enabled the Union to enlist the 180,000 African American
soldiers and sailors who volunteered to fight between January 1, 1863, and the conclusion
of the war.

As the Confederacy staggered toward defeat, Lincoln realized that the Emancipation
Proclamation, a war measure, might have little constitutional authority once the
war was over. The Republican Party subsequently introduced the 13th Amendment into
Congress, and in April 1864 the necessary two-thirds of the overwhelmingly Republican
Senate passed the amendment. However, the House of Representatives, featuring a higher
proportion of Democrats, did not pass the amendment by a two-thirds majority until
January 1865, three months before Confederate General Robert E. Lee's surrender at
Appomattox.

On December 2, 1865, Alabama became the 27th state to ratify the 13th Amendment, thus
giving it the requisite three-fourths majority of states' approval necessary to make
it the law of the land. Alabama, a former Confederate state, was forced to ratify the
amendment as a condition for re-admission into the Union. On December 18, the 13th Amendment
was officially adopted into the Constitution--246 years after the first shipload
of captive Africans landed at Jamestown, Virginia, and were bought as slaves.

Slavery's legacy and efforts to overcome it remained a central issue in U.S. politics
for more than a century, particularly during the post-Civil War Reconstruction era
and the African American civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s.

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