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.



2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.



Secretary of State William Seward issued the proclamation that incorporated the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing the institution of slavery, into the Constitution of the United States on this date in 1865.



More needed to be done to secure the blessings of freedom and the assurance of legal equality to all citizens, of course, as Frederick Douglass, among others, recognized and, to those ends, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were ratified during the next five years.



Not that the scars of so deep a wound, the disfigurement wrought by decade on decade of an economy of chattel slavery, don't remain on our country even now.



And how widespread through the world remains the enslavement of the human person.