Leonard L. Richards - Who Freed the Slaves?: The Fight over the Thirteenth Amendment

This project, even though it took just two years to write, actually began some forty years ago, back in the days when I was a graduate student seeking a dissertation topic. At the time, I benefited from the sage advice of Wilson Smith, my main adviser, along with that of Daniel Calhoun and Paul Goodman. All three told me that the topic I had chosen, Northern opposition to the antislavery movement, had to be narrowed. It was just too broad to be done effectively. So I began looking for narrower topics and settled on two, Northerners who mobbed abolitionists and Northerners who opposed the Thirteenth Amendment. I spent about a summer working on both and then decided to concentrate on the mobs.

In the years that followed, although my research interests went in a different direction, the discarded topic never completely vanished from my thoughts because, every year, I taught one or more courses that dealt with the death of US slavery. And, to my dismay, whenever the abolition of slavery came up for classroom discussion, no one in the class ever singled out the proponents of the Thirteenth Amendment for special credit. Clearly, those tenacious warriors along with their equally pugnacious adversaries had been long forgotten.

Otherwise, the explanations I got from students for slaverys demise changed over the years. In the beginning, back in the late 1960s, Lincoln had a lot of bad press. Scores of articles had been published portraying him as a bigot, and some of that information had trickled down to my students. So at first virtually no one said: Lincoln freed the slaves. Nearly all, however, attributed the end of slavery to the Emancipation Proclamation. At this point, most then went on to explain that Lincoln reluctantly did it just to keep England out of the war. That became the standard answer, repeated one semester after another. Then, gradually, the notion that Lincoln was at best a reluctant emancipator disappeared. But the other notionthat the Emancipation Proclamation ended slaveryremained the norm. Few knew anything about the Thirteenth Amendment, and virtually no one knew that getting it through Congress was an uphill battle.

A few years back, I mentioned this fact to some high school history teachers who were taking a course I was teaching in the Teaching American History program. One member of the class decided to poll his fellow history teachers, both in our class and elsewhere, and find out how much they knew about the end of slavery. The results, he said, were terrible. So I decided to write this book, never realizing that Steven Spielberg was about to incorporate several of the long forgotten warriors into the movie Lincoln, which undoubtedly made millions of moviegoers realize for the first time that the Thirteenth Amendmentand not the Emancipation Proclamationended US slavery, but which still adhered to the long-standing tradition of giving Lincoln most of the credit.

In putting this book together, I have had plenty of help. First of all, I owe a big thanks to my students, both at the University of Massachusetts and in the Teaching American History program. I tried much of the basic story out on them, and time and again they pushed me for more information. So much of the explanatory material is there largely because of them. I also owe a big thanks to my colleagues at the University of Massachusetts, especially to Bruce Laurie, Ron Story, Robert Jones, and Barry Levy, who for decades have listened to my ramblings and provided me with sound advice. I also owe a very large debt to many archivists and librarians, especially those at the University of Massachusetts and the American Antiquarian Society, who for the past forty years have found the microfilm, microfiche, and obscure books I needed and in recent years have directed me to key websites. Special thanks are also due to the anonymous reviewers who made valuable suggestions for improving the manuscript and to Timothy Mennel, Nora Devlin, and Yvonne Zipter of the University of Chicago Press, who shepherded the manuscript through publication.