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PANEL I: THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT
IN CONTEXT
THE DANGEROUS THIRTEENTH AMENDMENT
Jack M. Balkin * and Sanford Levinson **
Through most of its history, the Thirteenth Amendment has been interpreted extremely narrowly, especially when compared to the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights. The Thirteenth Amendment has been read in this way because it is “dangerous.” The demand that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude... shall exist within the United States,” taken seriously, potentially calls into question too many different aspects of public and private power, ranging from political governance to market practices to the family itself. Our contemporary association of “slavery” with a very limited set of historical practices is anachronistic and the result of a long historical process. Yet at the time of the founding, the concept of “slavery” was far broader than currently understood. “Slavery” meant illegitimate domi- nation, political subordination, and the absence of republican govern- ment; “chattel slavery” was only the most extreme and visible example of slavery. The broader, antirepublican concept of slavery was narrowed to avoid awkward comparisons to the economic and political subordina- tion of wage laborers and women. Once chattel slavery was abolished, labor activists and suffragists sought to revive the older, broader concept of “slavery.” But emancipation allowed defenders of the status quo to insist that American society was now “free.” Even today, calling an injustice “slavery” is generally seen as overheated hyperbole and even a presumptuous insult to the memory of the victims of African American chattel slavery. This Essay concludes by asking how our political imagination has been limited as a result of this history.
- Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School. ** W. St. John Garwood and W. St. John Garwood, Jr. Centennial Chair in Law and Professor of Government, University of Texas at Austin. We are grateful for the research assistance provided by Robert James of the Yale Law School, Class of 2014. We would also like to thank Alex Tsesis and the editors of the Columbia Law Review for conceiving and organizing an excellent Symposium on the Thirteenth Amendment, which provided the occasion to write this Essay, as well as the Hofstra Law School faculty workshop, at which an earlier version of this Essay was presented.
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INTRODUCTION
One of the ironies of the U.S. Constitution is that although it was clearly designed to accommodate the interests of slaveholding states, the word “slavery” first appears in the Constitution in the Thirteenth Amendment, which claims to abolish slavery forever. Given its text—and the background context of 250 years of American history—the Thirteenth Amendment seems to portend a major transformation in both law and society: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly con- victed, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”^1 Moreover, Section 2 of the Amendment gave Congress its first new enumerated power since 1787: the “power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”^2
What is noteworthy, however, is that although the text of the Thirteenth Amendment seems to promise much, it has, over its 150-year lifespan, delivered remarkably little beyond the initial elimination of African American chattel slavery. With few exceptions, the United States Supreme Court has read the Thirteenth Amendment, and especially Section 1, quite narrowly, at least in comparison to other amendments— including, most significantly, its immediate successor, the Fourteenth.^3 Consider, for example, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s 1988 summary of Thirteenth Amendment doctrine: “The primary purpose of the Amendment,” O’Connor explained, “was to abolish the institution of African slavery as it had existed in the United States at the time of the Civil War, but the Amendment was not limited to that purpose.”^4 What else, then, is included? O’Connor explains that the addition of the ban on involuntary servitude “was intended to extend ‘to cover those forms of compulsory labor akin to African slavery which in practical operation would tend to produce like undesirable results.’”^5 Thus, O’Connor con- cluded, “our precedents clearly define a Thirteenth Amendment prohibition of involuntary servitude enforced by the use or threatened
- U.S. Const. amend. XIII, § 1.
- Id. § 2.
- One might also compare the Nineteenth Amendment, which, like the Thirteenth, was the product of sustained social movements. Each has left relatively few traces in either case law or even the operative rhetoric of American political discourse. Reva Siegel has pointed out that a narrow reading of the Nineteenth Amendment was by no means re- quired by the Amendment’s text, even though its language is arguably narrower than that of the Thirteenth. See Reva B. Siegel, She the People: The Nineteenth Amendment, Sex Equality, Federalism, and the Family, 115 Harv. L. Rev. 947, 953 (2002) (observing that immediately after ratification, “some courts understood the Nineteenth Amendment to have implications for practices other than voting,... [but] soon thereafter the Amendment came to be interpreted as a nondiscrimination rule governing voting with no bearing on questions of women’s citizenship outside the context of the franchise”).
- United States v. Kozminski, 487 U.S. 931, 942 (1988).
- Id. (quoting Butler v. Perry, 240 U.S. 328, 332 (1916)) (emphasis added).
