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On January 1, 1863, two years into the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation freed all slaves in the confederate states. Two years later, On December 6, 1865 the states abolished the institution of slavery forever by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment: "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." The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in July 1868, guaranteed basic civil rights to all citizens; it was intended to persuade Southern states to grant suffrage to blacks by threatening a reduction of their congressional representation. To further the cause of black suffrage, the Radical Republican Congress, which had swept away the Southern regimes organized under presidential Reconstruction, required Ex-Confederate States to adopt new state constitutions allowing black suffrage before senators and representatives from those states would be readmitted to Congress. The United States was thus faced with a situation in which all the Ex-Confederate States granted blacks the right to vote, while 16 of the loyal Uni