The abolition of slavery in the United States was a long and arduous process that began almost at the country's founding and resulted in the outlaw of slavery on June 19, 1882.
During the Civil War[]
Abraham Lincoln
In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared that all the slaves behind Union lines in currently rebelling states would be freed. This freed a number of slaves from the South but did not end slavery in Union states that still practiced it. Fearing that the Proclamation would be challenged or revoked after the war, Republicans in Congress proposed an amendment to end slavery nationwide. This amendment passed the senate but stalled in the house. Lincoln and his party won a narrow victory in the 1864 elections, seemingly reflecting a public losing faith in their proposals. With the war in an increasingly poor state, the administration lacked the political power to whip votes in the house, and the amendment was unable to pass before the more heavily Democratic incoming congress was seated. This killed any attempts at constitutional amendments aimed at ending slavery or altering the state of civil rights, as Republicans lacked the 2/3rds majority required to pass them.
With the victory of the Confederacy in the war, the United States lost any authority there. Slavery continued to be legal in both the Union and the Confederacy.
After the War[]
Republicans continued their support of abolition after the war ended. They still controlled modest majorities in both houses of Congress and were aware that the Democrats would likely see heavy gains in the 1866 elections. This meant that any kind of anti-slavery or civil rights legislation would have to be passed before March 1867.
With most of the slaveholding states now seceded, there was debate over how necessary national abolition even was. The institution clearly couldn't survive very long in a Union where the vast majority of states were free. Abolishing slavery nationwide would potentially only serve to stoke tempers in the border states and fuel additional secessionist movements there. With Democrats soon coming into power, any secession by additional states was considered unlikely to be challenged. It was thus important to avoid offending the remaining slave states. Lincoln and his moderate Republican faction advocated for national unity over abolition- the president's main focus was now on maintaining what was left of the Union and restoring peace. There were also vain hopes that not abolishing slavery would prove that the entire reason behind the Confederacy's secession was untrue and perhaps entice them to rejoin the Union in the future. In reality, tensions were far past that point, and Southerners were content to have their own nation.
Any attempts at anti-slavery legislation thus stalled. Congress did manage to pass three important pieces of legislation during this extended lame duck period. The first verified the legal validity of the Emancipation Proclamation and declared that all slaves freed under it were permanently free, never to be returned to the Confederacy or servitude. The second, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, extended citizenship and equal rights to all free male citizens, regardless of race. The third, the Detachment Act, repealed some previous laws that had been passed to placate the South and freed citizens from any liability of failing to report escaping Confederate slaves.
Democrats fiercely opposed these measures and vowed to reverse them at the soonest opportunity. They did indeed win large congressional majorities in the 1866 midterms, interpreted by them to be a total rejection of the policies of the Republican Party. They passed laws reversing the Republican policies, but President Lincoln vetoed them.
The Democratic Congress impeached Lincoln in 1868 but did not have the votes in the senate to convict him.
Some Democrats wanted the abolition of slavery and some didn't, but it was considered by most to now be irrelevant, an issue for the states if anything. Publicly, the party downplayed and barely mentioned the issue. They instead promised to return governance to the people and ensure peace by removing the ideological radicals of the Republican Party from government. The Republican Party collapsed in the early 1870's as it became clear they had totally lost the trust of the people and could no longer compete in national elections.
Democrat George H. Pendleton was elected president in 1868. Personally, he supported slavery and worked to undermine the remaining abolitionist influence in the country. He believed in Jacksonian democracy and thought that if slavery ever was outlawed, it had to be the will of the people in the individual states it affected, not a wide mandate by the federal government. He avoided the issue publicly as he saw no reason to stoke division when he was trying his best to reunite the country around the Democratic Party.
The Democrats were now able to repeal the laws passed by the last Republican congress. They replaced the Civil Rights Act with legislation that allowed states to make their own decisions on citizenship and voting rights. They re-legalized slavery in the territories, provided that the slaves had been honestly acquired in a state which already practiced slavery. They allowed every new state to determine for itself if it would be free or slave (all chose free). The Detachment Act was replaced by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1875, which required US citizens to report and help return escaping slaves back to the Confederacy.