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Thirteenth Amendment were taken as seriously as the Fourteenth has been taken, one would expect considerable political and legal efforts to make sense of its underlying purposes and apply its terms (and purposes) to new situations. Just as the Establishment Clause has been read to ban more than state-sponsored churches or government-salaried ministers, and the Free Speech Clause to protect all manner of expression, one would have asked how best to make sense of the terms “slavery” and “in- voluntary servitude” in a modern world. But, as United States v. Kozminski demonstrates, precisely the opposite has occurred. In the Supreme Court’s jurisprudence, at least, the more limited the meaning of these terms, the better.
Part I of this Essay describes the multiple and overlapping reasons why the Thirteenth Amendment has been read far more narrowly than the Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights. Part II explains why interpreting the Thirteenth Amendment in the same way contemporary interpreters read the Fourteenth Amendment or the Bill of Rights is “dangerous.” The demand that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude
... shall exist within the United States,” taken seriously, potentially calls into question too many different aspects of public and private power, ranging from political governance to market practices to the family itself. Indeed, the Thirteenth Amendment’s ban on “slavery” is the flip side of Article IV Section 4’s guarantee of “republican government,”^12 another clause with enormous potential reach that has effectively been read out of the Constitution (and, not coincidentally, out of the standard canon of constitutional subjects taught at America’s law schools^13 ).
Part III explains that our contemporary association of “slavery” with a very limited set of historical practices is anachronistic and the result of a long historical process. The language of the Thirteenth Amendment is taken from the 1787 Northwest Ordinance.^14 Yet at the time of the founding, the concept of “slavery” was far broader than currently under- stood. “Chattel slavery” was only the most extreme and visible example of “slavery,” which meant illegitimate domination, political subordination, and the absence of republican government. American colonists repeat- edly argued that the British Empire had made them slaves because they
common law civil rights protected by Civil Rights Act of 1866, and little more, and should be so interpreted today); Raoul Berger, Selected Writings on the Constitution 185 (1987) (“[T]he uncontroverted evidence, confirmed in these pages, is that the framers [of the Fourteenth Amendment] repeatedly stated that the amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 were ‘ identical ’... .”).
- U.S. Const. art. IV, § 4.
- See J.M. Balkin & Sanford Levinson, The Canons of Constitutional Law, 111 Harv. L. Rev. 963, 975 (1998) (describing “pedagogical canon” of key cases and materials taught in law schools).
- See infra notes 80–93 and accompanying text (discussing provenance of Thirteenth Amendment).
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lacked political freedoms and political representation in Parliament.^15 This eighteenth-century view opposing slavery to republicanism survives in Cold War arguments equating communism and totalitarianism to slavery and in twenty-first-century Tea Party rhetoric attacking big gov- ernment.
Part IV describes how the broader, antirepublican concept of slavery was narrowed during the fight for abolition for political and strategic reasons. Southern defenders of slavery taunted abolitionists by arguing that wage workers in the North and in England were equally slaves, and early suffragists argued that women were also unjustly subordinated. These critiques gave abolitionists incentives to maintain a sharp divide between chattel slavery and other forms of economic subordination, as well as the treatment of women. Once chattel slavery was abolished, labor activists and suffragists sought to return to the older, broader under- standing of “slavery.” But emancipation allowed defenders of the status quo to insist that American society was now “free.” Normal, everyday aspects of economic and family life could not be “slavery,” which was by definition the worst of evils and had already been eradicated by law. Today, calling an injustice “slavery” is generally seen as overheated hyperbole and even a presumptuous insult to the memory of the victims of African American chattel slavery. This Essay concludes by asking how our political imagination has been limited as a result of this history.
I. T HE J URISPATHIC TREATMENT OF THE T HIRTEENTH A MENDMENT
The legal historian Robert Cover famously called processes that produce multiple legal doctrines and interpretations “jurisgenerative,” and processes that cut off lines of development “jurispathic.”^16 The Fourteenth Amendment is one of the most jurisgenerative parts of the Constitution. Yet there is little doubt that the history of the Thirteenth Amendment (and its twin, the Guarantee Clause) has been decidedly jurispathic.
Why has the Thirteenth Amendment been treated so differently from the Fourteenth? There are many overlapping reasons. Part of the explanation lies in the history of Reconstruction and its subsequent disparagement as the price of political reunion by Northern and Southern whites.^17 Moreover, precisely because the Thirteenth
- See infra text accompanying notes 117–121.
- Robert M. Cover, The Supreme Court 1982 Term, Foreword: Nomos and Narrative, 97 Harv. L. Rev. 4, 11, 40 (1983).
