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After every Democrat who wanted to speak had been heard, the voting began. “Hundreds of tally sheets had been distributed on the floor and in the galleries,” Ashley recorded. It appeared at first that the amendment had fallen two or three votes short of the requisite two-thirds margin. The floor was in tumult when Speaker Colfax stood to announce the final tally. His voice shaking, he said, “On the passage of the Joint Resolution to amend the Constitution of the United States the ayes have 119, the noes 56. The constitutional majority of two thirds having voted in the affirmative, the Joint Resolution has passed.” Without the five Democrats who had changed their votes, the amendment would have lost.

“For a moment there was a pause of utter silence,” Noah Brooks reported, “as if the voices of the dense mass of spectators were choked by strong emotion. Then there was an explosion, a storm of cheers, the like of which probably no Congress of the United States ever heard before.”

“Before the members left their seats,” Congressman Arnold recalled, “the roar of artillery from Capitol Hill announced to the people of Washington that the amendment had passed.” Ashley brought to the War Department a list of all those who had voted in favor. Stanton ordered three additional batteries to “fire one hundred guns with their heaviest charges” while he slowly read each name aloud, proclaiming, “History will embalm them in great honor.”

Lincoln’s friends raced to the White House to share the news. “The passage of the resolution,” recalled Arnold, “filled his heart with joy. He saw in it the complete consummation of his own great work, the emancipation proclamation.” The following evening, Lincoln spoke to celebrants gathered at the White House. “The occasion was one of congratulation to the country and to the whole world,” he said. “But there is a task yet before us—to go forward and consummate by the votes of the States that which Congress so nobly began.” The audience responded with cheers. “They will do it” was the confident cry. And, indeed, the legislatures in twenty states acted almost immediately. Before the year 1865 was out, the requisite three quarters had spoken putting a dramatic end to the slavery issue that had disturbed the nation’s tranquillity from its earliest days.

No praise must have been more welcome to Lincoln than that of his old critic, the fiery abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. “And to whom is the country more immediately indebted for this vital and saving amendment of the Constitution than, perhaps, to any other man?” Garrison asked a cheering crowd at the Boston Music Hall. “I believe I may confidently answer—to the humble railsplitter of Illinois—to the Presidential chain-breaker for millions of the oppressed—to Abraham Lincoln!”

THE STORY OF the Peace Commissioners, whose presence had almost derailed the vote on the new amendment, had begun with Francis Preston Blair. Lincoln’s reelection had convinced the old editor that another attempt at peace might be successful. Lincoln remained unconvinced that talks at this juncture would be effective, but Blair was so anxious to try that Lincoln gave him a pass for Richmond. It was understood, however, that he was proceeding on his own, without authority to speak for the president.

After leaving Lincoln, Blair wrote two letters to Jefferson Davis. The first, designed for public consumption, requested simply “the privilege of visiting Richmond” to inquire about the papers Blair had lost when General Early’s troops took possession of his Silver Spring house. The second revealed that his “main purpose” in coming was to discuss “the state of the affairs of our country.” He promised to “unbosom [his] heart frankly & without reserve,” hopeful that some good might result.

On January 11, 1865, the seventy-three-year-old Blair arrived in Richmond, where he was greeted warmly by numerous old friends. Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina, “threw her arms around him” and said, “Oh you Rascal, I am overjoyed to see