Stations and cspan. Org cities to her. Youre watching cspan, all we can come every weekend. This is American History tv on cspan three. You can watch us every saturday and sunday, and holidays, too. Congress passed the 13th amendment formally abolishing slavery the United States on january 31, 1865. Next we discussed lincolns legacy in the 13th amendment 150 years later. The National Constitution center in philadelphia hosted this event. It is about one hour and a half. [applause] welcome to the National Constitution center. Im the president of this wonderful institution. The National Constitution center is the only institution in america chartered by congress to disseminate information about the u. S. Constitution on a nonpartisan basis. Thank you. Excellent. [laughter] weve party achieved our educational mission. In fact, we can all go home. We cant go home. We are launching a thrilling initiative. We are calling this the second founding here we are celebrating the 150th anniversary of the 13th minute to the constitution, which abolished slavery. Thanks to the generosity of David Rubenstein, we have the privilege of displaying this rare copy of the 13th amendment. He will talk about the relationship between his documents tonight. This is the beginning of fiveyear effort to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the three amendments passed after the civil war, the 13th amendment, the 14th amendment which guarantees a quality and civil rights, and the 15th amendment, which extended to africanamericans the right to vote. This Second Founding Initiative will complete the story that we tell in our new George H Dubya bush bill of rights gallery. That gallery tells the story of how the rights promised in the declaration of independence were implicit in the constitution and were codified in the bill of rights. As we were learned tonight and over the next five years, it wasnt until the civil war, and it took the bloodiest battle in American History where 17,000 men died or wounded. It took antietam and the getty bursts address address gettysburg address to fulfill jeffersons promise that all men are created equal. The Second Founding Initiative has an exciting series of bipartisan partners. They will sponsor a series of debates and podcast and symposiums and panels across america over the next five years about the reconstruction amendments. This initiative will be part of the new coalition of freedom Advisory Board that we Just Announced last week. The cochairs of this board are carolyn french skin fredrickson and lee otis. This coming together of these two groups will ensure that this is a nonpartisan issue. We are also so honored that this event is being supported by the National Endowment for the humanities and its visionary chairman, who recently launched an initiative to convince americans to concentrate on the common good. Were grateful for his support and i am looking forward to hearing his thoughts about how the Second Founding Initiative will be part of our effort to promote civil dialogue across the United States. Finally, theres one very important partner that i need to acknowledge, and one friend in particular, whose idea this is. This entire initiative would not take place without the inspiration of douglas kendall, have head of the constitutional account ability center. It is an organization in washington devoted to promoting education about the text and history of the constitution, and about a year ago, he came to me and said the civil war is about to turn 150 over the next five years, we need to bring america together to have education and debate. This is his vision and his initiative is a tribute. Thanks so much, doug. We are honored to be her partner. This is a night of education. We will learn a lot about the history of the three minutes in the relationship between them but to start us off, i am so honored to introduce the National Chair of the d of the Advisory Board Justice Sandra day oconnor americans americas leading figure for Civic Education believes that americans need to educate themselves about the postcivil war amendments. She has graciously agreed to chair our national nonpartisan Advisory Board. Shes not able to be here in person tonight, but she has recorded the most inspiring message that we could possibly have hoped for, and im thrilled to introduce you now to Justice Sandra day oconnor. [applause] good evening. I am sorry i wasnt able to join you in person for this exciting event. I cant say im sorry to be spending this winter evening in a warmer climate. I dedicate much of my time working to teach our schoolchildren about the importance of Civic Knowledge including the importance of our nations charter, ill constitution. A few years ago, i was speaking to a large group of young people. My personal was sitting next to my chair. Im told it was even trending on twitter for a time. One of the students asked me what i kept in that purse. I told her that i keep the usual sorts of things there, kleenex tissues, a compact. I also told her that one thing i never forget to include is a copy of the constitution. Just like i never forget my copy of the constitution, i also never forget that we need to care and learn about the whole constitution, not just the original articles drafted in philadelphia, in the bill of rights ratified soon after, but also the later amendments, including the amendments we are celebrity you tonight amendments that ended slavery that secured the quality for everyone of us, and expanded the right to vote. This is an important lesson to keep in mind tonight as we celebrate president lincolns constitutional legacy, and in particular, his role in the ratification of the 13th amendment to our constitution, as well as, and over the next five years, as we celebrate the 150th anniversary of the key amendments that president lincoln and his generation fought to secure for us, the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Tonight, we celebrate president lincoln and his Important Role in the passage of the 13th amendment, which ended slavery. He secured congressional approval of that on generally 31 , 1865. January 31, 1865. He called it a kings cure for the evils of slavery. Neither the 13th amendment nor the 14th and 15th amendments get the kind of attention they deserve, but they contain some of the most important and inspiring passages in our constitution. They gave our nation what president lincoln promised at gettysburg, a new birth of freedom. It is Little Wonder that scholars also often refer to them as her nations second founding. They deserve a place at the center of the american constitutional story. This larger celebration will continue through february 2020, the anniversary of the 15th amendment. Thank you for being here tonight. I hope you will join me of the next five years in helping to build a celebration that is worthy of the constitutional achievements of president lincoln and his generation. Thank you. [applause] thanks to Justice Oconnor for her inspiring leadership. Were looking forward to her overseeing this for the next five years. It is now my great honor to introduce the chair of the National Endowment for the humanities. He became the 10th chair this past summer. I had the great pleasure of meeting him here at the National Constitution center a few months ago and was struck by his devotion to the humanities and his commitment to engaging all americans in learning about our history and bringing people of different perspectives together for civil dialogue. Since that conversation, he has launched an Important Initiative devoted to supporting the common good. This event tonight as part of that initiative. I am so eager to have you meet him and hereby his project. He was the president of coal we college in maine from 20002014. He has had an illustrious career in higher education, including stints at stanford. He was Vice President and president of Lucknow University in 1995 the before coming president of colby. Police help me in welcoming, the chairman of the national delicate humanities, bro atoms. Adams. Good evening. Thank you for being with us here tonight. I want to congratulate jeff rosen on this Extraordinary Initiative and thank him for inviting me to be here i am honored to be among the distinguished people tonight. David rubenstein and the distinguished panelists you hear from an amendment. Our association with the broader project about which he briefly spoke. The reasons we are so compelled by that project. This topic were talking about tonight the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendment, is in itself and honestly historical an enormously historical import moment. It also has contemporary relevance. It is perfectly fitted to the mission of the National Endowment of the humanities and the work that we do and it is perfectly fitted with the initiative that i announced in january called the common good. Let me touch reflate on those points. They call this the second founding. The celebration in this moment of history. It was the monumental expansion of the meaning of revolution in 1787, making quality a coequal with liberty and the way we think about our constitutional heritage. Ever since in, equality has been one of the most important touchstones of our political and social lives. The 150 years since that time have turned those years on the struggle to define the legal political, and social meaning of those critical amendments, including the amendment that followed, the 19th amendment. I use that word struggle deliberately and advisedly. Struggle in the sense of the constitutional argument that we have in this country constantly. The debate about the meaning of because to shoot the meaning of the constitution and its meaning in that structure. A struggle in a different sense maybe a more common sense form as its played out in broad, popular movements as well as the institutional, political settings, which of course these amendments have done. They are enormously important in our contemporary politics. We continue to struggle with the meaning of these amendments. First of all, in a constitutional sense we are still debating it, and im sure we were debated for many years. They inform our political debates and arguments about equality is defining elements of our time. It is undoubtedly the case that we have seen a great deal of progress since the 13th amendment. I mention the 19th amendment and then of course the watershed moments in history since the civil rights movements of the 1960s. For example the monument to legislation of that time, the Civil Rights Act of 19641968, the Voting Rights act of 1964 and other important things that happened in the civil rights movement. Then, of course, the election of barack obama, the first africanamerican president of the United States. Even as we are aware of that progress and it has been significant, we are aware of the limits of that progress. We became very painfully aware of the limits this last summer in ferguson and Staten Island and bedford. This project is being launched tonight is really in every sense living history. It is a critically important form of Civic Engagement for this country at this point in time. It is also perfectly fitted with