Today in History, December 6th
On December 6, 1865, Georgia's vote ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery in the US. Plus the Halifax Explosion and the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
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December 6 is best known for 1865, when Georgia’s ratification put the 13th Amendment over the top and abolished slavery throughout the United States. The date also brought the Halifax Explosion in 1917 and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921.
The big story: The 13th Amendment abolishes slavery (1865)
On December 6, 1865, Georgia became the 27th state to ratify the 13th Amendment, giving it the three-fourths of the states it needed. With that vote, the abolition of slavery became part of the Constitution. The amendment’s first section bans slavery and involuntary servitude anywhere under U.S. jurisdiction, with one exception: punishment for a crime after a lawful conviction. It closed a gap the Emancipation Proclamation had left open. Lincoln’s 1863 order freed enslaved people only in Confederate areas still in rebellion. It did not reach the loyal border states, and it did not end slavery as a legal institution, so Lincoln pressed for a constitutional amendment. The Senate passed it in April 1864. The House followed on January 31, 1865, by a vote of 119 to 56, and Lincoln approved sending it to the states the next day. He was assassinated that April and never saw it ratified. When Georgia’s vote completed the process, slavery was over in every state, by law and for good.
More events on December 6
| Year | What happened |
|---|---|
| 1884 | Workers completed the Washington Monument in the nation’s capital. |
| 1907 | An explosion at the Monongah coal mines in West Virginia killed 361 miners, the worst mining disaster in U.S. history. |
| 1912 | Archaeologists excavating at Tell el-Amarna, Egypt, discovered the painted bust of Queen Nefertiti. |
| 1917 | Finland declared its independence from Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution. |
| 1917 | A French munitions ship exploded in the harbor of Halifax, Nova Scotia, killing nearly 2,000 people and leveling more than a square mile of the city. |
| 1921 | British and Irish negotiators signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty, ending the Irish War of Independence and providing for an Irish Free State. |
| 1933 | A federal judge ruled that James Joyce’s novel Ulysses was not obscene, clearing the way for its legal sale in the U.S. |
| 1957 | America’s first attempt to launch a satellite failed when the Vanguard rocket exploded on the pad, two months after Sputnik. |
| 1973 | Gerald Ford was sworn in as vice president, replacing Spiro Agnew, who had resigned. |
| 2006 | NASA released Mars Global Surveyor images suggesting that water had been present on Mars much later in its history than scientists had assumed. |
| 2022 | Raphael Warnock won a closely watched Georgia runoff for a U.S. Senate seat; he had first won the seat in a January 2021 runoff, becoming the first Black senator elected from Georgia. |
Born on December 6
- 1421: Henry VI, king of England, born at Windsor.
- 1778: Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, French chemist and physicist known for his work on gases.
- 1898: Alfred Eisenstaedt, photojournalist famed for his work for Life magazine.
- 1920: Dave Brubeck, American jazz pianist and composer, born in Concord, California.
- 1958: Nick Park, British animator and creator of Wallace and Gromit.
Keep reading
Sources
- On This Day: December 6, Encyclopaedia Britannica
- This Day in History: December 6, History.com
- 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865), National Archives
- Dave Brubeck, Encyclopaedia Britannica
