Freedom First

We complete our ranking of the Amendments to the Constitution.

Dec 22, 2023

As we come to the dramatic conclusion of ranking the Amendments to the Constitution, I need to share something personal – I’m a morning person.

It’s a positive spin rather than stating: I don’t stay up late.

I love going to bed and getting up early. I like shutting down my day when the sun goes down, waking up when the sun is still down, and then greeting it when it begins to rise.

What does this have to do with anything?

I’m glad you asked.

As a kid, I never could stay up late to greet Santa. Santa began his job at, like, 9:00 p.m., and there is no way seven-year-old me is going to stay up that late to say hello. By 9:00, I’m already two hours into sleep.

But by 5:00 a.m., I was immediately downstairs to see the goods he had delivered.

Christmas day is the best. In our family, one person delivers all the presents to the other members. It’s all about being efficient. We begin early so we can spend the rest of the day taking naps because we got up so early for no real reason.

I imagine revealing the final top two Amendments feels like Christmas Day to each of you. You all have been so good to me, opening, reading, liking, and commenting on my mediocre takes on the supreme law of our nation. Christmas has come early to you, my friends.

So, without further delay, let’s dive in.

Freedom is the theme of the last two finalists. Sure, freedom is intertwined in many amendments, but my top two involve essential Freedoms – ones that begin with the capital F.

Come on down the stairs and open your early Christmas gift – the top two amendments to the United States Constitution.

Let’s dive in. For real, this time.

2: Amendment XIII

Its purpose: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-13/

Year proposed: 1864

Year Ratified: 1865

The Good:
Slavery in the United States was its unique brand of oppression. It’s sorta like how we don’t use the metric system like everyone else in the world, or how we bestow all of our professional sports teams who win championships the title of being World Champions. We do our own thing.

Our British Overlords had slavery for a long time – that’s where we adopted it. But in Good Ole England, it didn’t matter what your skin color was; they were equal opportunity enslavers. But the English twist was they also worked with the enslaved to ensure they had a path out of it.

But in the United States, we didn’t think like that. We enslaved people based entirely on skin color, and there was no path out. We considered black people property, and from the beginning of our country, we counted them as 3/5^th of a person for tax purposes.

Fortunately, not everyone in the United States supported the idea that enslaving people was a justifiable thing. In fact, the Founders of the country went to great lengths to keep the word slave out of the Constitution. Many knew that slavery would be outlawed; they just all hoped they would be long dead before it happened. Fortunately, their wishes came true.

We all know Southern states seceded from the Union beginning in 1860, after the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, to preserve their heritage of owning other people.

A Civil War ensued, and by 1863, the tide had turned in favor of the Union after the Battle of Gettysburg and Vicksburg over the Fourth of July holiday that year.

These victories enabled enslaved people to flee plantations and join the cause. Over 180,000 black men served in the army, while hundreds of thousands of black men and women provided non-combat support.

We owe enormous gratitude to those who fought for their Freedom while getting paid less and taking on risky assignments that could send them back into shackles. It’s because of them that in two short years, the United States abruptly ended its horrific acts of violence. (I won’t call slavery our original sin; that would be reality television, but slavery is a big stain on our history.)

If you want to read more about these men's bravery, check out my piece from a few years ago on the movie Glory!

The Bad:

When you read the amendment, you notice after the first comma the word except. Commas can be tricky, especially in this instance where the word except is very bad – because you are ending slavery.

The word except here created a massive loophole that allowed terrible punishments for a crime that focused on forced labor – chain gangs, license plate factories, everything you saw in The Shawshank Redemption. Somehow, none of this was cruel and unusual, probably because it helped capitalism.

Black people, while freed from slavery, except when it came to punishments for crimes, were subjected to social injustice for centuries.

The Ugly:

Willard Salsbury, Sr. was born to a prominent Delaware family. It might shock you to learn that the Salsburys were slaveholders.

Willard was a known drunk, which made him a prominent drunk. He once got hammered and stepped onto the Senate floor to call President Lincoln an imbecile and then proceeded to pull a gun on the Senate’s Sargent-At-Arms, who tried to calm him down and escort him out.

But it was during the debate on the Thirteenth Amendment that Salsbury went to town.

He loved states' rights so much that he longed for the day the United States would return to the Articles of Confederation because that worked well, Willard.

He claimed that enslaved people were property and the Government couldn’t regulate property. Finally, in the most audacious interpretation of both-siderism, Salsbury claimed that Northern abolitionists and Southern slavery “fire-eaters” drove the country into the Civil War because, somehow, they worked as “cooperators and coworkers in the same damnable cause.”

Booze is one hell of a drug.

Who proposed it?

Ohio Congressman James Ashley.

Ashley was an abolitionist from childhood when he saw boys his age being sold and marched with chains to be taken into the Deep South.

By 1839, he worked on riverboats that ran up and down the Mississippi River, and his side hustle was helping enslaved people escape to the North.

He was a journalist who believed in the freedom of the press to criticize the Government, and he decided what better way to criticize the Government than by joining the Government and making change happen.

Asley pushed this amendment through, and then he would draw up articles of impeachment against President Andrew Johnson.

I need to learn more about this guy because he sounds okay.

Why did I rank it here?

I got into History as a kid because of Andrew Jackson and the Civil War. Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn had a lasting impression on me when I watched it as a kid on those after-school television specials because there’s no way I read it.

When you rank the amendments, the Thirteenth Amendment needs to be right up there because it also has other vital innovations that shaped our country.

First, it expanded the power of the Federal Government. There is a second section of the amendment that reads:

Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

We see this power explicitly written in later amendments. The power to pass laws over the states is an essential shift in how our Government works.

We also see a restriction placed on people for the first time. You can’t be an enslaver in the United States anymore. It can’t be your main job or your side hustle. You can’t describe yourself as an Oppressor on LinkedIn.

The Bill of Rights was created to protect people from the Government—the Eleventh and Twelfth Amendments corrected wrongs about suing the Government and electing the executive office. However, the Thirteenth Amendment prevented people from doing bad stuff while giving Congress the power to create laws to enforce them.

We saw that immediately with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which Johnson vetoed, then Ashley went after his butt. There would be no Civil Rights Act ever without this amendment. It would be a top amendment, except for that word.

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