the mission of the National Endowment for the humanities. Speaking of the 1960s, we are going to be salivating this year our 50th anniversary. We were founded as part of that burst of legislation in the mid1960s on september 29, 1965, when president johnson signed the act that created the National Endowment for the arts and the National Endowment for the humanities. In the congressional language in that bill that created us, there were two fundamental charges. One, to advance and contribute to the great humanities tradition that goes all the way back to the greeks and beyond. Also secondly, to engage the public by connecting that tradition to the circumstances of contemporary life. Those are words that come right from our legislation. At the very heart of that work of connecting to the circumstances of contemnor a life has been our effort to eliminate eliminate the principles of american democracy and connect those principles to the way we live now. That is what we let me to announce a new initiative, the common good, the humanities and the publics where. Public square. The purpose is to bring knowledge and understanding to bear upon the grand challenges that we face in contemporary american life. The rationale for that urge to bring those tradition to bear on our circumstances is this, and its very simple, i think. The grand challenges we face as a people now in this time are not principally technical or scientific challenges. There are challenges that bear upon our history and culture our ideas and values, and it is in addressing this spheres of life that the humanity shine. We need them. We neither message. We neither forms of knowledge. No challenge could be larger or more important than continuing the public discussion, the debate regarding the meaning of lincolns legacy and in our current circumstances. For us at any age, this initiative of the National Constitution center is a perfect embodiment of what we are trying to achieve. I will close with a very brief anecdote about my morning. As i get up and go ready to go to work, i moved washington in july. It is my habit because am a cyclist, to get up and ride my bike in the morning. I typically go out past the waterfront, around haines point past the jefferson memorial, and i go and turn around the lincoln moral memorial. It has occurred to me as i do that every morning that we have so mythologized in some way lincoln. We have embedded him in an almost unreachable realm. I think we forget about the contemporary circumstances and the contemporary meanings of his legacy for the ways that we live now. If i am ever tempted to forget it, the other part of my morning typically involves the metro ride. I get on the green line at the navy yard, some of you might know that station, and i write to stops where i get out and go upstairs and go to work. The train as it arrives in the navy are is coming from anacostia and the eighth ward, which is just across the river. The anacostia is a neighborhood that is 97 africanamerican, and it is one of the poor neighborhoods in that entire region of the country. It has a long and distinguished history, frederick legless was born there, but then and now it remains an emblem of rachel racial segregation in our nations capital. We have a lot of different disagreement about the role of the federal government and addressing segregation and the causes of segregation. It is a material fact that we need to keep in mind as we ponder lincolns legacy and the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. Thank you to jeff and the National Constitution center. We are very proud to be involved in this partnership and we thank you all for your engagement with us. Thank you very much. [applause] thank you for that wonderful speech. We are honored to be part of your Common Good Initiative and so convinced like you that lincolns legacy is something that belongs to all americans and is important to debate. It is important to debate both the Historic Context of the amendments and the contemporary significance. There are good arguments on all sides. Citizens can disagree in good faith about how broadly the amendments were intended to sweep and how they should be applied today, big but the constitution is a conversation that is bringing all sides together in respect of and respectful debates. Thank you for your support. It is my great pleasure to introduce my friend and coauthor and a great friend of the National Constitution center, David Rubinstein. David . Yes. Good round of applause at the beginning. [applause] david, as i said, has generously loaned us not only this magnificent copy of the 13th amendment, which i hadnt seen before now, and after the show, please dont come on stage but come and inspect and see lincolns signature and david will tell you both about the providence of this document in riveting detail and also its Historic Context, but also this rare proclamation. I first came to know David Rubinstein when he first came to the National Constitution center to lend us a rare copy of the declaration of independence. And when he came and i put on a ceremony to thank him for his loan and interviewed him about the declaration, he was so effective and riveting in his ability to translate the aspiration of the declaration for all americans, and his unique ability to connect jeffersons goals with the goals of the framers of the constitution, that as a result of that conversation, we cowrote a thrilling pamphlet together which you can find now in this beautifully produced pocket copy of the constitution published by the National Constitution center, which has a pamphlet that david and i wrote about the relation between the constitution and the declaration and the bill of rights. I gather, cspan viewers, that you can buy this irresistible document on amazon. For an extremely reasonable price. This pamphlet became the basis for our bill of rights gallery that i want everybody to go see after after the show which shows davids copy of the declaration of independence, the original constitution and copies of the bill of rights. Davids knowledge about founding era is not the limit of his talents as a constitutional educator. He is one of the most gifted exponents in america about the history and purposes of the 13th amendment. Ive seen him talk about the 13th amendment once before. I think the first time i saw you, action, was when you talked about the 13th amendment in aspen, colorado offstage. But he really, there is no one in america better prepared to tell us in riveting detail about what the framers were trying to achieve, what lincoln was thinking when he signed this amendment, and what the significance of the 13th amendment is on its 150th anniversary than David Rubinstein. Please join me in welcoming him now. David. [applause] how many people here actually believe i can live up to that introduction . Nobody. Maybe my mother, but shes not here. The truth is, there are scholars here who know far more about it than i do. I will try to give you a laymans appetizer and later well go into more detail with people that know much more about it than i do. Some of you may be wondering how can an individual actually own these documents and why isnt the emancipation proclamation or the 13th amendment back in the archives . Let me explain. Lincoln did sign back in 1863 the emancipation proclamation. He signed it on a day which was very busy in those days. The president would open the white house, anybody who wanted to come in, he would sign about shake about 200 hands and that day he went and signed the emancipation proclamation. That copy is in the National Archives and its open to the public or a select few to see. Its very fragile. As a souvenir, president lincoln was asked would he sign additional copies to raise money for Wounded Union veterans. And he did. He signed, i think, about 47 of those copies. They were to be auctioned off at about 10 apiece. Only about six of them sold. The price was considered to be too high. 26 of them remain. One of them is here. I previously loaned it to president obama. It was in the oval office for a while. Its a copy thats interesting in that it has the text of the emancipation proclamation and it has Abraham Lincoln. Abraham lincoln signed his full name for something significant. Generally he signed a. Lincoln. Obviously he signed this, and i think its one of the most historic documents in our countrys history, and probably with the stroke of a pen, no president of the United States has been more significant. The other document is the 13th amendment. As you heard earlier from Sandra Day Oconnor it was completely , ratified by 27 states. Lincoln had no role in actually officially signing the 13th amendment because, as you all know, to get an amendment approved, you need twothirds of the members of each house and threequarters of the state. There is no official role for the president of the United States in the amendment process, but lincoln was so excited about it that he signed it, anyway and youll see his signature there. The Congress Passed a resolution and i admonish him for getting in the middle of the process. He wasnt supposed to sign it but then he ignored that anyway. He did sign about 15 copies of these, and this is one of about 15. So why did we need an emancipation proclamation and why did we need a 13th amendment . That me give you a 10 minute summary of it, and i dont think i can do justice to all the facts, but ill try to do it very quickly and give you a laymans version of it. When the country started, we obviously had slavery. And slavery was something we had for more than 200plus years. In fact, we had slavery a longer period of time in our country than we havent had slavery, because from the 1620s on, about 1865, we had slavery. We had about 1600 slaves that were brought to our country. At the time of the civil war, we had about 4 million slaves because of reproduction and so forth, 3. 