- The Slaughter-House Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873), which limited the scope of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities Clause, also read the Thirteenth Amendment narrowly. The “obvious purpose” of the Amendment, Justice Miller ex- plained, “was to forbid all shades and conditions of African slavery,” id. at 69, and any new form of slavery that might arise similar to that suffered by blacks:
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it would be unconstitutional to buy or sell (for-profit) corporations, auction them off in public markets (sometimes called stock exchanges), or liquidate them in the interests of profit.^22
Ironically, even the most determined opponents of slavery may have contributed to the Amendment’s neglect. In Amy Dru Stanley’s important book From Bondage to Contract , she points out that even such notable and courageous abolitionists as William Lloyd Garrison believed their work was largely over once chattel slavery was abolished: “Where are the slave auction-blocks,” Garrison exclaimed, “the slave-yokes and fetters.... They are all gone! From chattels to human beings.... Freedmen at work as independent laborers by voluntary contract!”^23
In Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy , historian Eric Foner notes that all societies that have ended slavery have struggled over the meaning of the freedom that emancipation brings.^24 The title of his book is taken from the comment, by Confederate General Robert V. Richardson, that “[t]he emancipated slaves own nothing, because noth- ing but freedom has been given to them.”^25 This was not merely the view of ex-rebels. Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York Tribune , fancied himself an avid opponent of slavery.^26 Yet Greeley dismissed calls for giv- ing the freed men “forty acres and a mule” because it would have re- quired the confiscation of slaveholders’ land and redistribution to for- mer slaves.^27 This, he argued, was “either knavery or madness.... People
- See Jack M. Balkin, Corporations and the Thirteenth Amendment, Balkinization (Jan. 28, 2012, 10:27 AM ), http://balkin.blogspot.com/2012/01/corporations-and- thirteenth-amendment.html (on file with the Columbia Law Review ) (“[F]or-profit corpora- tions are by nature designed to be ‘slaves’ [of their owners]. That is what distinguishes them from natural persons.”); Jack M. Balkin, More on Corporations as Slaves, Balkinization (Jan. 29, 2012, 3:31 PM ), http://balkin.blogspot.com/2012/01/more-on- corporations-as-slaves.html (on file with the Columbia Law Review ) (“Like slavemasters, [the owners of a for-profit corporation]... have the power of life or death over their corpora- tions. On the other hand, the owners can sue other people who attempt to injure the cor- poration, and... take various steps to avoid hostile takeovers.”).
- Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation 4 (1998). Garrison was far more sympathetic to the plight of exploited workers in a “free labor” system than this quote suggests. His point, rather, was to emphasize the importance of being able to own and sell one’s own labor.
- Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and Its Legacy 1 (1983) (“Whether accomplished by black revolution, legislation, or civil war, emancipation... raised intractable questions about the system of economic organization and social rela- tions that would replace slavery.”).
- Id. at 55.
- Greeley had, of course, penned a famous letter in the Tribune to Abraham Lincoln in August of 1862 pressing Lincoln for a quicker path to emancipation. Lincoln’s equally famous reply was that his goal was to save the Union, whether with slavery or with- out it. But by September, Lincoln had announced plans for an Emancipation Proclamation to take effect on January 1, 1863. Robert C. Williams, Horace Greeley: Champion of American Freedom 233–34 (2006).
- Paul Brest et al., Processes of Constitutional Decisionmaking: Cases and Materials 431 (5th ed. 2006).
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who want farms work for them. The only class we know that takes other people’s property because they want it is largely represented in Sing Sing.”^28 Southern blacks were relegated to the market with no resources besides their own labor, which white employers sought to control and exploit through labor contracts.
As Stanley notes, one of the recurrent debates within the tradition of “social contract” theory is whether freedom of contract gives individuals the right to make binding contracts that would effectively make them slaves and forfeit their liberty.^29 Although most theorists did indeed place a limit on what people could contract to, some did not; for the latter, contracts for slavery were no different from any other presumptively arm’s-length transaction between consenting adults.^30 Versions of this tension sometimes appear in modern-day contracts courses. The principle of freedom of contract—and the concomitant rejection of principles of unconscionability and duress—when taken to an extreme, undermines confidence in an unregulated market’s ability to deliver genuine freedom for all. That is especially so in a society with vast disparities of income, wealth, and bargaining power. Once the direct ownership of human beings is abolished, this is the question raised—and the danger posed—by the Thirteenth Amendment.
Pete Daniel, for example, notes how freedom of contract gradually developed into a system of peonage that ensnared Southern blacks after the Civil War: Lacking land or capital of their own, blacks had little choice but to sign yearly contracts.... As military control became less strict in the South, a labor pattern emerged. Most blacks signed annual contracts. Improvident, they took advances on their ex- pected share of the crop. When settlement time came the next fall, the laborers often discovered that their share of the crop did not cover what they owed the supply merchant or the planter.... [S]ome planters demanded that workers remain until they had worked out their entire debt, and when planters used indebtedness as an instrument of compulsion, the system became peonage.^31 Foner and Daniel both indicate that peonage depended on the for- mal mechanism of contract, supplemented by the use of the criminal law to punish its breach. In the peonage cases at the turn of the twentieth
- Id.
