Amendment XIII: Abolishing Slavery


Book Description

One of the most stirring moments in history was when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Along with this crucial primary source, readers are treated to an amazing collection of essays about the abolishment of slavery and the Thirteenth Amendment. Readers will evaluate the historical defense of slavery and its rejection, reactions to Lincoln's proclamation, and they will learn how early Supreme Court rulings actually undermined this amendment's power. Other topics include segregation, housing developments, road closings, America's debt to slaves, immigrant labor, modern-day slavery, and slavery in American prisons and suburbs.




Constitution


Book Description




The New Jim Crow


Book Description

Named one of the most important nonfiction books of the 21st century by Entertainment Weekly‚ Slate‚ Chronicle of Higher Education‚ Literary Hub, Book Riot‚ and Zora A tenth-anniversary edition of the iconic bestseller—"one of the most influential books of the past 20 years," according to the Chronicle of Higher Education—with a new preface by the author "It is in no small part thanks to Alexander's account that civil rights organizations such as Black Lives Matter have focused so much of their energy on the criminal justice system." —Adam Shatz, London Review of Books Seldom does a book have the impact of Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow. Since it was first published in 2010, it has been cited in judicial decisions and has been adopted in campus-wide and community-wide reads; it helped inspire the creation of the Marshall Project and the new $100 million Art for Justice Fund; it has been the winner of numerous prizes, including the prestigious NAACP Image Award; and it has spent nearly 250 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Most important of all, it has spawned a whole generation of criminal justice reform activists and organizations motivated by Michelle Alexander's unforgettable argument that "we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it." As the Birmingham News proclaimed, it is "undoubtedly the most important book published in this century about the U.S." Now, ten years after it was first published, The New Press is proud to issue a tenth-anniversary edition with a new preface by Michelle Alexander that discusses the impact the book has had and the state of the criminal justice reform movement today.




Amendment 13


Book Description

Amendment 13, exposes how prior administrations have mass incarcerated millions of people, 95% are considered nonviolent offenders. Starting with Bill Clinton, the Federal Prisons grew from 24 facilities to now 122. Inmates are forced into jobs in State and Federal Prison Industries operating Phone Rooms handling 411 calls, making clothing, furniture, and electronics and doing the day to day operations needed to manage the large prison complexes on a daily basis. Inmates are subjected to medical treatment being withheld, dangerous, unhealthy and unsanitary conditions, violence, sexual abuse and murder all within the prison system. The average person doesn't realize what is happening. The inmates caught up in this house of horrors feel like there is no one to get help from, until now. In 1860 America was engaged in a civil war that divided the country and went on for years. Overwhelmingly, Union soldiers were white. It was not until May 22, 1863 that the U.S. War Department established the Bureau of Colored Troops enabling black men to serve as soldiers. (Black men had been assisting the army in other official capacities such as constructing entrenchments or performing camp duty or other labor since the Second Confiscation and Militia Act of July 17, 1862.) By the end of the war, 178,975 enlisted men served in the U.S. Army as members of the U.S. Colored Troops. Because of this effort, Lincoln and the lawmakers put forth Amendment 13 to provide a prohibition on Slavery, only problem is Slavery was only ended for private citizens, the U.S. Government kept the ability to have U.S. citizens be slaves to the United States. In the language of the 13th Amendment, the sixth word in section 1 is "Except" this one word changes everything. Now, this book will explain why the U.S. Government along with all states has engaged in a practice of prosecuting everything to accomplish three goals: To generate an army of citizens to be forced to work as slave labor, earning a rate of .14 cents to .30 cents per hour. Two, to remove the citizens' rights to exercise their 2nd Amendment rights, (right to keep bear arms) and third, the 15th Amendment rights (Citizens of the United States right to vote.) With Hillary Clinton willingness to lie to the American public, the American citizens need to have all the facts leading up to the November elections. Now with the Presidential race heating up, American citizens need to know the truth and fully understand how this directly relates to the increase in police actions in minority communities and how the law enforcement agencies are increasing under pressure, to arrest more people to meet the demands of the Prison Industries needing Slave Labor to produce goods and services. Currently with this going public, President Obama is left with a dilemma to be the first black president to end slavery, or the first black president to not end slavery, either way, his presidential legacy will be defined on what he decides.




Final Freedom


Book Description

This book examines emancipation after the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. Focusing on the making and meaning of the Thirteenth Amendment, Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. The book tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and reveals an unprecedented transformation in American race relations, politics, and constitutional thought. Using a wide array of archival and published sources, Professor Vorenberg argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation occurred after, not before, the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by prior historians; and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution.