5 million in the states that that seceded, about 2 a halfmillion in the border states that didnt secede. When we had the declaration of independence and Thomas Jefferson wrote these famous words about everybody being treated equally, many people laughed. They said, how can you say people were treated equally when you have slavery . In fact, that was the response of the british government, what do you mean everyone is equal when you have slaves . And we had close to a million slaves at that time. So Thomas Jefferson and others recognized the inconsistency of everybody being equal, but they couldnt do anything about it. Thomas jefferson wanted to do something about it, but he recognized it wasnt possible to really change slavery and he kind of lived with the system. And that grew and grew and grew, and as cotton and tobacco became more important, more slaves were needed in the south and more slaves actually came to the United States. In the end, slavery became very important to the southern economy. When Abraham Lincoln was running as president of the United States, he was widely seen as someone who wanted to keep slavery from being expanded to new states, and we had a compromise on which states could have slaves and which states couldnt have slaves and lincoln was seen as being much tougher than the fast the south thought he should be in keeping the expansion of slavery from going forward. Lincoln was elected. He was elected with a minority of the popular vote, but he was elected, obviously with a majority of the electoral vote. It was widely viewed by many states in the south that he would eliminate slavery not just in the new states but in the south eventually. So initially seven states seceded. Lincolns determination was to bring the union back together, and he said repeatedly, my greatest goal is to bring the union together and ill do what it takes. He originally was not considered an abolitionist. He was not considered a great great emancipator. Even she concluded that the only way to win the war and he then signed the emancipation proclamation. He told his Vice President and cabinet members about it in 1862 and they were surprised because they never thought he would do anything as significant as that, but he was determined to do so. Eventually taking the advice of one of his cabinet officers he , waited until there was a military victory so it didnt look like he was desperate. There was a military victory and he decided to issue a preliminary emancipation proclamation in 1862. It said in 100 days hence, if the Southern States didnt agree to come back to the union, those states that had slaves in those states would basically be free. The exempted certain areas and did not cover that many people. And some people like to say the emancipation proclamation didnt didnt emancipate anybody because the people who were to be freed were under the control of Southern States and slaveowners and they werent freeing the slaves. But eventually 7,000 slaves did get free, and the north then became northern soldiers fighting against the south. But the emancipation proclamation didnt really solve the problem. It didnt really end slavery for sure. It only said those slaves in states that have seceded to the United States, if these states dont come back, the slaves there would be freed. But it didnt actually say anything about the border states. In other words, if your state hadnt seceded and you were a slave, you werent covered under the emancipation proclamation. So it really was under the war powers act the president thought he had, and therefore it wasnt clear what the legal standing was. He was always afraid this would be overturned by the courts. Many have criticized the emancipation proclamation for not having the flowing rhetoric of the gettysburg address, and lincoln was afraid the Supreme Court would overturn the emancipation proclamation. It was very clear he gave reasons for it. He didnt give reasons for it as a legalistic document and he basically said these areas would have no slaves after a certain period of time. Well, the preliminary emancipation was openly made final on january 1 of 1863. It didnt necessarily win the war. The war machine didnt fall apart, and as we know the war didnt really end until april of 1865. But lincoln pursued the idea that ultimately there would be the end of slavery. As the war was coming further along, there was still many difficulties in winning the war, but many people thought you couldnt really win the war ever really bring the country together again as long as you had slavery. So many people in the north thought you had to end slavery and the only way to do it was through a constitutional amendment. That was considered very unusual, because there hadnt been a constitutional amendment for 50 years. After the bill of rights, there have been only two other constitutional amendments. For 50 years, people hadnt amended the constitution. Why not . Because it was considered almost like the ten commandments. It was sacred. As a result, people didnt want to amend it. They said the Founding Fathers gave us a certain government and if were going to change some things, we should do it outside the constitution. We should not amend this enormous the important document. Ultimately people concluded the only way to really end slavery was through the amendment process, and so a process began to amend it. Lincoln actually didnt support it initially. Publicly he didnt support it. He basically was silent on it. The idea to have an amendment to end slavery went through the senate in 1864, and it was passed by the senate but it went to the house and it failed. There wasnt enough votes. It failed by a reasonable amount. You have to have threequarters of members voting for it and it didnt get that. It failed by about, i think, 16 votes. As a result, the constitutional amendment wasnt passed, and we went into the 1864 election. And lincoln in that election really never was as ardent a supporter of the amendment as people later thought he maybe should have been because it wasnt that free of controversy. There were many people who didnt really think we should use an amendment process. Ultimately lincoln decided if he won the election that the best way to end the war was to make it clear to the south that there was not going to be any opportunity to come together and have slavery again in a reunited country. He wanted to make it clear that the country was going to come together again, it had to be without slaves in the south. So he worked very hard to get the constitutional amendment passed in the house, and as you probably saw from the movie lincoln, thats what the movie lincoln was really about getting it passed in the house. Lincoln had not been involved in the legislative process all that much as president , he usually let congress do what they wanted to do, and he wasnt that involved in the initial parts of the 13th amendment being passed by the senate, and he wasnt involved when it was being defeated by the house before the 1864 election. After the election, he decided he wanted to get it passed and wanted to get it passed before the new congress came in. 1864, when he was reelected, there was a new congress, and the new congress was even more republican and more in favor of a constitutional amendment, but he would have to wait for almost a year before the new congress would come into effect, and he wanted to put pressure on the south right away. So he worked very hard. He didnt actually meet with that many members of congress, but he did things he had never done before to make it clear that he wanted this passed. Ultimately it was passed. And ultimately, as i noted, the president signed it. It didnt solve all the problems for sure. All it did was to say that slaves were to be free. It didnt say they had citizenship, it didnt say they had equal rights, it didnt say they had any rights. It didnt say they had the right to vote. As we know later, the 14th amendment and the 15th amendment were needed to deal with those problems. It is interesting that the 13th amendment was considered at the time enormous change to the constitution because we had slavery for so many years and now it had ended. But it didnt really solve the problem for sure until you really studied the other amendments and recognized that even with the 14th and 15th amendment, we obviously didnt solve the problems we have had of discrimination and lack of real civil rights. We have had to deal with that throughout history. But i do think as you look back on history, you recognize that among the most Important Documents in our history, in addition to the constitution and the bill of rights, are the emancipation proclamation, and with the stroke of a pen was probably the most significant thing any president ever did and the 13th amendment in changing our country. Our country had a flaw in the beginning. We tried to change it in the 13th amendment. It needed additional amendments to give africanamericans the rights they deserved. But we still have many problems a hundredplus years after these documents were approved by congress. There is a long way to go, but i think learning the history of these documents and learning how lincoln thought about them, and learning the extraordinary anguish that he had in addressing these issues. Should he support an amendment what type of amendment should it be, how should he negotiate it and what would be the impact of it, it was very, very clear these were issues he struggled with. Anybody who studies lincoln and anybody who studies him carefully will come away feeling, i think, that he is an extraordinary individual. And probably no other person would have been able to hold this country together because he was determined to hold the country together. In the end he did it by eliminating slavery. I think all of us owe him a big deal of gratitude because he paid the final price. Think about this. He didnt say in the 13th amendment that africanamericans would have the right to vote. But there was discussion about what would happen. What would it mean if the slaves were free . Would they be free to do anything . Would they have any civil rights . Would they have the right to serve on a jury, the right to vote . Would they be able to get jobs . These issues were somewhat unclear. At one point he made a speech shortly before he died in which he said, well, perhaps blacks, africanamericans who fought for the war, fought for the north in the war and worked on behalf of the union to win the war perhaps they deserve to have the right to vote, and perhaps africanamericans who were very well educated, perhaps they had the right to vote. Well, when that speech was given, John Wilkes Booth was in the audience. And he heard it. And he resolved then he needed to go forward with his plan to kill the president. Four days later he did so. Its a tragic ending and lincoln did not live to see the 13th amendment actually ratified. I heard that in december of 1865 he actually died in april of 1865, but its his greatest legacy, something we all owe a great debt of gratitude to him for. Ill end there, and im happy to take any questions about this that you would like or anything else on the subject. [applause] wow. Thank you, david, for an extraordinary presentation. Youve told us about the providence of these documents, youve told us about lincolns goal in passing the amendment and his struggles about how broadly it should apply and you told us about its limits and subsequent amendments. I have many followups. Let me begin by saying i know you read deeply in the 13th amendment but you just reread two or three really good books. What do you recommend to the audience to read about the 13th amendment . Well, there is an excellent book on the 13th amendment written by professor bornburg at brown, and i highly recognize that. And eric phoner has just written a very good book on lincoln and slavery. It won the pulitzer prize. I highly recommend that. Thats a very good discussion of the 13th amendment as well. And one of our guests has written an ultimate book on the emancipation proclamation, and well talk about that shortly. Wonderful. Lets read the text of the 13th amendment once again from this superbly produced pocket edition. Is there any jewelry that comes along with this . There is. You can get Benjamin Franklins snuff box. The one he received from the king of france and got criticized for. Well give you a reproduction at a very reasonable price. Heres what the 13th amendment says. Section 1 says neither