- See Stanley, supra note 23, at 6 (“Whether free persons could contract away all their rights and therefore voluntarily become slaves was a point of theoretical dispute.”).
- Id. (comparing Hobbes and Pufendorf, both of whom recognized legitimacy of contracts for slavery, with Locke, who did not).
- Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901–1969, at 19– (1972); see also Pete Daniel, The Metamorphosis of Slavery, 1865–1900, 66 J. Am. Hist. 88, 89 (1979) (“[P]eonage was widespread in the South by the turn of the century.... [S]lavery had indeed ended for some blacks, but for others it had endured, metamor- phosed.”).
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Amendment did not bar “tyrannical” legislation as such,^35 also dissented in Bailey v. Alabama. Alabama had created a legal presumption that any- one who ceased work after signing a contract for long-term employment and accepting an advance of wages had intended to defraud the em- ployer and could be criminally punished for doing so, even though the accused was not permitted to testify to rebut the statutory presumption.^36 In Holmes’s view, such a law was simply a means of ensuring that con- tracts were enforced by creating proper incentives.^37 As such, Holmes believed that Alabama’s law was as much within the legislature’s power as New York’s decision to limit the maximum hours of bakers. “Peonage,” Holmes explained, “is service to a private master at which a man is kept by bodily compulsion against his will. But the creation of the ordinary legal motives for right conduct does not produce it.”^38
To be sure, after emancipation, some activists made connections be- tween the ban on slavery and the constitutional claims of the populists and the labor movement,^39 and still later on, the constitutional claims of the twentieth century movement for black civil rights.^40 However, it was the legal equivalent of swimming upstream against a vigorous current. Risa Goluboff has shown how Thirteenth Amendment claims were offered on behalf of black sharecroppers in the middle of the twentieth century, but these theories were eventually abandoned.^41 The NAACP’s legal strategy focused instead on undermining the logic of Plessy v. Ferguson ’s “separate but equal” doctrine by bringing cases aimed at segre- gation in colleges and professional schools; it naturally focused on the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment.^42 In this strategy, the Thirteenth Amendment and the constitutional demand of freedom from oppressive working conditions did not fit particularly well.^43
- Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45, 75 (1905) (Holmes, J., dissenting) (“It is set- tled by various decisions of this court that state constitutions and state laws may regulate life in many ways which we as legislators might think as injudicious or if you like as tyran- nical as this, and which equally with this interfere with the liberty to contract.”).
- Bailey , 219 U.S. at 228.
- Id. at 246 (Holmes, J., dissenting).
- Id.
- See infra text accompanying notes 155–162 (describing examples of arguments by labor activists following Civil War).
- This history is described in Risa L. Goluboff, The Lost Promise of Civil Rights (2007).
- Id. at 10–13, 217–18, 256–57, 259.
- See Robert L. Carter, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 86 Mich. L. Rev. 1083, 1084–85 (1988) (reviewing Mark Tushnet, The NAACP’s Legal Strategy Against Segregated Education, 1925–1950 (1987)) (explaining that NAACP’s strategy under Charles Houston and Thurgood Marshall was to focus on desegregating graduate and professional schools, followed by public schools).
- See Goluboff, supra note 40, at 217, 228 (“Once [Thurgood] Marshall fixed his sights on Plessy , the labor cases that had once held out legal as well as institutional promise fell by the doctrinal wayside.”).
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Later social movements, building on the NAACP’s example—and the equal protection jurisprudence spawned by Brown v. Board of Education^44 —continued to focus on the Fourteenth Amendment rather than the Thirteenth.^45 In what might be a self-fulfilling prophecy, succes- sive waves of social movements have gravitated to the Fourteenth Amendment, even though in theory they could also have used the con- cepts of nondomination and self-sufficiency implicit in the Thirteenth Amendment’s prohibition against slavery.
Even so, it is not surprising that interest in the Thirteenth Amendment, and in particular the Enforcement Clause of Section 2, would make somewhat of a comeback during the civil rights revolution, when all three branches of the federal government got behind the movement for black civil rights. In a trio of cases, Jones v. Alfred H. Mayer Co. ,^46 Griffin v. Breckenridge ,^47 and Runyon v. McCrary ,^48 the Warren and early Burger Courts held that Congress had extensive powers to reach racial discrimination (and later discrimination based on national origin and ancestry^49 ) under Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment. What the Supreme Court did not do, however, was offer much discussion of the substantive meaning of Section 1. Rather, it broadly read Congress’s powers to remedy the “badges and incidents of slavery,”^50 a phrase taken from the 1883 Civil Rights Cases , which had construed Congress’s powers far more narrowly.
