Final Freedom

Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment by Michael Vorenberg


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
An excellent history of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. I’ve read a lot of dull legal history lately, and this sparkles in comparison without losing an ounce of rigor. Lots of intricate political maneuverings and broad, sweeping social changes laid out with lucid grace. Particularly interesting to me for the discussion of the psychology of Constitutional amendment – depending on who you ask, the Thirteenth was the first amendment to radically revise the (proslavery) original text, or it was just an extension of the intrinsically antislavery document. I think it was the first, myself. This matters because Constitutional scholarship at the time pretty much was originalism – that’s what it would be, when your parents knew the guys who wrote the thing, right? This book is about all the cataclysms and upheavals and reverses that could make the stars and the congressmen align to get the amendment through, with hundreds of thousands dead and pamphlets about the evils of miscegenation on every street corner. As a portrait of a tumultuous time, and as an aid to the largely underground academic movement of Thirteenth Amendment revival scholarship, this book is a great success.

It’s an accidental success in exploring what an extraordinarily white history the Amendment has. And not just in the obvious – all the senators and representatives were white, (almost) all of the voters who elected ratifying bodies were white, the drafters were white. But I think the one major lapse in this book is the way it doesn’t seem really conscious of how the debate it describes is all about white people – about their guilt or their complicity or their racism or their fear. It’s not a blatant failure of the book, because this was, I think, what the debate was like. But the book should know that more consciously.

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