slavery nor involuntary servitude except as a punishment for crime where one of the parties has been duly convicted except within the United States or anywhere subject to its jurisdiction. And then section 2 says Congress Shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. I want to focus on the language in section one. Tell us again. It is so important. The original emancipation proclamation only applied in some areas of Union Control because lincoln was acting under his authority in article 2 as military commander and chief so he felt he did not have power to free the slaves in the north in states like maryland. Is that why you needed this broader version . Lincoln was a person who revered the constitution. And he considered it a sacred document. He didnt feel as president he had the right to change the constitution. The constitution said that slavery in effect is ok if you want to have slavery, and the constitution was, in effect, written recognized slavery. Some people say the constitution was a proslavery document, some say it was an antirecognized slavery document. Lincoln didnt feel he had the power to eliminate slavery under the constitution. But as commander in chief, he felt he could say in effect that he had the right to end slavery. He relied, i think, on the legal work of a lawyer from boston who he later made the solicitor of the war department, warden whiting, and that gentleman basically had the belief that slavery could be ended within war powers. It was only able to in slavery in areas that were under control of the union or it was a border state not seceded from the union, then he didnt have that war power. That language, the language of the first section you read that was very simple, where did that language come from . Well, we have something called the northwest ordinance, and under the northwest ordinance, we basically recognize certain states and created certain states, ohio, indiana, wisconsin, minnesota and michigan. Language creating them actually had that language in them. In effect, the draftsmen who drafted the 13th amendment pretty much took that language which actually probably came from Thomas Jefferson because he helped write the language of the northwest ordinance, and thats where the language came from. The controversy is in the second section because it says the federal government will have the right to enforce this. What does that mean . As the 13th amendment was being debated in the congress, people said, what does that mean . Will blacks be able to vote . Will they be able to have citizenship the same as whites . Will they be able to go to schools the same as whites . It was unclear what it meant. The people who wanted to pass it said, it doesnt mean anything, dont worry about it, its pro forma language. Those who wanted the federal government to get more involved said privately and later more publicly its really giving the federal government the right to come in and make sure there are rights to vote and civil libertys where people were free from slavery. But it was unclear at the time. Fascinating. Tell me more about section 2. As you say, the most ardent supporters of it believed congress had the right to ban the images of slavery, not only slavery itself, and that could include banning private discrimination. How widely was that viewed here . Those people who wanted the 13th amendment to be passed, in order to get it passed, they were saying, well, it doesnt mean anything because they wanted to get as many votes as possible. After it was passed, some of the same people said, well, we really meant it had more authority than we said at the time and they believed the federal government should be actively involved. There was enormous racism in the senate and house in those days in the country. One of the biggest fears about the 13th amendment was something called. It was something that would come about because blacks and whites were allowed to live together, and if they lived together ultimately they would reproduce together, and that would be a terrible thing for the white race, many people thought. The republicans, who wanted the 13th amendment, they turned the argument on its head. They said, well, actually, white slave owners are involved in masegonization now. Theyre sleeping together. If you wanted to get rid of it you should get rid of slavery. One of the most important things i didnt say and others will probably talk about later is this. Lincoln was a product of growing up in kentucky. He married a woman from a prominent kentucky family that had owned slaves. He was somebody that really was not from a slaveowning family. In fact, his father was very much against slavery. But lincoln was a product of illinois and the midwest, and it was an area where he had a racist view to some extent, he made racist jokes even when he was president , and slurs privately about blacks. He had a different view, and his view all along was the view that if youre going to eliminate slavery, which he eventually came around to, he evolved his thinking. It wasnt that he was against slavery all along. He eventually evolved to being against slavery. His view as a young man and even as president of the United States was that slavery should be eliminated, but in the end blacks and whites wouldnt be able to live together. So he was a big support about a big supporter of something called colonization, which was a word meaning blacks should be asked, if not forced, to leave the country. Even as president of the United States, he spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out how he could get money to colonize the blacks. They are free, send them to south america. He realized that wasnt going to work, and only after the 13th amendment was passed did he stop talking about colonizing. As a member of congress, he was a member of congress for two years, he passed the proposed legislation that didnt pass that said slavery should be ended in the District Of Columbia provided it was done voluntarily, there was compensation for the slave owners and the slaves were colonized. That was a view he had all along, and actually many Founding Fathers had the view, and many people actually supported the 13th amendment had the view that blacks and whites could never live together. In fact, many of the great abolitionists in our country the most famous abolitionists, they thought slavery was immoral and slavery should be gotten rid of. But they favored colonization as well. Many didnt want blacks coming to the north and taking jobs from whites. It wasnt that many had the view that blacks and whites could live together. There were very few in those days who thought that would be realistic. Its important that you remind us that lincolns view of equality was not our own in the lincoln debates. He recognized civil equality for people but not social equality. Yes. When you say all people would have certain rights, lincoln looked at it this way. You had certain natural rights the right to live, the right to be married, the right to have your children stay with you. You had the right to live a healthy life. But he didnt mean that you had the rights of a citizen. You didnt have the right to vote, to be in a jury, to have certain other kinds of civil rights. So lincoln made that distinction. Many Founding Fathers did as well. So i think that lincolns view evolved over a period of time, but he would not have been somebody who would have said early on in his career, i want to end slavery because thats the morally right thing to do. He was against slavery but he thought the constitution trumped that moral view and ultimately didnt want to end slavery until later he realized it was the only way to save the union. So why did lincoln change his mind about the scope of the 13th amendment . An early draft he proposed would have compensated owners who freed their slaves but not abolish slavery everywhere in the union. Why did he embrace the broader view . Ultimately he said it would be too expensive. There was not enough support for compensation. He actually proposed that Congress Pass legislation that that would provide about 400 million to compensate slave owners. Interestingly, there was no compensation for the slaves, it was only for the slave owners. Slaves werent to be compensated, they were to be openly colonized, but lincoln recognize and there wasnt enough for that, so he dropped that idea. When you have the 13th amendment, the south would recognize there was no way to come together and maintain slavery. In other words, people would say, after the emancipation proclamation was issued, lincoln did have a solution to solve slavery in the states after the war was over because the emancipation proclamation only dealt with the war period. After the war was over, it was lincolns view that the Southern States could come back in the union. If 10 of the citizens would vote to be in effect loyal to the union and if they could do it through state legislation. In the end that didnt get too far. He thought in the end the only way to convince the Southern States that they could come back into the union was to make it clear that the constitution had been changed and it was out of his hands. And, therefore, if you want to come back in the union, you have to recognize that slavery has been eliminated. How did lincoln get Southern States to vote for ratification . Georgia voted for it, i gather Andrew Johnson did some lobbying but how did he pull it off and , how accurate was the Lincoln Movie in describing who voted for it and who didnt . In the first question remember, you had some people who were loyal to the north in the country who lived in the Southern States. Not everybody was in favor of the confederacy who lived in these states. It didnt take that many citizens to vote to create a new, in effect, government in the state. Only a few states did it, but you only needed about 10 of the citizens who had voted before in the 1860 election to vote to now be in favor of being loyal to the country. So it wasnt a gigantic percentage and only a few states actually did it. The movie lincoln is interesting. The book was written by doris kearns goodwin. And all of you probably know she wrote a book that really emphasized how lincoln had brought his cabinet together and other people who were really political opponents of his. Before she wrote it, she had talked to Steven Spielberg and said, im writing a book about lincoln. He said, great, i want to option it. He did. But the book wasnt completed until ten years later. When the book was finished, its about 600some pages, a number of script writers were given the task of writing a script for it. They went through several script writers because its a comprehensive book about lingcoln and it was hard to figure out what to do. Ultimately a brilliant script writer came on the idea of focusing on only five pages in the book. Those five pages dealt with the 13th amendment. The movie itself was ironic, pretty historically accurate, well done, but it was filmed ironically, i always thought, it was filmed in the virginia. If you look very carefully, one of the sons in virginia, a man who grew up in virginia and wasnt always recognized as such, was woodrow wilson. If you look