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Current and former cabinet members joined in the lobbying campaign. Seward promised patronage appointments to Democrats who had been defeated for reelection and agreed to vote for the amendment. Montgomery Blair urged the influential Samuel L. M. Barlow to swing Democratic votes in its favor, arguing that passage would enable the party to recoup its fortunes “on the negro question as contradistinguished from the slave question.” In December 1864, “around a table at Delmonico’s,” leading New York Democrats including Barlow, Samuel J. Tilden, and New York World editor Manton Marble debated whether the amendment’s passage would benefit their party. Barlow remained unconvinced, but the World wrote almost nothing about the amendment as the vote neared, to the relief of the measure’s supporters.55

When the decisive moment came on January 31, 1865, spectators ranging from members of the cabinet and Supreme Court to ordinary black residents of Washington packed the House chambers. By a vote of 119 to 56, slightly more than the required two-thirds majority, the House approved the Thirteenth Amendment. Every Republican voted in favor, along with sixteen Democrats, all but two of them lame ducks who had been defeated or had chosen not to run in 1864. Lincoln’s former law partner John T. Stuart, now a Democratic congressman from Illinois, rejected a personal appeal from the president and voted no. Lincoln’s lobbying did, however, pay dividends among border congressmen. The five border states (including West Virginia) produced 19 votes for the amendment and only 8 against. During the debates, border congressmen who had previously opposed passage explained their change of heart. “War,” said John A. J. Creswell of Maryland, “is as subversive of theories as it is of mere physical obstacles,” and the Civil War had dispelled the idea that “the negro race” was unfit for freedom. James S. Rollins of Missouri, once “a large owner of slaves,” declared, “We can never have an entire peace in this country as long as the institution of slavery remains…. We may as well unsheathe the sword and cut the Gordian knot!” Green C. Smith of Kentucky identified slavery as the reason Ohio had “outstripped” his own state in prosperity. Thus, the old nightmare of the Lower South came to pass: the northern tier of slave states joined the North in bringing about the abolition of slavery.56

“Regardless of parliamentary rules,” the staid reporter for the Congressional Globe noted, the House erupted in “an outburst of enthusiasm” when the final tally was announced. Congressmen “wept like children” while in the galleries men threw their hats in the air and “the ladies…rose in their seats and waved their handkerchiefs.” The names of those who voted for the amendment, the Washington Morning Chronicle proclaimed, would go down in history beside the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Lincoln offered impromptu remarks to a group that came to the White House to celebrate. The Thirteenth Amendment, he declared, went well beyond the Emancipation Proclamation as a way to “eradicate slavery” and would erase any doubts as to the proclamation’s “legal validity.” He said that the proclamation was “inoperative” on slaves who did not come within Union lines and might have no effect on their children. “But this amendment,” he added, “is a King’s cure for all the evils.”57

The debate over the amendment reached its climax as one of the more unusual episodes in Lincoln’s presidency unfolded. In his message to Congress of the previous December, Lincoln had flatly rejected negotiations with the Confederacy, since the “insurgent leader” had made it clear that he would accept nothing short of “the severance of the Union.” A few days later, however, Lincoln gave Francis P. Blair Sr. permission to travel to Richmond to meet with Jefferson Davis. Blair had devised a bizarre scheme whereby the Union and Confederacy would declare an armistice and send a joint army to overthrow the