Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment (2001 book published by Cambridge University Press)

Finalist for the Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize and a key source for the screenplay of Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film Lincoln.

Final Freedom looks at the struggle among legal thinkers, politicians, and ordinary Americans in the North and the border states to find a way to abolish slavery that would overcome the inadequacies of the Emancipation Proclamation. Michael Vorenberg tells the dramatic story of the creation of a constitutional amendment and argues that the crucial consideration of emancipation happened after, not before the Emancipation Proclamation; that the debate over final freedom was shaped by a level of volatility in party politics underestimated by previous historians, and that the abolition of slavery by constitutional amendment represented a novel method of reform that transformed attitudes toward the Constitution.

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