New opposition arose to Democratic rule, taking the form of the American and National parties. The American Party maintained the Radical Republican spirit of abolitionism, aiming to reshape the United States into a truly free and equal republic. The National Party largely disregarded the issue, sharing the Democratic and moderate Republican view that it was now moot and would likely die out anyway. Any direct action on the issue was thought to be too divisive when the party's main goal was to unite the populace against the conservative policies of the Democrats.
Pendleton earned the ire of the public when he began making public overtures to the Confederacy in hopes of establishing warm relations. This culminated in a visit by the Confederate president Stonewall Jackson to the United States capital for the country's bicentennial in 1876. Hatred towards the South was stoked once again among the general public, and support for anti-Confederate policies skyrocketed. This included abolitionism. If the US was to truly rid itself of the vestiges of Southern influence, it had to rid itself of the peculiar institution.
Pendleton was succeeded as president by Samuel J. Tilden. Tilden was a reformer and also a committed abolitionist. His abolitionism did not take center stage in his campaigns for the Democratic nomination or the presidency. He wished to keep the party united so he could pursue his promises of civil service reform.
While a few Democrats supported abolition of slavery, the majority were not willing to pass any kind of federal legislation on the matter. They believed that such action should be up to state legislatures or the practice dying out on its own. Tilden didn't try to advance the issue during his first term.
In 1880, Tilden won reelection but the Democrats saw heavy losses in all other respects. This meant that both houses of Congress were now controlled by National Americans. Abolitionist National Americans saw an opportunity. Party leadership did not want to give such a momentous achievement to a Democratic president, as it would completely undermine their political messaging. Former members of the National Party were reluctant to support any anti-slavery legislation at all, believing it to be an unnecessary stoking of regional tensions when they were supposed to be leaving such things in the past. True abolitionists were not willing to let slaves stay in chains for four or more additional years just to play political games.
Lincoln reversed his stance on national abolition in 1880, which provided the momentum needed for the party to begin working on its passage. Lincoln would pass away before the bill became law.
Abolition[]
A bill to outlaw slavery was introduced in 1881 after backroom communications with President Tilden. This bill was officially titled An Act to outlaw the practice of slavery and provide for the orderly transition to emancipation, and was called the Abolition Act by most. Once it was actually on the floor, it was essentially guaranteed passage- any National American that voted against it would essentially be committing political suicide. The bill passed in summer 1882 and was sent to the White House for Tilden to sign. He organized a public ceremony and, on June 19, 1882, signed the bill into law. Slavery had been outlawed and abolition had been achieved at long last.
President Tilden
Tilden's Signature
Tilden considered it to be the proudest moment of his political life and knew that it would be his most enduring legacy. Many in his party were outraged, believing that their president had gone much too far in his reform efforts. The Democrats were divided while Tilden and the National Americans celebrated a great moral victory. The Confederacy looked on the event with disgust, believing it to justify their decision to secede.
The freeing of the slaves went smoothly. Although they were not compensated, the few remaining major slaveholders released their slaves without incident. The law only directly effected the border states, as slavery had already been outlawed in every other state in the Union. It was celebrated as a major victory nearly everywhere in the North, a final rebuke of the backwardness pushed by their Southern neighbors. For the first time since the war, American idealism came back into fashion.
National Americans also wished to advance voting rights for free Blacks, but Tilden was not so willing to support such a measure. He privately believed it to be a good idea but thought it too divisive to publicly support at a time when his party already saw considerable infighting. He suspected that such a law would eventually be signed by a National American successor of his, and he was correct. A voting rights law was passed in 1886 and signed by President Levi P. Morton. Tilden did not live to see it, however.
The laws saw challenges in the courts by some extreme Democrats and slaveholders suing the government. It was consistently found that there was nothing unconstitutional about the law, which was supported by decades of precedence of states outlawing slavery within their own borders. As it was only a law and not an amendment, it could have been repealed, but few Democrats wanted to take the issue back up once it was settled. By the time they came back into control of Congress and the presidency, there was almost no desire anywhere in the country to revive slavery, and the issue held little national relevance.
The abolition of slavery soon came to be seen as a point of pride among all northerners, a practical symbol of what separated them from their Southern neighbors. Slavery would continue in the Confederacy until it was forcibly abolished by the US at the end of World War I.
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