[77] A constitutional amendment requires for its passage a two thirds vote in the Senate and the House of Representatives, and ratification by three fourths of the States.
[78] Thirteenth Amendment. First: 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. Second: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
CHAPTER XIII
THE FALL OF RICHMOND, AND THE ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT LINCOLN
From the Capitol, where he had spoken his inaugural on March 4, 1865, Mr. Lincoln came back to the White House with less than five weeks of life before him; yet for those scant weeks most men would have gladly exchanged their full lifetimes. To the nation they came fraught with all the intoxicating triumph of victory; but upon the President they laid the vast responsibility of rightly shaping and using success; and it was far less easy to end the war wisely than it had been to conduct it vigorously. Two populations, with numbers and resources amply enough for two powerful nations, after four years of sanguinary, relentless conflict, in which each side had been inspired and upheld by a faith like that of the first crusaders, were now to be reunited as fellow citizens, and to be fused into a homogeneous body politic based upon universal suffrage. As if this did not verge closely enough on the impossible, millions of people of a hitherto servile race were suddenly established in the new status of freedom. It was very plain that the problems which were advancing
with approaching peace were more perplexing than those which were disappearing with departing war. Much would depend upon the spirit and terms of the closing of hostilities.