Amendment XIII Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Section 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. In our age of roiling discontent, liberalism and its historical achievements are under assault from all sides. For the past four years, Donald Trump had little use for truth, science, progress, mutual respect among races and identities — all the liberal ideals embodied in the founding documents and embedded in the history of American politics. Despite overseeing the military that long ago defeated the Confederacy, Trump nonetheless made the Lost Cause his own, becoming the protector of Confederate monuments and place names, and this support has gained him the appreciation of white nationalists and other “good people” like the ones who marched on Charlottesville. Trump had little use for the colorblind state that liberals associate with the Party of Lincoln. Even with Trump out of the Oval Office, Trumpism continues to be the perfect ideological provocation for those on the other side now questioning America’s central political tradition. It sets the mood for their revisionism. At war with classical liberalism and “neo-liberalism” alike, the progressives are busy rewriting American history. They want a past that reflects their dim view of the American record and justifies certain policies to address racial grievances. American history, they now instruct, is dominated by topics that liberals allegedly marginalized, including settler colonialism, slavery, white supremacy, whiteness, and peoples of color. The editor of the eminent American Historical Review writes that he aims to “decolonize” American history. Ibrahim X. Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning described racism as our very origins. Reducing four hundred years of black history to victimhood, the New York Times’ 1619 Project echoed this sentiment. Racism explains slavery, which in turn explains the American Revolution and much else worth knowing about American history. Internal conflicts among whites — based on religion, ethnicity, or class — hardly explain anything, and there is certainly nothing exceptional about America. Rather than claiming their own version of the liberal tradition articulated in the Declaration of Independence, the Reconstruction Amendments, the promise of the New Deal, and the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s, the progressives play up the failures and the betrayals of previous generations of liberals, even as they are suspicious or grudging about the Biden victory. Unwittingly taking their cue from the Nation of Islam, they view American liberalism itself as a species of white supremacy, national in scope and operation: in their view, white supremacy is not an aberrant tradition rooted in the American South, as most twentieth century liberals saw it. They feel little solidarity with American liberals, except those they have dubbed radical and incorporated into what they call the “black radical tradition,” especially Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Like some of the activists in the street, they would topple Jefferson, Lincoln, and Grant along with the Confederate generals. They see liberalism, past and present, as a huge obstacle to the remaking of America into what amounts to a fully integrated society with a social welfare state for all. One of the pillars of American liberalism under assault is the Thirteenth Amendment. Many Americans now believe that slavery never ended — not despite but because of the amendment that fulfilled the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation. In the words of Bryan Stevenson, the head of the Equal Justice Initiative turned historian, slavery never ceased, it merely “evolved.” In his thinking and that of other Thirteenthers, it was the great amendment of 1865 that led to the re-enslavement of black people and mass incarceration. The key to understanding its “evolution” is the exception clause in the amendment, which ended slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime.” Under cover of those words, the Thirteenthers claim, ownership of slaves shifted from individuals to the state, even as the Thirteenth Amendment gave the American people, especially its newly freed people, the false impression that America had ended slavery once and for all. Some Thirteenthers do not simply believe that the amendment led to mass incarceration; they also hold that the loophole represented a diabolical scheme concocted by whites as a race. What all Thirteenthers share is the belief that the loophole created a seamless history of black slavery from the seventeenth century until today. When a person of Stevenson’s commitment and stature gives such a dim appraisal of the efficacy of an amendment signed by Abraham Lincoln, attention must be paid. In his crusade to link mass incarceration to the Thirteenth Amendment, he is not alone. A wide array of historians, cultural studies scholars, activists, and artists have endorsed this view in full or in part, including Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Kimberlé Crenshaw, Khalil Muhammad, Alex Lichtenstein, Kanye West, and Ava DuVernay. Whatever chance this interpretation had for burning out on its own disappeared when DuVernay’s documentary 13th took the nation by storm in 2016. It is now taking root in the nation’s schools: after watching DuVernay’s film, my students believed that the convict lease system (about which more below) re-enslaved most blacks. They were shocked to learn that the percentage was much less than one percent. An idea born in the 1960s has become a popular and pseudo-scholarly belief that many want to use as a basis for making public policy. Not many have gone as far as Kanye West, who— with all the erudition at his disposal — has called for the repeal of the Thirteenth Amendment. Most Thirteenthers aim for an amendment to close the loophole. Their objective is to put an end to mass incarceration, which is a fine objective. But the key to ending it, they suggest, lies in removing its supposed economic justification — black prison slavery. Thirteentherism is best viewed as another episode in a long tradition of using history as
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