13th Amendment
Thirteenth Amendment
Ratified December 6, 1865
Verbatim
Exact text as ratified.
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.
Plain English
A translation that drops archaic words but keeps the meaning, including the parts courts still argue about.
Section 1. Slavery and involuntary servitude are not allowed in the United States or any place under U.S. jurisdiction. The only exception is as a punishment for a crime, after a person has been properly convicted.
Section 2. Congress has the power to enforce this amendment by passing appropriate laws.
What this means for you
The Thirteenth Amendment ended slavery in the United States in December 1865. It is the only amendment in the Constitution that directly restricts what private people can do to each other. Most amendments restrict only what the government can do.
The criminal punishment exception is real and significant. The text allows involuntary servitude as punishment for a crime, after a proper conviction. This clause is the legal basis for prison labor programs in the United States today. Some states allow prisoners to be required to work for very low pay or no pay. The constitutionality of this practice has been challenged on various grounds but remains in effect.
The amendment's prohibition extends to forced labor in any form — not only slavery as it existed before 1865, but also debt peonage, forced child labor, human trafficking, and other forms of involuntary servitude. Federal laws including the Trafficking Victims Protection Act enforce this through criminal penalties.
If you are being forced to work against your will, through threats, debt, document confiscation, or physical restraint, you are protected by the Thirteenth Amendment. The National Human Trafficking Hotline is 1-888-373-7888 and operates 24 hours.
About
The Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6, 1865, eight months after the end of the Civil War and seven months after President Lincoln was assassinated. It was the first of three Reconstruction Amendments — the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth — passed to address slavery and its aftermath.
Before this amendment, the Constitution had treated slavery as a state-by-state question and had included several provisions that protected the institution, including the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause. The Thirteenth Amendment removed slavery from the Constitution entirely and made the prohibition national.
Section 2 of the amendment, granting Congress enforcement power, is the textual basis for several major civil rights laws including the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and parts of more recent anti-trafficking legislation.
The criminal punishment exception ("except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted") was used in the post-Civil War South to create convict leasing systems, in which Black Americans were arrested under vagrancy laws and other discriminatory statutes and then leased as forced labor. The legacy of this practice is part of ongoing debates about the prison system in the United States.