"A Resolution,"

The Emancipation Proclamation of January, 1863, declared free only those slaves in the rebellious states of the Confederacy. By the end of the war, no provision or law existed concerning the freedom of slaves owned by those who had been loyal to the Union. The legal status of the institution of slavery was by no means resolved, and it was generally recognized that an amendment to the Constitution was necessary to clarify the legality of what was a reality in practice. Various proposals for constitutional amendments had been offered in Congress even before the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. The final form of the resolution that was to become the Thirteenth Amendment was based almost word for word on the slavery prohibition embodied in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This resolution, as submitted by Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, was passed in the Senate on April 8, 1864, by a vote of 38 to 6. When the resolution reached the House on June 15, 1865, it failed to secure the requisite two-thirds vote, but after the re-election of President Lincoln in November of that year, it passed the House on January 31, 1865, by the narrow vote of 119 to 56 (8 representatives abstaining). The amendment was eventually ratified by three-fourths of the states, including eight that had formerly belonged to the Confederacy, and was declared adopted on December 6, 1865.

This copy of the resolution is signed by President Lincoln, Vice-President Hannibal Hamlin, and Speaker of the House, Schuyler Colfax, and is attested to by the signatures of John W. Forney, Secretary of the Senate, and Edward McPherson, Clark of the House. This copy is one of at least four known copies, and other signed copies may be in existence. The University's copy is probably unique in that the name of Hamlin is above that of Colfax, which comes first on other copies. The copy was reportedly discovered in a New Hampshire farm house attic in 1928 and was sold by Goodspeed's Bookshop in Boston to the Lincoln collector, Frank Tallman.

Gift of the Wilmington Institute Free Library