carefully in the movie, in the state capitol, there is a bust of woodrow wilson. Obviously, he hadnt been born yet. In terms of the vote, there was an inaccuracy in one respect. You may remember the votes are being called, they were called by state. And actually votes are not called by state in the house they were really called by individual names. But in the end, i think the movie is pretty historically accurate and i think it does a Great Service to the country by explaining the 13th amendment, its importance, and the celebration that came about after it was actually passed though it took about 11 months to ratify it. You mentioned the celebration. Tell us more about the reaction. How did the country receive it . It was received very well certainly in the north, because it was seen by many people as the right thing to do morally. It was seen as economically the right thing to do as well for the south and for the north, because it was a fair way to treat people. But i cant say everybody in the south was jumping up and down for joy. But i do think that it did have the effect of ending the war relatively quickly thereafter. And it made it clear that the only way we could get the country together again was a union where there were no slaves. But, again, as i tried to say at the beginning, the 13th amendment is very important, maybe the most important. The 14th and 15th amendments were important as well, but its tragic that the jim crowe laws went around these amendments. In fact, we had another 100plus years where there was enormous discrimination. It wasnt called slavery. We had poll taxes that werent dealt with by the 14th and 15th amendments, so we didnt solve our problems by a long shot with those amendments, but it was an important first step in beginning to correct these problems. In a moment in the next panel, were going to extend the story that you have set up so beautifully and talk about the relationship between the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment. Before we close, just a few words about these phenomenal documents. This one was sold at a philadelphia greatgreat sanitary fair. What was that . How did this one emerge from that sanitary fair . It doesnt sound fun. They were designed to raise money for wounded war veterans and i think lincoln signed i believe it was 47 of them. Again, it was supposed to be sold for 10 and not that many sold, so ultimately they were, i guess, transferred around. Over the years collectors of historic documents have bought these, and they cost more today than 10, i can assure you, but they are really good symbols. Now, whats the point of actually thinking about it . Why do i like to buy these documents and other kinds of documents, the magna carta or the declaration of independence . The point is not to say i own them. I dont have anything in my house. They are displayed at a place where people can see it and think about it. The important point is this. I think americans need to know more about their history. We dont know enough about history as we really should. In a recent survey, when americans were asked who was the first secretary of treasury, about 35 said larry somers, which is not true. Very good secretary, but not the first. About 30 of americans in another survey, when they were asked what river did George Washington cross . They said the rhine river which , is not in our country. And a survey of high school sof sophomores sophomores, more High School Sophomores could name the first names of the three stooges than the Founding Fathers. So i hope you go back and read about our history. If you, more about American History, you see what mistakes shouldnt be made in the future. Sandra day oconnor is devoted to history in our school system. I agree we should have them in our school system, and by having these documents around, people will go through them and read them more thoroughly. Its not the document thats important, its the thought process afterwards so you can think about why do we have this document, why do we need this document, and how can we be better citizens now that we have a Different Society and how can we make our Society Better . Thats why i buy these things and put them on display, so people can think about our country, the good things and bad things. David, by loaning us the 13th amendment, you can help people to see and youve helped us understand its a Historic Context. Please join me, everybody, in thanking David Rubinstein. [applause] ladies and gentlemen, its now my great privilege to introduce an extremely great panel of historians and jurists. Im going to introduce them briefly and then were going to delve into our conversation. Sidney blumenthal, my old friend and colleague at the new republic years ago is a former assistant and Senior Adviser to president bill clinton, Senior Adviser to Hillary Rodham clinton and a member of the and advisor to the foundation. He is a journalist of his generation and does better historical writing than anybody in his generation. This year a selfmade man will , be released. This is his first book in a trilogy of Abraham Lincoln and he is riveted in the context that shaped lincoln. This man wrote a book that won the lincoln prize in 2000, slavery in america which won the lincoln prize in 2005, and he won the Abraham Lincoln Institute Prize in 2008. His most recent book is Abraham Lincoln as a man of ideas. The he is class of 1960 and head of the Politics Department at washington and lee university. He is editor of Ralph Ellison and the raft of hope. He just published essays called lincoln and liberty wisdom for the ages. Another good friend of the National Constitution center chief judge ted meky was sworn in as the court of appeals in 1964. He has given his career to public service. He was assistant public attorney for the District Of Columbia. Definitely a pennsylvanian. I dont want to make that mistake. A judge of the court of common pleas, but he has been such anie evangelist for education that he has spearheaded this mission we have here where he and other judges of the Fourth Circuit were regularly coming to the Constitution Center to talk to school kids about what it means to apply constitution in the courtrooms. The kids are riveted, i hope the judges are enjoying it and he is just a great friend of constitutional education. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming this incredible panel. [applause] we have a lot to talk about. I just want to set the stage by putting on the table a question that David Rubinstein raised at the end of his presentation, which is the relationship between the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. If i can do this in a paragraph, let me try to put it on the table and then ask you to tell me how ive done and fill out the details. As i understand it, the 13th amendment is passed, and some of its most enthusiastic proponents believe that it eliminates private badges of discrimination, such as the efforts by Southern States to pass the socalled black codes which deny to free africanamericans the right to make contracts and so forth. But others disputed that broad ruling, and therefore Congress Passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 which prohibited this sort of discrimination and gave africanamericans the same rights to sue and be sued, make property and make contracts with white people. But president Andrew Johnson vetoed the act. It was passed over his veto, but some still question the Constitutional Authority of congress to pass the Civil Rights Act. And, therefore, the reconstruction of republicans concluded a new amendment was necessary explicitly guaranteeing africanamericans the same privileges and immunities of all citizens of the United States as well as equal protection of the law and giving congress the power to enforce that article by appropriate legislation. So the 14th amendment completely eliminated any doubts of Constitutional Authority to give civil rights to africanamericans. But as david said, civil rights did not guarantee equality. They didnt include pligolitical Political Rights like the right to vote. It took the 15th amendment, the final of our trilogy, to extend to africanamericans the right to vote and to complete the effort that some thought the 13th amendment achieved. So alan gelso, how did i do and what would you add . And more specifically, youre such an authority here. Do you want to tell us more about just the 13th or begin by saying more about im going to ask you about the relationship between the three documents. I think what you try to do is to draw as straight a line as possible. Get from a to b, because its logical and thats simple. In fact, it looks more like a zigzag, a step here, a step over here, a step over there with the word oops occurring at several points in between. What i mean by that is this. The 13th amendment abolishes slavery. Slavery as a Legal Institution disappears. It cant happen anywhere in america, therefore, there cant be slaves. Well, there are now freed people. What is to be their fate . Is it to be left to the states to decide . Well, yes, because that was the way things had always been done. States were the entities that determined who voted, how often you could vote, who had certain civil privileges, who did not. And so you looked at a situation where suddenly, all right, weve abolished slavery, but what are, who are the freed slaves . Are they citizens . The oops comes in because the constitution didnt really have a definition of citizenship. The word citizen is mentioned several times in the constitution. Theres no definition of it either on the National Level or on the state level. So the First Response to the zigzag after the 13th amendment is to say, we need to establish what a citizen of the United States is. And a citizen of the United States is very explicitly defined in the 14th amendment. It is someone who is born here. They could have made it a matter of, well, you have to be born of United States citizen parents. They didnt do that. That would have been what they called the use sanguinis. In other words, citizenship by blood. Instead the rule laid down in the 14th amendment is the use solis. Youre a citizen if youre born here. That would include all the slaves. That was a deliberate choice. So slaves are now citizens of the United States because now we know what a citizen of the United States is. Ah, but there is another zigzag. The zigzag is so many of the civil rights are determined by the states. There is no hard and fast rule about what civil privileges belong to citizens of the United States and what civil privileges belong to citizens of individual states. So the 15th amendment is itself yet another move to straighten out the zigzag pattern by directly specifying that Voting Rights belong to National Citizenship and, therefore belong to all american citizens irrespective of color. Those three amendments, although when we put them in order, look like a Straight Line really are moving back and forth feeling the way. Because, you know, jeffrey, no one at the end of the civil war had a handbook on reconstruction. I could not , if i had lived then, reach in as i do with this wonderful book. [laughter] nice. There was no instruction book how to do a reconstruction, and there was no simple process of one, two, three, four, five. They had to improvise and they are constantly taking one step and realizing, oh, now what do we do about this next situation . So the 13th, 14th and 15th amendment really are not that Straight Line. Although i think in a way thats actually more of a compliment to them. Because what it says is these amendments were not just stale events like, oh, all right well, lets have another amendment. Instead they are real responses by people who were trying to understand the situation on the ground in the chaos of the postwar months. Beautifully said. And youve taught us a whole bunch of things about the 14th amendment, including we now understand the first sentence. I am going to quote from the text as much as possible. