December 7, 1941 may be a day that will live infamy, but December 6, 1865 will be a day that lives in glory in United States history. December 6 is the day that the 13^th Amendment completed the ratification process to become part of the US Constitution.

The 13^th Amendment is one of the simplest constitutional amendments: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” With these words, slavery breathed its dying gasp in United States history. Or so most of us believe.

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The 13th Amendment from the National Archives

Some people mistakenly believe that Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery in the United States, but this isn’t quite correct. The Emancipation Proclamation only applied in areas in rebellion against the United States. However, there were four states that had slavery in 1861 but didn’t join the Confederacy—Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware. (West Virginia separated from Virginia and became a state with slavery in 1863 but had few slaves and outlawed slavery at the state level early in 1865.)

The 13^th Amendment’s Impact

This was, however long overdue, one of the finest hours in the history of the US. And it was long overdue. Many nations banned slavery prior to the United States. To put things in context, the Russian Empire, hardly a bastion of liberty or freedom, banned serfdom (1861) before the US got around to ending slavery. And, although the 13^th Amendment was officially the end of slavery in the US, unofficially it was not.

You see, immediately after the 13^th Amendment, southern states began passing a series of laws known as “black codes.” These were, on the whole, a group of laws meant to maintain slave-like conditions without the title of slavery. I encourage the reader to look up what these laws did and see if you can detect any meaningful difference between the black codes and slavery.

My readers may also be familiar with the group of laws known as Jim Crow laws that appeared in the South toward the end of the 19^th century. These laws, while not as severe as slavery, certainly placed African Americans in a subordinate status.

The 13^th Amendment and the Prison Labor System

However, accompanying the rise of the Jim Crow laws was the prison labor system of the South, and this was little different from slavery. In fact, one prize-winning book about the South’s prison labor system bears the title Worse Than Slavery. A second book, Slavery by Another Name, argues that the prison labor system was equivalent to the re-enslavement of African Americans in the United States, and I see little reason to doubt this assertion.

I’ve read both books (David Oshinsky and Douglas Blackmon are the authors. Blackmon’s book also won awards and inspired a PBS documentary.) and found them deeply saddening. So much so, that I wrote one of my novels, Darkness in Dixie, about a character sentenced to prison labor in the turpentine forests of Florida. The real story of prison labor bothered me badly enough that I decided to write an entire novel to try to bring more attention to this American tragedy.

How could this happen, you might ask, given the 13^th Amendment? The answer varies from state to state, I suppose, but at the heart of the matter is the nature of the multi-layered system of government (local, state, and national) that we have in the United States. In short, if local and state governments are hostile (and in the South, they certainly were hostile to African Americans) and the national government is ambivalent, states can get away with acting unjustly toward some of their citizens, and those people have little redress. This was certainly the case for African Americans in the South from the 1870s onward, even though the 13^th Amendment said slavery was no more.

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