Re: The original 13th Amendment Richard C. Green
Date 16/2/1997

Sir:

Having just reviewed some of the arguments against the validity of the original Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, I am compelled to respond immediately and with some alacrity.

Just recently, this issue was brought to my attention, in the course of doing research on campaign finance laws and the legal status of foreign corporations and foreign-born contributors. What I did was to go first to the federal repository library at Yale, where I was able to verify the exact wording of the Amendment, and that it was issued by the Eleventh Congress in the Second Session. Everyone agrees on the 1810 date of issuance and the precise wording.

Then, I went to the "Laws of the United States of America, from the 4th of March, 1789 to the 4th of March, 1815 ..." as published by Bioren and Duane of Philadelphia. In Volume One, on page 74, the Title of Nobility Amendment is given as Article 13. The wording is exact and correct, and Yale University has an edition in their Law Library and one in the Rare Book Library. The funding for this edition of our laws was approved on February 16, 1815. The Bioren and Duane was authorized by an Act of Congress. That means that -- as of the conclusion of Congressional business on March 4th, 1815, the Thirteenth Amendment was considered valid and ratified -- and the premiere printers of Philadelphia were retained to print a summary of all U.S. laws and the Constitution.

The argument that the Secretary of State had some extraordinary jurisdiction over the ratification process fails the test of reason: the law passed April 20, 1818 [Chapter LXXX, Section 2] requires the Secretary of State "to cause" to make known the results of any and all polls taken. The section reads, in part "it shall be the duty of the Secretary of State" to publish any amendment which has been adopted, "with his certificate specifying the states by which the same may have been adopted, and that the same has become valid [as a part] of the Constitution of the United States."

A law passed in 1818 cannot negatively affect an Amendment issued by Congress in 1810, and the wording of this law (updated in 1820, after Virginia's ratification) does not alter or impair the rights of the states in any way. It puts an obligation on the Secretary of State to provide information to the public, to issue an official certificate of ratification, and nothing more!

There is no indication that President Monroe polled Louisiana, Mississippi or Indiana regarding this Amendment. They were not present in Congress to vote on the Amendment in 1810, and they had no jurisdiction over it at any later time, except to provide pro forma approval. Louisiana published the Amendment as valid in 1822.

The National Archives have finally acknowledged [1994] that the 1819 ratification of this Amendment by Virginia was correct and proper. Nothing in Article V requires Virginia to send the federal government a letter or a certificate of any kind, and if the Secretary of State failed to publish such a certificate of ratification according to the 1818 law, that is not the failure of Virginia or its people. The slight modification of this law in 1820 likewise does not impair Virginia's prior approval of this article.

The assertion is made that Connecticut rejected this Amendment, but I have been unable to determine where that information comes from: as of April 22, 1813 no definitive action was taken. Meanwhile, four times in the years from 1821 to 1839, the Amendment was published as part of the organic laws of Connecticut. That is a considerable number of state editions to be issued by mistake, and consecutively. Both Missouri and Connecticut published this section as valid in the year of 1835.

"Nothing can be more unfortunate for the United States, than for those citizens who hold the power of leading fashion to grow by degrees into a mock nobility, employing their wealth and influence to try to refine laziness and make vice attractive, instead of feeling an interest in the welfare of their country." Those comments were written in July of 1821 by William S. Cardell, Esquire, of New York City.

He was the corresponding secretary of the American Academy of Languages and Belles-Lettres, and his essay circulated to all of the leading intellectuals of that era, including John Quincy Adams, and Daniel and Noah Webster. The tone of this essay, and its commentary on education for the general public, clearly indicate that the topic of "titles of nobility" was common to the intellectual currency of the day.

"If our patriots and philanthropists cannot succeed in an enlightened course of instruction, it will be eventually found ... necessary to check the depradations of felons." Virginia's ratification in 1819 had to be common knowledge, otherwise why would these leading thinkers be concerned with a proposition that had failed six or more years earlier? Among the leaders of this Academy was vice-president Joseph Story, who was also a justice of the Massachusetts court. Story was part and parcel of the legal establishment of the 1820s, he had to know that his state issued a version of the Constitution with the Amendment in place in 1823. Therefore, when in 1828 he published the "Public and General Statutes passed by Congress 1789-1827" and omitted any mention of the "Title of Nobility" section or the resolution of Congress in 1810, it was not an oversight but a deliberate, calculated effort to suppress a lawful portion of the Constitution. The publishing agents were Wells & Lilly of Boston, and every other aspect of the Congressional business done in 1810 agrees with other extant publications. Joseph Story is either the father or great uncle of the decades-long struggle to eliminate this Amendment, and it is up to the apologists for this conspiracy to explain his motives. As a member of the Academy mentioned previously, as a state supreme court judge, he was as well-informed as any man of that era could be. Why did he conspire to suppress the "Title of Nobility" section, the original Thirteenth Amendment?

Richard C. Green

Added August 5, 1997

Many pages of the Revised Code of Virginia, as published in 1819 and showing the original Thirteenth Amendment as ratified and the valid Article 13, are now available on the World Wide Web. This is from page thirty of the original manuscript, an additional copy of which was recently discovered in the University of California at Santa Cruz law library.