What Is National Freedom Day? Here’s a GIF Explainer.
Today is National Freedom Day, a day that celebrates President Abraham Lincoln’s signing of a joint congressional resolution that was later ratified as the 13th Amendment, formally abolishing chattel slavery across the United States.
Lincoln signed the resolution a day after it passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a 119–56 vote. The Senate passed the resolution months earlier on April 8, 1864, by a 38–6 vote.
What is in the 13th Amendment? The amendment consists of two sections:
“Section 1. 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.
Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
The 13th Amendment’s path to Lincoln’s desk was arduous: several abolitionist legislators first introduced proposals for a constitutional amendment to abolish chattel slavery in 1863.
According to History, in February 1864, the Senate Judiciary Committee consolidated several proposals to introduce a final amendment that abolished slavery nationally with the exception of punishment for a crime. The chamber passed the amendment two months later.
The 13th Amendment languished in the House, where it failed a vote in June 1864 by a 93–65 vote, falling short of the two-thirds majority needed for passage.
Faced with opposition from Democratic legislators, Lincoln would go on to include the ratification of the 13th Amendment in his 1864 reelection campaign, explicitly endorsing the idea at his party’s nominating convention. According to the Library of Congress, Lincoln and members of his party saw the amendment as a way to enshrine the Emancipation Proclamation, preventing it from being overturned by the courts or Congress after the Civil War.
After his reelection, Lincoln led a final push for the amendment’s passage in the House. The chamber passed the amendment on January 31, 1865, by a razor-thin two-vote margin, sending it to the states for final ratification. Lincoln would be assassinated two months later.
How did National Freedom Day come to be? According to the Library of Congress, the commemoration was the brainchild of civil rights leader Major Richard Robert Wright, who proposed “a national day to commemorate freedom for all people” in 1941 to local leaders in Philadelphia.
In 1947, a year after Wright’s death, Congress passed a bill to establish February 1 as National Freedom Day “to commemorate the signing by Abraham Lincoln on February 1, 1865, of the joint resolution […] that proposed the 13th Amendment to the Constitution.”
While National Freedom Day is often celebrated as a day to recognize the significance of the 13th Amendment, many also take the opportunity to reflect on the amendment’s shortcomings and complicated legacy.
Notably, the rights of citizenship and the vote eluded formerly enslaved Black people until the ratification of the 14th and 15th Amendments.
Even still, former Confederate states launched an onslaught of targeted legislation and state-sanctioned violence designed to disenfranchise and marginalize the newly freed Black population and their descendants.
Many also take the day to recognize the legacy of the “except” clause in the 13th Amendment, which empowered former Confederate states in the aftermath of the Civil War to arrest the newly freed Black population on minor crimes, sentencing them to be “slaves of the State,” as ruled by the Virginia Supreme Court in 1871.
Some scholars have blamed the clause for creating “a new form of slavery” that persists to this day through incarceration: an audit of jail populations in three Southern counties by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that in 2019 “Black people were admitted to jail at a rate at least double — and up to six times — that of White or Hispanic people and spent up to 12 days longer in jail than White people.”
In 2024, the fight to fully abolish slavery continues, as several states move to eliminate it as a form of criminal punishment from their state constitutions. In 2022, voters in Alabama, Oregon, Tennessee, and Vermont passed ballot measures to repeal language allowing slavery as punishment for a crime from their state constitutions. This November, voters in Nevada will head to the polls to vote on Question 4 or the “Remove Slavery as Punishment for Crime from Constitution Amendment.” According to CBS News, California could also vote on a similar ballot measure this fall.
Legislators on Capitol Hill are also working to close the slavery loophole in the Constitution: in 2023, Georgia Rep. Nikema Williams, New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, and Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley introduced legislation to remove the exception clause from the 13th Amendment.
As of 2024, 16 states have exceptions for slavery or involuntary servitude in their state constitutions for criminal punishment.
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