The revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment (Miles Smith, January 31, 2025, Washington Examiner)
Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania Republican and one of the leading architects of the amendment, believed he was participating in a revolution of the slaveholding South and in broader American society. “The whole fabric of southern society must be changed,” said Stevens, “and never can it be done if this opportunity is lost. Without this, this government can never be, as it never has been, a true republic.”
People often don’t realize the revolutionary nature of the 13th Amendment, and conservatives in particular downplay its revolutionary nature. American historians have for a long time treated the actions of the Republican Party, and the ending of slavery in particular, as a modest but nonetheless substantive political and social revolution.Allan Nevins, whose eight-volume history of the sectional crisis and the Civil War won a string of awards in the middle of the 20th century, called the Civil War a revolution, as did Pulitzer-winning historian James McPherson, author of the 1989 book Battle Cry of Freedom, which is perhaps still the single best history of the Civil War. In fact, it’s hard to see how the Civil War and the abolition of slavery did not remake the United States.
The understandable desire to protect the legacy of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, and the tendency to view the Constitution as an almost sacred document that created an exceptional nation, are powerful but not always historically helpful ways to conceive of the 13th Amendment and the other two Reconstruction amendments. While slavery did not create the American republic, the Constitution undoubtably tolerated ownership of human chattel.
We did not Reconstruct hard enough.