The House Vote That Killed Slavery
On January 31, 1865, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Thirteenth Amendment 119–56, writing the end of slavery into the Constitution.
Late in the afternoon of January 31, 1865, the U.S. House of Representatives did what it had failed to do seven months earlier: it voted to end slavery in America forever. The clerk announced the tally — 119 in favor, 56 against — and the chamber erupted. Members wept openly. They cheered, embraced, waved hats and canes. In the galleries above, Black onlookers — who had only been permitted to attend congressional sessions for about a year — cheered along with everyone else.
The road to that moment had been long and uncertain. The Senate had passed the amendment the previous April, but when the House first voted on June 15, 1864, the measure fell thirteen votes short of the required two-thirds, failing 93 to 65. After winning reelection that November, President Abraham Lincoln made the amendment his top legislative priority, and his administration spent the lame-duck session of Congress working members relentlessly — with patronage, persuasion, and promises of government posts for outgoing Democrats willing to switch sides.
The arithmetic on January 31 was excruciatingly tight. With 183 members seated, 122 “aye” votes would normally have been needed for two-thirds — but eight Democrats abstained, lowering the threshold to 117. Every Republican voted yes, joined by fourteen Democrats, most of them lame ducks with nothing left to lose. The final count, 119 to 56, cleared the bar by two votes. Had a single more member voted no — or had the abstainers shown up — the amendment would have failed again.
The celebration was real, but the work was not finished. Though the Constitution gives the president no formal role in amendments, the joint resolution was sent to Lincoln anyway, and on February 1 he wrote “Approved” beneath the signatures and added his own — a symbolic gesture from a man who had made the amendment his cause. Then the fight moved to the states. One by one they ratified, and on December 6, 1865, Georgia became the twenty-seventh state to approve, reaching the required three-quarters. Twelve days later, the amendment was certified as part of the Constitution, and slavery — which had survived in Kentucky and Delaware even after the Emancipation Proclamation — was finally illegal everywhere in the United States.
The Thirteenth Amendment was the first amendment to govern private individuals rather than restraining the government, and it became the legal foundation for every civil-rights law that followed. But its first meaning was simpler, and it was written on the faces in that House chamber on January 31: after nearly two and a half centuries, American slavery had been voted out of existence.
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