- 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
- Major victories in the courts by social movements for the rights of women, gays, and noncitizens reflect this focus on the model of Brown and the Fourteenth Amendment rather than the Thirteenth Amendment. See, e.g., Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558, 564 (2003) (protecting gay rights under Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause); Romer v. Evans, 517 U.S. 620, 635–36 (1996) (protecting gay rights under Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause); Plyler v. Doe, 457 U.S. 202, 215 (1982) (holding that children of undocumented aliens are protected by Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause); Craig v. Boren, 429 U.S. 190, 197 (1976) (holding Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause requires heightened scrutiny of sex classifications); Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113, 164 (1973) (upholding abortion rights under Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause); Reed v. Reed, 404 U.S. 71, 77 (1971) (holding that preference for male over female administrators of estates violated Equal Protection Clause of Fourteenth Amendment); Graham v. Richardson, 403 U.S. 365, 376 (1971) (holding state statute denying welfare benefits to resident aliens violates Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause).
- 392 U.S. 409 (1968).
- 403 U.S. 88 (1971).
- 427 U.S. 160 (1976).
- See Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb, 481 U.S. 615, 617–18 (1987) (holding that Congress’s remedial powers under Thirteenth Amendment allow it to ban discrimina- tion against Jews, who were considered “race” at time of Thirteenth Amendment’s enact- ment); Saint Francis Coll. v. Al-Khazraji, 481 U.S. 604, 613 (1987) (applying 42 U.S.C. § 1981 to persons of Arab ancestry); cf. United States v. Nelson, 277 F.3d 164, 190–91 (2d Cir. 2002) (holding that Section 2 gives Congress power to reach some religious discrimi- nation in order to eliminate badges and incidents of slavery).
- The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 20 (1883).
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secure republican government has, for the most part, lain unused.^55 Both clauses have been limited because both are “dangerous”: Their potential reach seems unlimited and, taken to their logical conclusions, they might require a serious rethinking of public and private power in the United States.
Sanford Levinson has recently published a book emphasizing the difference between the “Constitution of Conversation,” which consists of those clauses actively litigated and subjected to endless discussion in the legal academy, and the “Constitution of Settlement,” referring to a vari- ety of textual provisions that establish our basic political structures and that are never litigated because their meanings are deemed “self-evident” as a practical matter.^56 There is a third possibility, though: the “Constitution of Silence,” consisting of those clauses of the Constitution that could be remarkably important, but which contemporary lawyers, judges, and scholars have, for one reason or another, chosen to ignore. The Thirteenth Amendment is perhaps the best example of the Constitution of Silence, along with such other provisions as the Guarantee Clause,^57 the Titles of Nobility Clause,^58 and the Bill of Attainder Clause.^59 The point is not that these clauses are irrelevant to modern life; rather, the point is that, taken seriously, they might be alto- gether too relevant.
Guarantee Clause is nonjusticiable while holding that courts may review state legislative reapportionment schemes under Equal Protection Clause); Pac. States Tel. & Tel. Co. v. Oregon, 223 U.S. 118, 148 (1912) (“The fundamental doctrines thus so lucidly and co- gently announced by the court, speaking through Mr. Chief Justice Taney in the case which we have thus reviewed, have never been doubted or questioned since... .”); Taylor v. Beckham, 178 U.S. 548, 578 (1900) (“It was long ago settled [by Luther v. Borden ] that the enforcement of this guarantee belonged to the political department.”). Although Luther has come to stand for the general proposition that the Guarantee Clause is nonjus- ticiable, it could—and should—be read far more narrowly. See Jack M. Balkin, Living Originalism 241–42 (2011) [hereinafter Balkin, Living Originalism] (“[ Luther v. Borden ] holds only that some kinds of claims—those involving recognition of governments and deciding when domestic violence requires intervention by federal troops—are best deter- mined by the political branches... .”).
- Senator Charles Sumner once called the Guarantee Clause “a sleeping giant in the Constitution,” because “[t]here is no clause which gives to Congress such supreme power over the States... .” Cong. Globe, 40th Cong., 1st Sess. 614 (1867) (statement of Sen. Charles Sumner). It is precisely for that reason, William Wiecek has argued, that the Clause has largely been left undisturbed since Reconstruction. William M. Wiecek, The Guarantee Clause of the U.S. Constitution 295 (1971).
- See Sanford Levinson, Framed: America’s Fifty-One Constitutions and the Crisis of Governance 17–27 (2012) (explaining distinction between mostly textual “Constitution of Settlement” and “Constitution of Conversation,” which concerns indeterminate aspects of Constitution). Examples of provisions in the Constitution of Settlement are the length of the president’s term, the timing of inauguration day, and the allocation of two senators to each state regardless of population.