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state in which they reside. That overturns the dredscott decision that americans cannot africanamericans cannot be citizens of the United States even if they are freed men and grants to all citizens privileges and immunities. Would you also tell us there was disagreement about what those privileges and immunities were . We see from section 2 of the amendment that they anticipated several states might deny africanamericans the right to vote and would have a proportionate reduction in their representation in congress, and that it took the 15th amendment to guarantee full citizenship. So thank you for that. Please do. Lincoln gave a number of speeches and made a number of comments about what he preferred to call respiration as opposed restoration as opposed to reconstruction. He didnt want people to think there was any deconstruction. But i think the comments on deconstruction which explains the zigzag that alex poindted out was the second inaugural address, which will celebrate its anniversary next month. In the last paragraph, the first line actually, the last paragraph is its only line. But you dont get there without going through the most important paragraph, which is the third paragraph which is the paragraph that talks about not just how devastating the war was. Four years was long. Much blood, much treasure, but slavery, white enslavement of blacks, White Supremacy had been around for a lot longer. And lincoln thought, as a people, even if we beat johnny reb in the battlefield, we still have the battle of time. Lincolns might dont didnt make it right, as it were in their minds. So lincoln tried to spell out to the country on march 14th, 1865 when he ascended again to the presidency, was to say we will not be able to move forward with reconstruction, with restoring federal authority over the people of the United States. A practical relation of the states among themselves, we wont be able to move forward unless we have a common memory of what this war was about. What happened, and what was the result, and emancipation being one of those results. Lincoln was pointing out that unless we saw the war as a judgment, as a divine chastisement on the nation, for whats been called a fatal flaw right, the sin of slavery, a sin that dates not back to the declaration, but to 1620. Until we understand and buy that, believe that slavery really was wrong, reconstruction was going to be a very tall order to accomplish. I think without that context, we cant understand any of the attempts to try to restore the federal authority. That is riveting. I cant wait for the audience to read your work on religion, and reconstruction, and youre reminding us that for lincoln this was not just a legal crusade, but a form of divine retribution, and atonement is so important to understanding this context. Sid blumenthal, your book is going to be a definitive reconstruction of the politics behind the 13th amendment and reconstruction. Give us some sense of the texture of what constrained lincoln, what he was trying to achieve, and how he understood the 13th amendment as it actually emerge. The 13th amendment emerges from a political campaign. The campaign of 1864. The election campaign. By no means a certain thing. Lincoln, in fact, wrote a document that he sealed, glued and had the members of the cabinet sign. They didnt know what was in it. What had he written . He had written that he was going to lose the election. And that he was going to do everything he could, after losing the election, to try and save the union. In the interim, when his opponent, who was not pledged to end slavery, but, in fact, had agreed to a platform that was against ending slavery, would be elected. So this was a nearrun thing. This was by no means certain. And people underestimate the degree of opposition from the Democratic Party during that year. In the north. Not simply from the south, and the confederate armies which were quite formidable. But from the Democratic Party in the north. Some of them were called copperheads. They had taken the liberty pennies as a sign. They had secret organizations, some of them, called sons of liberty. That document over there from the philadelphia Sanitary Commission was that he signed was at an event where lincoln delivered very interesting speech in which he contended with the idea of liberty. Which were still contending with today. We have people who call themselves libertarians. Lincoln said what he was dealing with was the liberty of the wolf. And he was there to protect the sheep. And so thats a different concept of liberty. And lincoln was, as we all know, a lawyer who lincoln had a very difficult time getting through his election year. It required general sherman, and general sheridan, and he had political momentum. And thats it was on that political momentum that he decided that he would enact the 13th he would pursue enactment of the 13th amendment. He was a politician to the marrow of his bones. And he did not want to waste that moment, and wait for another possible moment when it could dissipate. And he did many things. He was a people talk about the hidden hand presidency of dwight eisenhower. Lincoln in many ways was a hidden hand president. He would do many things, some of which we dont even know about, to help move events. He was a kind of prime mover of politics. And ill just say one of them, i dont want to speak too long but, when he had decided to move for the 13th amendment, he arranged very quietly for the first africanamerican to step on the floor of the house of representatives and to address the house. Never happened before. It was a close friend of his very little of their conversations are known. He was henry highland garnet. And he was probably closer to lincoln than Frederick Douglass. He was a radical. He was a minister. He was a free black. And he had a congregation in washington. He had been in new york. And his speech which undoubtedly lincoln discussed with him includes many of the themes of his second inaugural. And begins to raise the question of what emancipation means in terms of rights for the slaves. Lincoln is acting in very subtle ways here. Beautiful. That vivid example gives context to the comments that david and i were discussing about his less than progressive views on race but you remind us that with this friendship, his actions in some ways belied that. Ted mckee, to what degree is the 13th amendment relevant in jurisprudence today . We saw that the framers of it, some of them thought that it would eliminate all private discrimination. Is it cited in contemporary cases . Give us a sense of contemporary jurisprudence. It was cited recently with a basis of a decision by the fifth circuit last year actually which i can talk a little bit about if time permits. But if i can tie the answer to that question to something that you said about the second inaugural of lincoln because it gets at the heart of your question, and it gets at the heart of the vitality and continued viability of the importance of the 13th amendment. Particularly section two as youll recall section one is the one which eliminates slavery. Section two then empowers congress to pass all laws and enact all laws which are necessary and appropriate to that end. Soon after this happened in 1883, there was a case, a group of cases actually, that came before the Supreme Court, called the civil rights cases. And theyre brought out of something which sounds very common, public accommodations, public accommodations bill of 1864 that jeff mentioned earlier. It was an attempt to try to use the power of the second section of the 13th amendment to open up certain areas of restaurants inns, inn in washington around the country where blacks were prohibited from going in large part based upon the mentality of the jurisprudence under the old black codes mentioned. And an action was brought arguing that the provision of the 1864 Civil Rights Act meant that those private actions were no longer valid. The key word there is private because the 13th amendment unlike the 14th and 15th amendments reached private conduct. The 14th amendment is limited to state action. 15th amendment as we heard is limited to state action. The 13th amendment is not that restricted. It goes after private action. And it was hoped that the private black individuals could gain redress against private actors who were prohibiting them from going into restaurants and inns, things of that sort. The Supreme Court said something which is very important, and since then its gotten kind of implanted and conflated into section two. Its not in section two. And that is the court recognized the ability of congress in section two to make all laws which are appropriate and necessary to eliminating slavery, but it went further and it said the badges and indicators of slavery. Which is great. The problem was that it then went on and looked at the public accommodations that were being denied access by the blacks and said, well, look, this is not a badge or an indicator of slavery. It defines slavery very narrowly. It said basically slavery is a relationship of power between master and a slave, indicative in that relationship is one of absolute power of life, death, corporal poundishment, it means the blacks cant testify in court, cant appear as witnesses in court. Were just talking about whether or not private individual has to open up his or her bus to a business to a black person. And that has nothing to do with slavery. In a brilliant dissent just Justice Haney foreshadows a later case which overturned this in which he said, you cant look at, and goes back to the phrase that you referred to, the common memory, and the common morality. You cant define slavery so narrowly that you wipe out of it the common memory of what it meant to be in a slave master relationship, and these laws do nothing more than try to strike down the vestiges, the badges, and indicators, if you will, of that master slave relationship therefore theyre well within the spoke of congress authority to legislate. Unfortunately that was a dissent. Its so important today because you can ask for what are the badges of indicators of slavery. You could argue that its racial profiling. The fifth circuit case that i mentioned earlier arose out of the Matthew Shepard hate crimes. People were prosecuted under the hate crime law that was