Who Voted Against the 13th Amendment: 6 Senators, 56 Reps, 4 States

Opposition to the Thirteenth Amendment came from three distinct groups: six senators who voted no on April 8, 1864; 65 House members who blocked the amendment on June 15, 1864, followed by 56 who voted no on final passage January 31, 1865; and four state legislatures — Delaware, Kentucky, New Jersey, and Mississippi — that formally rejected ratification. Those who voted against the 13th Amendment were overwhelmingly Democrats, concentrated in the border states and in a handful of northern states with strong Democratic machines.¹

The Six Senators Who Voted No

The Senate approved the amendment 38 to 6, well above the two-thirds threshold. The six senators who voted against it were:

Garrett Davis of Kentucky
Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana
James McDougall of California
Lazarus W. Powell of Kentucky
George R. Riddle of Delaware
Willard Saulsbury of Delaware

Hendricks and McDougall were Democrats from free states. Davis, Powell, Riddle, and Saulsbury represented slave states.² The floor debate, which had opened on February 10, 1864, turned on the constitutionality of uncompensated emancipation, the nature of federalism, and whether it was appropriate to adopt the first constitutional amendment in over sixty years.³

Why Opponents Said No

The most common argument was a states’ rights claim: slavery was part of the original constitutional compact, and abolishing it by amendment would gut state sovereignty as protected by the Ninth and Tenth Amendments. Representative Fernando Wood of New York was among the loudest voices making this case.⁴

Senator Lazarus Powell of Kentucky argued that enslaved people were legally protected property and that the federal government had no authority to interfere with state domestic policy. He warned his colleagues that Southerners would not “yield while they have arms to strike.” Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky went further, proposing a counter-amendment that would have constitutionally barred Black people from citizenship, from holding civil or military office, or from occupying any position of trust under the United States.⁵

Other opponents raised a slippery-slope claim: if Congress could abolish slavery, it could logically abolish other forms of property, including land, and eventually reach family and domestic relations. Democrats campaigned under the slogan “the Union as it was, the Constitution as it is,” casting the amendment as a radical rewriting of the country’s governing structure. Some claimed emancipation would prolong the war by removing any incentive for the South to surrender; others said people of African descent were inherently inferior and that freeing them would be “an act of cruelty.”⁶ Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware added a procedural objection, arguing the amendment could not bind states not represented in Congress at the time of the vote.⁴

The House Rejection of June 15, 1864

When the amendment reached the House, it failed. The recorded vote was 93 in favor, 65 opposed, and 23 not voting, well short of two-thirds.¹ The opposition was almost entirely Democratic, with 58 of the 65 nay votes cast by free-state Democrats; only four free-state Democrats supported the amendment.⁷

Prominent no votes included Fernando Wood of New York, George Hunt Pendleton of Ohio (the 1864 Democratic vice-presidential nominee), and Samuel J. Randall of Pennsylvania, alongside dozens of other Democrats from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, New York, and Pennsylvania.¹ The amendment’s floor manager, Republican James M. Ashley of Ohio, changed his own vote to no at the last moment as a procedural maneuver so he could later move for reconsideration after the November elections.⁷

The 56 Who Voted No on Final Passage

On January 31, 1865, the House passed the amendment 119 to 56. Every Republican and every Unconditional Unionist voted yes; the 56 nay votes came from 50 Democrats and 6 members of other factions.⁸ The opposition was concentrated in a handful of states:

Ohio (11): George Hunt Pendleton, Samuel Cox, Alexander Long, Chilton White, William Finck, Warren Noble, John O’Neill, George Bliss, James Morris, William Johnston, and Joseph Worthington White.
New York (10): Fernando Wood, Benjamin Wood, Elijah Ward, John Chanler, James Brooks, Martin Kalbfleisch, Dwight Townsend, Charles Winfield, John Pruyn, and Francis Kernan.
Illinois (9): James Allen, William Joshua Allen, Charles Harris, John Eden, John Stuart, Lewis Ross, Anthony Knapp, James Carroll Robinson, and William Morrison.
Pennsylvania (8): Samuel Randall, Sydenham Ancona, Philip Johnson, Myer Strouse, John Stiles, Charles Denison, William Henry Miller, and John Littleton Dawson.
Indiana (5): John Law, James Addison Cravens, Henry Harrington, William Holman, and Joseph Edgerton.
Kentucky (5): Henry Grider, Aaron Harding, Robert Mallory, Brutus Clay, and William Wadsworth.

Smaller numbers of nay votes came from Maine (Lorenzo Sweat), Maryland (Benjamin Gwinn Harris), Missouri (John Guier Scott and William Augustus Hall), New Jersey (William Gaston Steele and Nehemiah Perry), and Wisconsin (James Sproat Brown and Charles Eldredge).⁸

Democrats Who Crossed Over

The shift between the two House votes came from 14 Democrats who broke with their party to support the amendment. Several of them had voted no in June 1864, including Augustus Baldwin of Michigan, John Ganson and Anson Herrick of New York, Alexander Coffroth of Pennsylvania, and Wells Hutchins of Ohio. Other Democratic yes votes came from New York (Moses Odell, William Radford, Homer Nelson, John Benedict Steele, and John Augustus Griswold), Pennsylvania (Joseph Bailey), Connecticut (James English), and Wisconsin (Ezra Wheeler).⁸ Coffroth defended his switch by saying there was both the legal power and the political wisdom to amend the Constitution. Archibald McAllister of Pennsylvania said he was voting against “the corner-stone of the Rebellion.”⁹

The Four States That Rejected Ratification

Ratification required 27 of the 36 states. Four legislatures formally voted no, and three of them took generations to reverse themselves:

Delaware rejected the amendment on February 8, 1865, and did not ratify until February 12, 1901.¹⁰
Kentucky rejected on February 24, 1865, and did not ratify until March 18, 1976.¹⁰
New Jersey rejected on March 16, 1865, then reversed course and ratified on January 23, 1866.¹⁰
Mississippi rejected on December 2, 1865, voted to ratify on March 16, 1995, but did not officially complete ratification until February 7, 2013.¹¹

Mississippi’s delay was the result of a paperwork failure. The state legislature voted to ratify in 1995, but no one filed the required documentation with the Federal Register. The vote sat unrecorded for eighteen years, until Ken Sullivan, a researcher at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, discovered the omission and worked with Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann’s office to submit the paperwork. Ratification became official on February 7, 2013.¹²¹³

Kentucky’s 1976 ratification came through the persistence of Mae Street Kidd, an African American businesswoman and state legislator who represented Louisville’s 41st district from 1968 to 1984. During debates over the Equal Rights Amendment, Kidd reminded her colleagues that Kentucky had never ratified any of the three Reconstruction Amendments. On March 18, 1976, the legislature voted unanimously to ratify the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, more than a century after they became law.¹⁴¹⁵

Secretary of State William Seward officially proclaimed the amendment ratified on December 18, 1865, after Georgia became the 27th state to ratify. The National Archives records the ratification date as December 6, 1865.⁴¹⁶

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