- U.S. Const. art. IV, § 4.
- Id. art. I, § 9, cl. 8; id. art. I, § 10, cl. 1.
- Id. art. I, § 9, cl. 3.
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But precisely why is the concept of slavery in the Thirteenth Amendment so dangerous? There are several different overlapping rea- sons. First, the focus of the Thirteenth Amendment seems to be society as a whole, not merely state power. All of the Justices in the Civil Rights Cases noted that the Thirteenth Amendment contained no state action re- quirement;^60 for the majority, this was a reason to restrict its power and scope. As Justice Bradley (in)famously explained, “It would be running the slavery argument into the ground” to allow Congress to prohibit ra- cial discrimination in places of public accommodation.^61
Bradley’s metaphor suggests that calling these forms of race discrim- ination unjust domination would discredit the principle of eliminating the badges and incidents of slavery. But the reason it would discredit the principle is that it would discomfit too many whites. By 1883, many whites, in both the North and the South, had accepted the Compromise of 1877 that had ended Reconstruction and returned political power to white elites in the South.^62 Desiring sectional peace, Northern white majorities either acquiesced to—or actively supported—the unfettered return to power of white majorities in the South who were committed to white privilege and black inferiority.^63 Moreover, as Michael Les Benedict has observed, other factors drove the Compromise of 1877 as well. Northern white elites increasingly feared what they perceived as the threat of “socialism”—demands by freed blacks and their white sympa- thizers for redistributive programs.^64 Elites feared that newly empowered majorities would be led astray by “[w]eak-minded sentimentalists or cor-
- See The Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3, 23 (1883) (“Under the Thirteenth Amendment, the legislation... may be direct and primary, operating upon the acts of individuals, whether sanctioned by State legislation or not; under the Fourteenth... it must necessarily be... corrective in its character, addressed to counteract and afford re- lief against state regulations or proceedings.”); id. at 35–36 (Harlan, J., dissenting) (“[U]nder the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress has to do with slavery and its incidents; and that legislation... may be direct and primary, operating upon the acts of individuals, whether sanctioned by State legislation or not.”).
- Id. at 24–25 (majority opinion) (“It would be running the slavery argument into the ground to make it apply to every act of discrimination which a person may see fit to make as to the guests he will entertain, or as to the people he will take into his coach or cab or car, or admit to his concert or theater, or deal with in other matters of intercourse or business.”).
- See generally David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory 137–38 (2001) (describing terms of Compromise of 1877).
- See C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow 67 (1955) (“[T]he liber- als... felt themselves strongly drawn toward the cause of sectional reconciliation. And since the Negro was the symbol of sectional strife, the liberals joined in deprecating fur- ther agitation of his cause and in defending the Southern view of race in its less extreme forms.”).
- See Michael Les Benedict, Reform Republicans and the Retreat from Reconstruction, in Preserving the Constitution: Essays on Politics and the Constitution in the Reconstruction Era 168, 168–72 (2006) (noting Northern reformers viewed redistribu- tive policies as threat to human liberty and equal rights).
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guarantied to the blacks the right of buying, selling and holding prop- erty, and of equal protection of the laws. Are not these the essentials of freedom? Surely a white lady cannot be enforced by Congressional en- actment to admit colored persons to her ball or assembly or dinner party.”^71 To be sure, “[t]he [Thirteenth A]mendment declares that slav- ery and involuntary servitude shall be abolished, and that Congress may enforce the enfranchisement of the slaves. Granted: but does freedom of the blacks require the slavery of the whites? [A]nd enforced fellowship would be that.”^72
This gives Bradley’s famous metaphor an unexpected meaning: “running the slavery argument into the ground,” would, like a plow, un- earth or dig up features of social life that many whites wanted to main- tain unquestioned and unchallenged. Unearthing these aspects of social life was dangerous precisely because it would undermine a basic com- promise underlying the Reconstruction Amendments. Blacks were enti- tled to civil equality, such as the right to make contracts and own prop- erty, but not social equality—that is, the right to associate with whites as equals.^73 Even if blacks were equals in the abstract, whites should remain their superiors in civil society.^74 Hence Bradley’s horror at the thought that white women would have to mix with blacks, and his conflation of places of public accommodation with private dances and dinner parties.
- Id.
- Id.
