The Slavery of Emancipation

The Thirteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution commands that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist." What has been the effect of this command? It will serve my present purpose to offer the following toosimple answer to this complex question: the Thirteenth Amendment secured little more than the manumission of slaves already practically freed by the friction of war. It guaranteed, in Confederate General Robert Richardson's now well-known phrase, "nothing but freedom." Supposing this answer to be true, a further question presents itself: Did the Thirteenth Amendment's effect fulfill its command? Did universal manumission abolish slavery? A full answer to this question would require a rich historical account of the evolving institution of American slavery, the features of that institution that survived the Reconstruction era, and how those features evolved in the ensuing century and a quarter. I have no intention of providing such a full history here. I intend only to argue for the indispensability of such a full history to the task of interpreting and applying the Thirteenth Amendment. I mean to argue for the relevance of remote and recent history to the meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment by arguing against the sophistry that would make General Richardson's crabbed account of abolition true by definition. Thus, I will not argue that abolition must mean more than universal manumission, but merely that it may. Abolishing the institution of slavery may entail more than manumitting slaves for the simple reason that manumission was itself an important feature of that institution. Thus, I propose the paradoxical possibility that the institution of slavery could persist without any individual being lawfully held as a slave.