Founders' Son


Book Description

Abraham Lincoln grew up in the long shadow of the Founding Fathers. Seeking an intellectual and emotional replacement for his own taciturn father, Lincoln turned to the great men of the founding—Washington, Paine, Jefferson—and their great documents—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution—for knowledge, guidance, inspiration, and purpose. Out of the power vacuum created by their passing, Lincoln emerged from among his peers as the true inheritor of the Founders’ mantle, bringing their vision to bear on the Civil War and the question of slavery. In Founders’ Son, celebrated historian Richard Brookhiser presents a compelling new biography of Abraham Lincoln that highlights his lifelong struggle to carry on the work of the Founding Fathers. Following Lincoln from his humble origins in Kentucky to his assassination in Washington, D.C., Brookhiser shows us every side of the man: laborer, lawyer, congressman, president; storyteller, wit, lover of ribald jokes; depressive, poet, friend, visionary. And he shows that despite his many roles and his varied life, Lincoln returned time and time again to the Founders. They were rhetorical and political touchstones, the basis of his interest in politics, and the lodestars guiding him as he navigated first Illinois politics and then the national scene. But their legacy with not sufficient. As the Civil War lengthened and the casualties mounted Lincoln wrestled with one more paternal figure—God the Father—to explain to himself, and to the nation, why ending slavery had come at such a terrible price. Bridging the rich and tumultuous period from the founding of the United States to the Civil War, Founders’ Son is unlike any Lincoln biography to date. Penetrating in its insight, elegant in its prose, and gripping in its vivid recreation of Lincoln’s roving mind at work, this book allows us to think anew about the first hundred years of American history, and shows how we can, like Lincoln, apply the legacy of the Founding Fathers to our times.




Slaves of the State


Book Description

The Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, passed in 1865, has long been viewed as a definitive break with the nation’s past by abolishing slavery and ushering in an inexorable march toward black freedom. Slaves of the State presents a stunning counterhistory to this linear narrative of racial, social, and legal progress in America. Dennis Childs argues that the incarceration of black people and other historically repressed groups in chain gangs, peon camps, prison plantations, and penitentiaries represents a ghostly perpetuation of chattel slavery. He exposes how the Thirteenth Amendment’s exception clause—allowing for enslavement as “punishment for a crime”—has inaugurated forms of racial capitalist misogynist incarceration that serve as haunting returns of conditions Africans endured in the barracoons and slave ship holds of the Middle Passage, on plantations, and in chattel slavery. Childs seeks out the historically muted voices of those entombed within terrorizing spaces such as the chain gang rolling cage and the modern solitary confinement cell, engaging the writings of Toni Morrison and Chester Himes as well as a broad range of archival materials, including landmark court cases, prison songs, and testimonies, reaching back to the birth of modern slave plantations such as Louisiana’s “Angola” penitentiary. Slaves of the State paves the way for a new understanding of chattel slavery as a continuing social reality of U.S. empire—one resting at the very foundation of today’s prison industrial complex that now holds more than 2.3 million people within the country’s jails, prisons, and immigrant detention centers.







The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery


Book Description

“A masterwork [by] the preeminent historian of the Civil War era.”—Boston Globe Selected as a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review, this landmark work gives us a definitive account of Lincoln's lifelong engagement with the nation's critical issue: American slavery. A master historian, Eric Foner draws Lincoln and the broader history of the period into perfect balance. We see Lincoln, a pragmatic politician grounded in principle, deftly navigating the dynamic politics of antislavery, secession, and civil war. Lincoln's greatness emerges from his capacity for moral and political growth.




Lincoln and the Thirteenth Amendment


Book Description

Long before the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln recognized the challenge American slavery posed to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. A constitutional amendment would be the ideal solution to ending slavery, yet the idea of such an amendment conflicted with several of Lincoln’s long-held positions. In this study, Christian G. Samito examines how Lincoln’s opposition to amending the United States Constitution shaped his political views before he became president, and how constitutional arguments overcame Lincoln’s objections, turning him into a supporter of the Thirteenth Amendment by 1864. For most of his political career, Samito shows, Lincoln opposed changing the Constitution, even to overturn Supreme Court rulings with which he disagreed. Well into his presidency, he argued that emancipation should take place only on the state level because the federal government had no jurisdiction to control slavery in the states. Between January 1863 and mid-1864, however, Lincoln came to support a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery because it worked within the constitutional structure and preserved key components of American constitutionalism in the face of Radical Republican schemes. Samito relates how Lincoln made the amendment an issue in his 1864 reelection campaign, chronicles lobbying efforts and the final vote in the House on the amendment resolution, and interrogates various charges of corruption and back-room deals. He also considers the Thirteenth Amendment in the context of the Hampton Roads conference, Lincoln’s own thoughts on the meaning of the amendment, and the impact of Lincoln’s assassination on the reading of the amendment. Samito provides the authoritative historical treatment of a story so compelling it was recently dramatized in the movie Lincoln. Closing with a lively discussion that applies the Thirteenth Amendment to current events, this concise yet comprehensive volume demonstrates how the constitutional change Lincoln helped bring about continues to be relevant today.