Words Worth Remembering: The Great Moral Victory
The day that many dreamed of—the day that yet many others hoped never to see—had at last arrived. At four o’clock on the evening of Tuesday, January 31, 1865, the House of Representatives approved the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, declaring the institution of slavery, upon ratification, forever abolished in the land of hope.
Unprecedented displays of triumph and joy followed the final vote. “Members joined in the shouting and kept it up for some minutes,” staunch abolitionist George Julian wrote in his journal. “Some embraced one another, others wept like children. I have felt, ever since the vote, as if I were in a new country.”
Seated in the gallery, Charles Douglass was overcome, writing to his father, Frederick, “I wish that you could have been here.”
Later that evening, a jubilant crowd gathered beneath the White House windows with torches and a brass band to celebrate what was doubtless a monumental day in the nation’s history.
A tired Abraham Lincoln stepped into a window and addressed the people. “This amendment is a great moral victory,” he said with brief certainty. And, ever Lincoln, added with humor, “I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly those who desire it for others.
“Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery,” he added with increased humor, “I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.”
The crowd roared with laughter and applause. Lincoln concluded by calling the amendment “a King’s cure for all the evils” that had long divided and, since his election to the presidency, torn the nation apart in open civil war. “It winds the whole thing up,” he said with confidence, because it would settle, once and for all, that slavery was fundamentally inconsistent with the American ideals.
Despite his quips, Lincoln knew that it was not a humorous day but a solemn one. Slavery was no laughing matter. It had seeped into the vitals of the American body since before the Union was founded, poisoning it from within until it at last required surgical removal.
It was “a great moral victory” precisely because it had been a great moral struggle. Seven years earlier, in his seventh and final debate with Stephen Douglas in Alton, Illinois, Lincoln had laid bare the moral core of the battle, fought for so long. “That is the real issue,” he said. “It is the eternal struggle between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world.”
(Earlier in the debate, he worded it a little differently: “The real issue in this controversy,” he said, “is the sentiment on the part of one class that looks upon the institution of slavery as a wrong, and of another class that does not look upon it as a wrong.”)
He had added, “They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle.”
Such, he knew, was the truth of the American story—a constant tug-of-war between principle and practice, ideals and their fulfillment, contradictions and their correction.
To Douglas, too, Lincoln explained that the meaning and promise of the Declaration of Independence—specifically the announcement that “all men are created equal”—was not a finished fact but a living hope: something, he said, to be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even, though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence and augmenting the happiness and value of life of all people, of all colors, everywhere”—a promise never fully realized in any one generation but forever beckoning the next.
In December 1865—eight months after Lincoln’s death—the Thirteenth Amendment was at last ratified effective. Slavery, once the death knell of the Union and the land’s starkest contradiction, was no more. America finally took one decisive, irreversible step toward making good on its founding promise.
That year of triumph and tragedy, war had given way to peace, the hate of an assassin silenced the hope of a president, and the optimism of the freed slave was tempered by lingering clouds of injustice, but a wrong was forever corrected—and in the eternal struggle between right and wrong, America moved one great measure closer to the light.
It remains today, as it did then, “a great moral victory.”