enacted based upon section two, and and there was an attack made on congress authority to enact that legislation. The fifth circuit upheld it. The problem is, i dont want to go with this, there was a case in 1968 where an action was brought to prevent somebody from not releasing property to a black person. It was brought under a federal law which made it illegal to refuse to rent or sell to someone based upon their race. The decision of the case is significant because it could have been rendered based solely on the clause. The issue was the authority of congress to reach into the relationship between a private landlord, or seller, and the purchaser. Easily could have been resolved on the Commerce Clause and said, look, its purely constitutional, because congress clearly has the authority to legislate laws under its Commerce Clause authority. So far as i can tell theres only one mention of the Commerce Clause in that entire legislation litigation, and that occurs in an exchange between justice stew rt and the attorney for the plaintiffs during oral argument. The whole case was litigated based upon congress authority under the Commerce Clause to prohibit leasing to ban to lease to blacks. The Supreme Court decided that not under the Commerce Clause authority but under section two of the 13th amendment, and its a wonder that they did because they said that this is nothing more than a badge or indicator of slavery, and clearly congress has the right to reach it under section two of the 15th amendment. It gets a little more complicated because theres two more recent cases. Ill kind of leave it there. Basically its relevant today because back in 1883 the the congress, the Supreme Court said in civil rights cases that congress has the authority to define what is a badge or indicator of slavery. Now if that is still a valid jurisprudential concept, it is absolutely huge. And i question how viable it is. But the language is still sitting there. Its still in a majority opinion in that part of it has not been undermined. And we give congress the authority to go pretty far in terms of reaching things that congress determined were badges or indicators of slavery. Any cases which make that a lot more difficult than i just made it sound. Ladies and gentlemen, youve just heard a superb lesson in constitutional law, and i want you to go and follow up on the cases that chief judge mentioned. He just told its not in here. Really amazing. Tragically you cant find these cases in this document. But you can find them in the new equally thrilling, interactive constitution. That the National Constitution center is creating. This Advisory Board with the Federalist Society and the Constitution Society and when we launch on Constitution Day next year youll be able to click on any provision of the bill of rights and original constitution, see commentary on the leading cases written by the top scholars on both sides of the aisle, both what they agree about and what they disagree about. And weve just done a model where rick pildas and brad smith write about the 15th amendment and youll see what they think is the subtle law on the question some of which the judge chief just mentioned and then theyll have statements about open and contemporary controversies. I want to sum it up again quickly because these are crucial points. Ted just told us that some of the framers thought that to have 13th amendment ban private discrimination as the bings in the midst of Slavery Congress relied on that in passing the Civil Rights Act of 1875. The Supreme Court struck down that act arguably violating the original understanding of the framers of the 13th amendment in the civil rights cases and it took until the 1960s in that jones case that he mentioned that you should go check out for the Supreme Court to actually uphold a ban on private discrimination under the 13th amendment. Theres one final wrinkle weve just opened this great exhibit on kennedy downstairs which you can also go see after the show. The Kennedy Administration because of those civil rights cases that the chief judge mentioned, decided to rest the constitutionality of civil rights legislation on what he called was the Commerce Clause on Congress Power to regulate interstate commerce. A sort of odd home for it since the framers intended it to be rested in the 13th and 14th amendment, but hes noting that theres some current cases that are going back to the original understanding. A safer way if you can build the record, youve got to build the record, in the hate crimes cases arguable, record couldnt be built, thats why its based upon section 2 of the 13th amendment because how do you establish a record of the impact of hate crimes on commerce. You probably could do interstate commerce but its a tall order. Should someone devoted to the original understanding of the 13th and 14th amendments rest Congressional Authority on those amendments, rather than the Commerce Clause . Well, again, the problem is the court basically imposed whats called a confluence and proportionality test on how far congress can go in defining rights. That grew out of the religious restoration act. Congress had tried basically to turn back and cut back some of the Supreme Courts jurisprudence which was interpreted narrowly the rights of individuals to engage in religious practices. Congress was concerned about it, they enacted this act. And then there the court i think Justice Kennedy wrote the opinion said and in order for congress, Congress Just cant create writes out of whole cloth the rights they create have to be based in congruence and proportionality to those rights which have their source in the constitution. If you do that, since badges and indicators of slavery are not in section two theres a problem. Given what the Supreme Court did with the Voting Rights act lately, it seems to me to suggest thats why i said Commerce Clause is safer because the way the politics and jurisprudence is going. Im not sure how much traction one could get now arguing section twos badges and indicators of slavery. Its a lot safer based on the Commerce Clause and bravery, clear the Affordable Care act case. But thats a whole different story. You see how incredibly relevant these amendments are to contemporary questions. In addition to sponsoring this very wonderful interactive constitution. Were going to have a series of debates across the country for the next five years about these questions. Were going to present both sides, and allow you, the people, to make up your own mind about what these amendments were originally intended to mean, and what they mean today. We have time for brief closing thoughts from each of you. And im going to let you there are some Great Questions from the audience, but i think im going to ill pose this to you allen guelzo but allow you to give more bradley your thoughts about what you want our audience to know about the 13th amendment. The question is, how did the friedmans bureau come about . Didnt help blacks transition into mainstream life . Maybe you could tell us about the relationship between the Freedmans Bureau and the 13th amendment and what lincoln was trying to achieve . Freedmans bureau is a federal agency created in the spring of 1865 to, as the full title of the bureau indicates, to resettle, administer property, reclaim unsettled lands, and in a sense, provide a mechanism for assisting the newly treated slaves to move out of the environment they had been in, which was the environment of slavery, into the environment of freedom and citizenship. There were many ways in which this could be done. One major way is what about ownership of land. Here are former slaves, theyre standing on land that they have farmed for years, in some cases for generations, does that give them title to that land . Have they earned that . The freed mans bureau has to determine that. Freedmans bureau is also going to be involved in litigation about exactly these civil rights issues on a one by one basis. And sometimes officers of the Freedmans Bureau are going to be appearing in courts. And theyre going to be making arguments this way. Yet the Freedmans Bureau was not really given very much in the way of budget, not much in the way of teeth, and not much in the way of staff. President Andrew Johnson grew to loathe the Freedmans Bureau and did his very best to cripple it, and in fact by 1871 the Freedmans Bureau has for all practical purposes been dismantled. But while it was in operation, it was a potent force as sort of midwife, bringing to birth an entirely new cohort of citizens for the United States. If it had been able to do more go further, work faster, then perhaps the history of reconstruction itself might have been very different. Certainly the officer who was in overall charge of the Freedmans Bureau, oliver otis hower, former Major General in the union army, and a man of exact the kind of devout faith and morality that lucas was talking about as being part of lincolns ideal of what has to guide the country and yet Andrew Johnson as a president , and the democratic opposition that sidney was talking about, really succeeded in emasculating the Freedmans Bureau, and in the end, sinking it so that what could have been a major transitional agency, really is prevented from serving that purpose in american life. Beautiful answer. Lucas morel was there any thought regarding colonization to send, to send the freed slaves to other areas of the u. S. Territories, similar to Andrew Jacksons movement of people to oklahoma from North Carolina . Not that i know of. Lincoln has two things to do with lincoln and colonization. Yes, its true, lincoln was a longstanding proponent of colonization because he thought that whites would not be willing to free blacks and then coexist with the blacks. He thought it was the next best thing. There was no good solution that the majority white population of the United States, which is north and south of the mason dixon line, was going to stomach in terms of emancipation. Emancipation was always a twopart question. It was never just should we free the slaves. It was always, but what then . As Frederick Douglass would always say disparagingly the negro problem. This isnt a negro problem. This is an american problem. Right . They never say what shall we do with the white people, right . But always what should we do with the negro . You know what douglass answer was . Leave us alone. Your interference, your ben ef sense has been a positive injury to us. So short version is lincoln was in favor of colonization. As a palliative as kind of the spoonful of sugar to help the medicine of emancipation go down. By the time of 1863 his secretaries sloughed off the idea. One thing that modern scholars who are actually thinking that lincoln was still in favor of it almost till the day he died overlook is that as early as 1854, very famous speech at peoria, illinois, lincoln says out loud, to his audience that even if his his, our gut reaction is black colonization a moments thought on the subject we would realize it would never work. He says that out loud. Explicitly, as early as 1854. Which leads me to believe his heart was not in to colonization for the next 10plus years. Never heard of any