- On the distinction between civil and social equality, see, e.g., Cong. Globe, 42d Cong., 2d Sess. 901 (1872) (statement of Sen. Lyman Trumbull) (stating Civil Rights Act of 1866 was “confined exclusively to civil rights and nothing else, no political and no social rights”); Balkin, Living Originalism, supra note 54, at 222–26 (explaining Reconstruction Era distinctions between civil, political, and social equality); Harold M. Hyman & William W. Wiecek, Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development, 1835–1875, at 277–78, 394–402 (1982) (explaining that whereas civil rights were “those rights essential to differ- entiate a slave from a free person,” “the highest and most controversial stratum” of rights concerned “social equality,” which, in the view of most whites, included equal access to public accommodations); Michael W. McConnell, Originalism and the Desegregation Decisions, 81 Va. L. Rev. 947, 1024 (1995) (“It was generally understood that the nondis- crimination requirement of the Fourteenth Amendment applied only to ‘civil rights.’ Political and social rights, it was agreed, were not civil rights and were not protected.”); Mark Tushnet, Civil Rights and Social Rights: The Future of the Reconstruction Amendments, 25 Loy. L.A. L. Rev. 1207, 1208 (1992) (“For Reconstruction legal thinkers civil, political and social rights were seen as three distinct categories. Civil rights attached to people simply because they were people.... Social rights were exercised in the rest of the social order.... [G]overnment had nothing to do with guaranteeing social rights... .”).
- See Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 544 (1896) (“The object of the amendment was undoubtedly to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but... it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce so- cial, as distinguished from political equality... .”); id. at 559 (Harlan, J., dissenting) (not- ing superiority of white race socially “in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power” but arguing that “[i]n respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law”).
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Social inequality was justified as a feature of personal privacy—an inevi- table consequence of private preferences and human nature—and was defended both in law and in constitutional doctrine. To dig up and ex- pose these aspects of social life to criticism made the slavery argument— and the Thirteenth Amendment itself—far too dangerous.^75
This leads to a second reason why the Thirteenth Amendment is so dangerous. The idea of slavery, focusing as it does on nondomination and self-sufficiency, can apply to many different societies, including modern ones. Nineteenth-century critics called slavery a form of barba- rism (sometimes coupling it with polygamy), implying that slavery was a feature of premodern or ancient societies.^76 But domination and en- forced social dependency do not disappear in modern societies. They merely reappear in new guises, sometimes through public power, some- times through private power, and sometimes through a combination of both. One does not have to be a Marxist to recognize that unregulated capitalism might create its own forms of domination and oppression to replace the chattel slavery of older societies. Nor does one have to be a Hayekian to recognize that unchecked and unaccountable government power can reduce citizens to new forms of servitude. If domination can exist within markets and welfare states alike, and can be reproduced even in social systems that promise formal equality, then domination will ap- pear—and reappear constantly—in modern societies.
Furthermore, eliminating pervasive and overlapping forms of domi- nation might call for remedies that give people self-sufficiency, like the famous redistributive formula of “forty acres and a mule” for the former slaves that sent Horace Greeley into livid fury.^77 If so, then once again it might undermine market capitalism, making the attack on slavery as dangerous to market-based liberalism as it is to traditional status hierar- chies.
Third, once it is acknowledged that “slavery” need not be identical to or closely resemble African chattel slavery, the attack on slavery might threaten not only modern capitalism and the modern state, but also any number of traditional social formations and traditional status relations.
- Or, as contemporary opponents of the individual mandate might put it, the Thirteenth Amendment’s guarantees have “no limiting principle.”
- The 1856 platform of the new Republican Party, for example, insisted on “both the right and the imperative duty of Congress to prohibit in the Territories those twin relics of barbarism—Polygamy, and Slavery.” Republican Platform of 1856, in 1 National Party Platforms, 1840–1956, at 27 (Donald Bruce Johnson ed., Univ. of Ill. Press rev. ed.
- (1924).
- See Akhil Reed Amar, Forty Acres and a Mule: A Republican Theory of Minimal Entitlements, 13 Harv. J.L. & Pub. Pol’y 37, 37 (1990) (“[A] minimal entitlement to prop- erty is so important, so constitutive, and so essential for both individual and collective self- governance that to provide each citizen with that minimal amount of property, the gov- ernment may legitimately redistribute property from other citizens who have far more than their minimal share.”).
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interpretation of Congress’s powers—would give the federal government broad new powers to attempt to reshape both law and society.
The connections between slavery and republicanism—with its triple focus on nondomination, self-sufficiency, and the accountability of power—and the potentially (and dangerously) broad scope of the con- cept of slavery have always proved too much for American judges and politicians to stomach. As a result, both the Thirteenth Amendment and the Guarantee Clause have been cabined and limited throughout the country’s history—so that they do not require too much of either public or private institutions. It is well worth asking what is gained and what is lost by this jurispathic treatment.
