Why did the confederate states like Alabama, Virginia, Florida, Arkansas, the Carolinas, Georgia and Tennessee sign onto the thirteenth amendment within months after fighting for the right to hold slaves ?
Well, they lost. Besides, at the time the amendment was passed, their legislatures were packed by the Radical Republicans: anyone who had the slightest interest in retaining slavery was not allowed to hold office.
Wasn’t re-admission to the Union made contingent upon the former Confederate states’ ratifying the amendment?
In theory, but at least one state (Mississippi) rejected it, yet was readmitted.
Not true at all. The 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865 by conservative white legislators, including many former slave owners and Confederate supporters, who were elected in whites-only elections.
Four of the 11 Confederate states (LA, AR, TN, VA) began Reconstruction and elected Unionist legislatures while the Civil War was still in progress. Naturally, Confederate supporters sat out these elections, so moderate white Unionists tended to win. (Abraham Lincoln set the ground rules for these elections, and didn’t allow black people to vote because he was afraid of alienating support in the North.) These four legislatures saw no disadvantage to ratfying the 13th Amendment; they predicated their existence on the fact that the South was going to lose the war and slavery was finished.
The other seven states didn’t elect legislatures until Johnson was President and the war was over, so former Confederates resumed participation. (Again, Johnson didn’t allow black people to vote.) The legislatures elected in these states were mostly pro-slavery and pro-Confederate, but they recognized reality–the war was over, they had lost, and there was no way Congress would readmit their representatives unless and until the Amendment was ratified. Even Andrew Johnson, as conservative and racist as he was, insisted on ratification before he would recognize the new state governments.
Except in the case of Mississippi, which refused to ratify despite all of the above. Nobody made an issue of it, because by that time the Amendment had secured the necessary 3/4 of the states and become part of the Constitution.
Actually I think that Congress did an end-around on this. Johnson opposed this amendment, and when the Southern states that Johnson had readmitted to the US voted against it, it died . . . but did it? The Radical Republicans claimed that those states had not yet re-entered the Union, therefore they did not have voting rights. Thus by Congress’ calculation, the Amendment had the necessary 3/4 votes of the states to pass AND that Johnson exceeded his authority in readmitting the former Confederate States. Johnson did not hide his feelings on this issue. This resulted in Charge XI (denying tie validity of laws passed by Congress) when he was impeached and interestingly enough, the House managers felt that this would be a guarantied conviction, thus it was the first charge voted on.
SaintCad: That’s the Fourteenth Amendment, not the Thirteenth. Even Andrew Johnson supported the Thirteenth Amendment.
Johnson thought that emancipation and ratification of the 13th Amendment should have been sufficient in themselves for Southern readmission. However, the same Southern legislatures which ratified the 13th Amendment enacted draconian “black codes” which retained much of the substance of slavery via “apprenticeship” and vagrancy laws and denial of African American civil rights. To forestall implementation of the codes, Congress passed the 14th Amendment and made its ratification an additional condition for readmission. The Southern legislatures (except for Tennessee) refused to ratify, leading to so-called “radical Reconstruction”, which wasn’t all that radical unless one considers it radical to have African Americans vote.
D’oh!!!
See what I get after teaching math for 10 years