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Effects of Slavery on America

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Effects of Slavery on American History
Andrew Avila
US History 1301
Dr. Raley
April 18, 2013

The U.S. Constitution is primarily based on compromise between larger and smaller states, and more importantly, between northern and southern states. One major issue of the northern and southern states throughout American history is the topic of slavery. Although agreements such as the Three-Fifths Compromise in 1787, and the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 were adapted to reduce and outlaw slavery, it took many years for slavery to be completely abolished and allow blacks the freedom they had been longing for. The Three-Fifths Compromise was a agreement reached at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia in which …show more content…

This prevented the bill from becoming an actual law. President Lincoln took active measures to get the proposed bill on the Republican Party platform for the 1864 presidential election. After several months of debate, the bill finally reached the two-thirds vote on January 31, 1865, although the signed amendment’s archival copy states the bill was passed February 1, 1865[8]. After the approval of the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress passed four statutes known as the Reconstruction Acts. The Reconstruction Congress was required to pass two laws that implemented the Thirteenth Amendment[9]. The first was the Civil Rights Act declaring that freed slaves were allowed to enjoy the same rights as white people. This law made it a crime on the federal level to deprived freed slaves of these rights. The second was the Anti-Peonage Act of 1867 which made the holding of any person as a slave unlawful[10]. The Thirteenth Amendment completed the abolition of slavery in the United States. The process to abolish slavery began with President Lincoln’s issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Although the Thirteenth Amendment outlaws slavery and involuntary servitude, officials had to selectively enforce laws such as vagrancy forcing blacks to be subject to involuntary servitude. The southern states ' attitudes towards abolition made it

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