proposal of lincoln doing what jefferson was proposing, kind of the diffusion thesis. It will be easier to emancipate or encourage white owners to get rid of those black slaves if they arent so densely populated. Right . That was the big fear. Would servile insurrection. The fear was if you not did it gradually, but if you had mass emancipation what might be at the top of the todo list for those freed slaves . Right. Go to walmart . No. Pick up eggs on the way home . No. Kill master . Interestingly enough, though what happened, even to blacks who were enslaved throughout our history . They became americans. You mention a book that i wrote on Ralph Ellison. Ralph ellison taught us in his essays, in his novel, in his short stories, that blacks have been here for as long as theres been a here. And in the process, they became in spite of the oppressive conditions, culturally religiously, politically, and so the great fear of mass nat turners rebellions happening was never really, i think, in the offing. But it was a palpable fear to guys like jefferson, to henry clay, even to alexis de tocqueville. He didnt predict the civil war. He predicted a southern war between blacks and whites. He never thought whites as lincoln put it would be cutting each others throats over the question of whether slavery should be the future in this country. So, colonization for lincoln, i think, he never really had his heart in it. It was, as i say, just a way to try to help emancipation along. And for him, it was liberia was hopeless. It would have been something more like central america. He thought, and it was very controversial, Frederick Douglass wasnt at this meeting but i heard about it afterwards when they had what they called a negro delegation to the white house when lincoln shared this idea of colonization in the very year that he was drafting the emancipation proclamation, he just said look, even in the best place in this country, blacks are not treated legally, socially, or politically as an equal of whites. In short saying to them, why would you want to live among the people who have been treating you like this . Cant you get the ball rolling for colonization . And he made sure that there was a reporter present. And if you read this account its probably met in maybe along with some of the statements he made in the Lincoln Douglas debates in 1858, probably the harshest things we hear from lincoln directly to black people. The leaders of blacks at that time, about their existence in this country, and i think theres Something Else going on there. It would take a little more time to explain that but i dont think weve gotten to the bottom of that very important meeting that lincoln had with that black delegation. Powerful stuff. Sid, this picks up on some of lucas really important observations. The question says, what were thoughts as to what slaves were to do after they were freed . They had no jobs, nowhere to go, no way to support themselves. What were lincolns intentions about how they could achieve full equality . Its an excellent question. At the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of slaves were wandering the country. Their social situations were uncertain. Some of them were looking for their families. And the Freedmans Bureau was a very Important Institution to try and deal with this question. Just to deal on two grounds. One, lincoln had told james blaine, who was a congressman from maine later a president ial candidate that his idea was to operate point by point. Its in blaines memoir. Thats how lincoln operated. But its not as if he didnt have a principle, and an idea. It stated, as David Rubenstein said, in his april 11th speech his last speech just days before his assassination, where he publicly speaks about opening citizenship to the slaves. Lincoln knew. Lincoln was more than canny, more than clever, he understood that this was going to lead to some form of citizenship, and he was going to have to do the politics of that. Perhaps his worst political decision that he ever made was to name Andrew Johnson as his Vice President , and the reason he did that was, of course, for political reasons to have a border state running mate. To help him in what they called the union party in 1864 in this difficult election, and lincoln paid very little attention to his Vice President s. He didnt include them in his cabinet meetings, for example. He his only meeting with Andrew Johnson as Vice President was on the day of his assassination when he told him basically to shut up. Dont give speeches, youre inciting all kinds of hatreds. Youre a demagogue, stop it, and i dont want to see you again. And that was their relationship. What would lincoln have done . What would lincoln have done . Well we know who he surrounded himself with. Theres some people who say he made an accommodation with the radical republicans. Perhaps. James speed as attorney general who is the brother of his old best friend said that. Thats perhaps. Edwin stanton was there, very de devoted to the idea of a very tough reconstruction. And lincoln was very close to stanton. Grant was there. Grant would do what lincoln wanted. He would. And u. S. Army was still out in the field. So and he had other advisers, men like howard around who conserved his purposes, his larger purposes. We dont know. He was assassinated. But what i feel is that what he would have done would have been not what Andrew Johnson did. The worst that lincoln would have done or might have done would have been better than the best that Andrew Johnson did. Said so well. Its all in the booklet. Its in the booklet to especially to the degree that the 14th and 15th amendments are there in the booklet. And part of the reason theyre there was that the congress could not tolerate what Andrew Johnson was doing. And they felt it was required for them to create these amendments, to deal with this president who was opposing them an every score in dealing with a positive reconstruction to the extent that he vetoed the admission of the state of colorado. Because he thought the state of colorado would elect senators and representatives that would oppose what he was doing. So we had a you had in reconstruction the lincolns afterlife, which is the disintegration of his legacy. Which leads us to 100 years afterwards. Where we had to have a second reconstruction. So ted mckee, to judge mckee, last word to you. First of all, i believe, this is, ladies and gentlemen lincolns birthday on which were launching this Exciting Initiative to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the reconstruction amendments. My question to you is has lincolns hope for equality that is embodied in the 13th amendment been achieved in america . And as we sponsor this series of nonpartisan debates across the country, what are the topics that you think americans should debate in order to educate themselves about the reconstruction . Well, answer to the first question is despite the fact i dont want to minimize the importance of obamas election. It is mindboggling to me. Ill never forget laying in bed and watching that, i remember trying to compose, mind boggling. Its huge. That being said, however, we clearly are not where i think back when the 13th amendment was enacted, folks thought we would be 150 years later as our conversation sounds weird but i was struck by that phrase that stan oliver used to say in laurel and hardy, in talking about slavery, well that is another fine mess youve gotten me into. At the end of the 20th century the beginning of the 20th century the problems of the 20th century would be the color line i think even though we have a black president the same statement can be made today, its clearly there with what we have about use of force and the societys response to the use of force in some instances. The problem of the 21st century is still the problem of the color line in terms of what people can do to educate themselves i think if you just start thinking sincerely in a nondefensive way about what are the badges and indicators of slavery, theres so Much Research out there about subliminal bias and the mind bugs we all have all of us black and white alike and how we tend to devalue i dont know not only black lives but black achievement, and not see blacks as being able to succeed at the same level of whites, and its there, from the day they were born, planted in black brains, the same way its blanted in planted in white brains to the extent were going to get beyond that, one way may be to try to wrestle with how much of it is baggage were carrying on today, is left over from the kinds of social dynamic, military and economic and political dynamic that were talking about here in terms of reconstruction, and the amendments. Ladies and gentlemen, youve just heard a wonderful discussion about the contemporary and historic meaning of the reconstruction amendments from our great panelists, from David Rubenstein, from bill adams and justice Justice Oconnor. Please join us as we engage all americans about the meaning of these central amendments to the constitution. You can participate in all sorts of ways by listening to podcasts, by looking at the documents here at the Constitution Center, by watching the debates that will take place here, and across the country but most important of all by educating yourselves. All of us have an obligation to learn about the history and text and meaning of these amendments. Youve just gotten a taste of the richness and complexity and importance of these amendments in american life, and im looking forward to joining you for many educational conversations in the years to come. Thank you so much and now please join us for a reception outside. Many thanks. [ applause ] tonight at 6 30 p. M. Eastern central time, John Menendez recounts the story of a couple that infiltrated the cia and gathered topsecret information on the use of sex in the 1970s. Menendez says that one populous uighurs clout three when he one popular Swingers Club frequented by the couple. As tonight on American History tv. Each week, American History tvs real america brings you archival films that help to tell the story of the 20th century. This is the night that hollywood holds america spotlight. Audrey hepburn announces the best actor. 10. Wrecks rex receive the award for my fair lady. Audrey hepburn was the leading lady. Julie andrews for mary poppins. Julie andrews played opposite of him in the play version of my fair lady. She played mary poppins. As bob hope put it, hollywood is handing out goal. Just lovely. I know you americans are famous for your hospitality, but this is ridiculous. And a year of many outstanding movies, the night of the oscars was a huge success. You are watching American History tv. 48 hours of programming on American History every weekend on cspan 3. Follow us on twitter for information on a schedule of upcoming programs and to keep up with the latest history news. Up next, conversation about gerald fords constitutional legacy. Mark wolf and another person discuss the 38th president s decision to pardon former president Richard Nixon and his relationship with attorney general edward levy. Thank you. Good m
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