III. T HE R EPUBLICAN ORIGINS OF THE T HIRTEENTH A MENDMENT
The language of Section 1 is taken from Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servi- tude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted... .” 80 Congress had used similar language in two 1862 acts, ending slavery first in the District of Columbia and then in all federal territories.^81 Senator Charles Sumner’s proposal, borrowing language from the French Declaration of Rights of 1791, would have provided, “All persons are equal before the law, so that no person can hold another as a slave; and the Congress may make all laws necessary and proper to carry this article into effect everywhere within the United States and the jurisdiction thereof.” 82 But this language was quickly rejected by the Senate. Senator Jacob Howard objected that the equality formula was “utterly insignificant and mean- ingless,”^83 adding nothing to the abolition of slavery.
One might think that the decision to reject Sumner’s language should be quite significant: It would mean that the Thirteenth Amendment merely ends slavery but does not secure equality of any kind. But this does not appear to be what congressional Republicans ac- tually believed. In the brief congressional debates over the Thirteenth Amendment, and later again in the much longer debates over the 1866 Civil Rights Act, Senators Lyman Trumbull (the author of the Thirteenth
- Northwest Ordinance of 1787, art. VI, 1 Stat. 51 n.(a).
- An Act to Secure Freedom to All Persons Within the Territories of the United States, ch. 111, 12 Stat. 432, 432 (1862) (declaring “there shall be neither slavery nor in- voluntary servitude” in territories); An Act for the Release of Certain Persons Held to Service or Labor in the District of Columbia, ch. 54, 12 Stat. 376, 376 (1862) (proclaiming “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall exist in District of Columbia). Similar language was also used in the Missouri Compromise of 1820, ch. 22, 3 Stat. 545, 548 (pro- hibiting “slavery and involuntary servitude” in territory north of compromise line).
- Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1483 (1864) (statement of Sen. Charles Sumner).
- Id. at 1488 (statement of Sen. Jacob Howard).
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Amendment) and Jacob Howard insisted that they did not disagree with Sumner on matters of substance.^84 They believed, like many other Republicans, that once blacks were free, they became citizens, and there- fore enjoyed equal civil rights under the law.^85 To be sure, this was not the universal view: Senator Edgar Cowan disagreed—in his view the Amendment granted only freedom, not equality of any sort.^86 But the idea that ending slavery meant citizenship and equal civil liberty was common among Republican supporters of the Thirteenth Amendment and the 1866 Civil Rights Act.^87 And therefore it is no surprise that the Civil Rights Act was written specifically to secure citizenship and equal civil rights.
Rather, Trumbull and his allies preferred the language of the Northwest Ordinance for a number of reasons. First, unlike Sumner’s proposal, the language of the Ordinance had no foreign associations. 88 Second, the Northwest Ordinance had deep connections to the American political tradition.^89 These concerns are reminiscent of current debates about the use of foreign materials in constitutional interpreta- tion, except that in this case the issue concerned drafting constitutional text, and not interpreting it.^90
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the Northwest Ordinance of- fered familiar language that most supporters of the Amendment could agree on. During his debate with Sumner, Trumbull emphasized the
- See id. (discussing disagreement over precise wording, but not substance, of Thirteenth Amendment).
- See Michael Kent Curtis, No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights 48 (1986) (“Republicans believed that the Thirteenth Amendment effectively overruled Dred Scott so that blacks were entitled to all rights of citizens.”); Jack M. Balkin, The Reconstruction Power, 85 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1801, 1816 (2010) [hereinafter Balkin, Reconstruction Power] (“The Reconstruction Republicans believed that once blacks became free, they enjoyed all the rights of citizens.”).
- See Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st Sess. 499 (1866) (statement of Sen. Edgar Cowan) (“That amendment, everybody knows and nobody dare deny, was simply made to liberate the negro slave from his master. That is all there is of it.”); see also id. at 477 (statement of Sen. Willard Saulsbury) (“[T]he effect of that amendment is simply to say that a person who heretofore was a slave of another shall be no longer his slave, and it operates no further.”).
- Curtis, supra note 85, at 48; Balkin, Reconstruction Power, supra note 85, at 1816.
- See Cong. Globe, 38th Cong., 1st Sess. 1488 (1864) (statement of Sen. Lyman Trumbull) (noting he was unsure that phrases “copied from the French Revolution[] are the best words for us to adopt”).
- See id. at 1489 (statement of Sen. Jacob Howard) (stating he preferred “good old Anglo-Saxon language employed by our fathers in the ordinance of 1787” over “French constitutions or French codes”).
- Compare Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304, 347–48 (2002) (Scalia, J., dissenting) (criticizing use of foreign materials in interpreting Eighth Amendment’s Cruel and Unu- sual Punishments Clause), with Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 921 n.11 (1997) (Scalia, J.) (distinguishing between use of foreign examples in drafting constitution and interpreting existing one).
