Damon Root is an award-winning legal affairs journalist and the author of A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution (Potomac Books, 2023) and Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court. His writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News, Chicago Sun-Times, Newsweek, New York Post, New York Daily News, New York Press, Washington Times, Wall Street Journal, Globe and Mail, and other publications. His most recent book Emancipation War: The Fall of Slavery and the Coming of the Thirteenth Amendment (Potomac Books, 2026) was published in June.

In Emancipation War award-winning journalist Damon Root chronicles the great legal, political, and military struggle to amend the U.S. Constitution to outlaw slavery once and for all. It is the story of canny political tacticians and unyielding radicals; of famous orators and unsung pamphleteers; of liberty-minded Union officers and enslaved persons who liberated themselves by following the North Star to freedom, and who then, in some cases, donned uniforms and took up arms against their former enslavers.

Telling the story from both the top down and the bottom up, Emancipation War provides a gripping and revealing new history of the Thirteenth Amendment.

Chapter 1

“No More Slave States”

It was a Tuesday, January 29, 1850, and Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky had set himself the none-too-modest goal of solving the seemingly intractable problem of American slavery once and for all. By Clay’s own none-too-modest reckoning, he was uniquely qualified for the job, having nearly done the very thing once before. Thirty years earlier, while serving as Speaker of the House of Representatives, Clay had been the driving force behind the landmark legislation that came to be known as the Missouri Compromise. That storied law had admitted Missouri to the Union as a slave state while simultaneously admitting Maine to the Union as a free state; it also bisected the young nation, slashing a line across the map that prohibited slavery “north of thirty-six degrees and thirty minutes north latitude” in the remaining federal territory acquired from France in the Louisiana Purchase. Clay’s legislative maneuverings had thus preserved the tenuous sectional balance between slave states and free states. The Union remained intact.

But that was then. The United States had kept on expanding in the years since, its territorial growth aided in no small part by an 1848 military triumph over the nation of Mexico. That war’s end had brought with it vast new lands that were now readying to become new states, such as California. Before such states might take their respective places in the Union, however, Congress had to confront, again, the vexing question of slavery and sectional balance. This was no mere academic query. The nation then stood starkly divided between slave states and free states. If Congress flatly outlawed slavery in the new federal territories—as a growing number of lawmakers wanted to do—that meant Congress could prevent new slave states from forming and entering the Union. The number of free states would grow while the number of slave states would remain the same. The slaveholders and their political allies did the math and shuddered at the results.

Enter the senator from Kentucky. “I consider our country in danger,” Clay was heard to say, “and if I can be the means in any measure of averting that danger, my health and life is of little consequence.” Clay’s overriding idea, soon to be known as the Compromise of 1850, was to appease both sides by getting each to give up something to get something. “I hold in my hand a series of resolutions,” Clay announced to the Senate, which, “taken together, in combination . . . propose an amicable arrangement of all questions in controversy between the free and slave States, growing out of the subject of slavery.”

The most pressing of those questions was the territorial one. Would the number of future slave states keep pace with the number of future free states as the new territories formed their protostate governments? Clay’s answer harkened back to the grand political bargain he had struck in 1820. Admit California to the Union as a free state, he now urged his fellow senators, while admitting the rest of the Mexican cession “without the adoption of any restriction or condition on the subject of slavery.” It was to be a sort of Missouri Compromise redux.

Another controversial question centered on the future of slavery in Washington DC. Under the terms of the U.S. Constitution, Congress possessed the power to “exercise exclusive Legislation in all Cases whatsoever, over . . . the Seat of the Government of the United States.” Antislavery activists had long urged Congress to wield that power on behalf of human freedom by abolishing slavery in the capital city. If Congress “can pass laws ‘to prevent horses from being cruelly abused,’” the abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld argued in an 1836 pamphlet, referring to a DC law that was then on the books, then Congress “can pass laws to prevent men from being cruelly abused, and if it can prevent cruel abuse, it can define what it is. It can declare that to make men work without pay is cruel abuse, and can prohibit it.”

Weld also turned the slaveholders’ legal defense of human property on its head. According to the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, he noted, “no person shall . . . be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Yet who could possibly believe that an enslaved person in Washington DC (or anywhere else) had received anything even approximating due process of law before being deprived of liberty, meaning, “the slaves were deprived of liberty unconstitutionally.” And “in that case,” Weld wrote, “the constitution emancipates them.” But for the sake of argument, Weld continued, assume that the enslavers were correct about their slaves qualifying as lawful private property. In that case, he observed, Congress undoubtedly had the power to free the slaves under its additional Fifth Amendment authority to take private property “for public use” so long as “just compensation” was paid to the owners. In other words, he wrote, Congress may emancipate slaves in the District of Columbia, “provided it will do something else, that is, pay for them.” Either way, Weld maintained, the power of the federal government to abolish slavery in Washington DC clearly passed constitutional muster and should be exercised immediately. Thus argued the radical abolitionist.