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By Root 1646 0

Thus, were the seceded states to be counted, as Lincoln insisted they must be (to do otherwise, he thought, would recognize the legitimacy of secession), ratification required twenty-seven approvals. It seemed unlikely that the three states carried by McClellan would ratify; thus five Confederate states would have to do so. The four with new governments recognized by Lincoln could be counted on—Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Virginia. Where the fifth state would come from depended on the progress of Reconstruction.62

Appropriately, Illinois was the first state to ratify. Delaware, the border state where Lincoln had begun his emancipation initiative in 1861, became the first to reject the amendment; not until 1901, long after it had become part of the Constitution, would it gain Delaware’s approval. Kentucky, with a government, one correspondent informed Lincoln, under the control of “the old secession party, and the relapsed portion of the Union party,” also refused to ratify. The place of Lincoln’s birth would have the distinction of being the only state to reject the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. Nonetheless, slavery in both these border states was clearly dying. Because of black enlistment in the army, Delaware was “practically free.” As for Kentucky, “no family knows whether they have a servant to prepare breakfast for them or not,” complained the Louisville Journal. Soon after the House approved the Thirteenth Amendment, moreover, Congress passed the bill, mentioned in chapter 8, to free the families of black soldiers. After soliciting the advice of Secretary of War Stanton, who affirmed that it would strengthen the army by relieving black soldiers of “great anxiety” about “those whom they love,” Lincoln signed it. By the end of the war, despite slavery’s continued legal existence, nearly three-quarters of the slaves in Kentucky and Delaware had become free. The remainder, however, would not enjoy liberty until the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment in December 1865.63

“The one question of the age is settled,” declared Congressman Cornelius Cole of California. But if the Thirteenth Amendment solved one problem, it raised a host of others. During the debates Democrats had asked repeatedly, “What is to be done with the negroes who may be freed?” Republicans showed little desire to discuss the precise rights that would come with freedom. But a number insisted that abolition would incorporate blacks into the “national citizenship” that would emerge from the war. For the moment, however, there was no agreement as to precisely what the rights of citizens were. Most Republicans agreed with Congressman John Farnsworth that “all questions of the consequences of emancipation” should be postponed.64

Nevertheless, the issue of blacks’ postwar rights had a way of reappearing. The month of February 1865 witnessed remarkable breaches in the northern color line. On February 1, the day after passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, Chief Justice Chase admitted John S. Rock of Boston as the first black lawyer to practice before the Supreme Court, an “extraordinary reversal” of the Dred Scott decision, Harper’s Weekly noted, and an “indication of the revolution which is going on in the sentiment of a great people.” A few days later, on Lincoln’s fifty-sixth birthday, Henry H. Garnet became the first black minister to preach a sermon in the hall of the House of Representatives. He used the occasion to claim for his people “every right of American citizenship.” Not only blacks but the nation as a whole, he proclaimed, had embarked on an exodus after a long bondage to slavery. Also in February, Lincoln approved the appointment of Martin R. Delany as the army’s first black commissioned officer, dispatching him to Beaufort, South Carolina, to raise additional black soldiers. And Illinois finally repealed its discriminatory Black Laws, the result of a campaign spearheaded by the black abolitionist John Jones of Chicago, who stationed himself at the door of the legislature “morn, noon, and evening