Freedom from Slavery and Involuntary Servitude
Slavery was introduced into America in 1619, when a Dutch ship delivered 20 Africans to the colony of Virginia. It took almost 250 more years before slavery -- an infection in a nation dedicated to liberty -- was to be eradicated through the Thirteenth Amendment.
Equality of all peoples, regardless of race, creed, color or sex, is a part of our nation's laws today. But in the early days of the colonies, public opinion on the issue of slavery was divided. The very existence of slavery and the governmental policy toward it was a source of great controversy and an underlying, although not primary, cause of the Civil War.
President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued September 22, 1862, served only to free those slaves in areas "in rebellion." This applied directly to Confederate states not occupied by Union troops. It remained for a constitutional amendment -- the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on December 18, 1865 -- to make freedom for all a legal reality.
It should be noted that the Thirteenth Amendment not specifically limited in application to the abolition African slavery in the United States. The U. S. Supreme Court, in the 1906 case of Hodges v. U. S., ruled the amendment was not "a declaration in favor of a particular people. It reaches every race and every individual, and if in any respect it commits one race to the Nation, it commits every race and every individual thereof. Slavery or involuntary servitude of the Chinese, of the Italian, of Anglo-Saxon are as much within its compass as slavery or involuntary servitude of the African."
In this light, the amendment emerges not merely as the product of post-Civil War politics, but as a further declaration that all Americans shall remain secure in their freedom.
Involuntary servitude, also prohibited by this amendment, is much broader in meaning than is slavery. Related to this prohibition of involuntary servitude was the Anti-Peonage Act of 1867, in which Congress announced that "all laws or usages of any state by virtue of which any attempt shall hereafter be made to establish, maintain or enforce, directly or indirectly, the voluntary or involuntary service or labor of any persons as peons, in liquidation of any debt or obligation, or otherwise, are now null and void."
Several years after the passage of this act, the U. S. Supreme Court held in Clyatt v. U.S. that an Alabama statute which imposed a criminal liability and subjected to imprisonment farm laborers who abandoned their employment with other persons was in violation of the Thirteenth Amendment and the Anti-Peonage Act.
While the history of other nations is replete with stories of debtor's prisons and similar practices which demonstrated insensitivity for those who experienced financial misfortunes, the United States is an exception. The Thirteenth Amendment prohibition of involuntary servitude is yet another instance of a legal system dedicated to ensuring that a man's freedom will not be jeopardized when he is subject to economic adversity.
In Civil Rights Case of 1883, the U. S. Supreme Court noted that Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment gave Congress "power to pass all laws necessary and proper for abolishing all badges and incidents of slavery in the United States." The court has retained this view in cases heard more recently. A 1968 case, Jones v. Mayer Co., involved a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968 which prohibited all racial discrimination, private and public, in the sale and rental of property. In upholding the validity of the act, the court said:
"Negro citizens, North and South, who saw in the Thirteenth Amendment a promise of freedom -- freedom to 'go and come at pleasure' and to 'buy and sell when they please' -- would be left with 'a mere paper guarantee' if Congress were powerless to assure that a dollar in the hands of a Negro will purchase the same thing as a dollar in the hands of a white man. At the very least, the freedom that Congress is empowered to secure under the Thirteenth Amendment includes the freedom to buy whatever a white man can buy, the right to live wherever a white man can live. If Congress cannot say that being a free man means at least this much, then the Thirteenth Amendment made a promise the Nation cannot keep."
Although only a century ago the Missouri Supreme Court, in the historic Dred Scott case, ruled that a slave was a piece of property, our legal system has evolved to ensure that no person shall be enslaved in our nation. The transition from a nation which sanctioned slavery to one which embraces liberty for all its people was implemented through processes which are a part of our legal heritage. Though the process has been slow and often painful, people working through the system have produced changes which carry the permanent weight of a constitutional guarantee.