Textbook
The text of the Wilmot Proviso, an anti-slavery amendment originally offered to a special appropriations bill on August 8, 1846, was deceptively simple: "Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted." Wimot was a freshman Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania. The language was borrowed in part from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. The proviso itself was never passed into law during the Mexican War, though it was later adopted by the US Congress and signed into law by President Lincoln during the Civil War. Lincoln claimed that as a single term congressman himself in 1847 and 1848 that he had voted for the proviso "at least forty times." The language on slavery was incorporated into the final text of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery in 1865. By that point, Wilmot, now a Republican, was a federal judge in Pennsylvania. (By Matthew Pinsker)
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Bochin, Hal W. "Caleb B. Smith's Opposition to the Mexican War." Indiana Magazine of History 69, no. 2 (1973): 95-114. | View Record |
Collins, John R. "The Mexican War: A Study in Fragmentation." Journal of the West 11, no. 2 (1972): 225-234. | View Record |
Currie, David P. The Constitution in Congress: Descent into the Maelstrom, 1829-1861. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. | View Record |
Earle, Jonathan Halperin. Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. | View Record |
Fehrenbacher, Don Edward. The South and Three Sectional Crises. Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. | View Record |
Foner, Eric. "The Wilmot Proviso Revisited." Journal of American History 56, no. 2 (1969): 262-279. | View Record |
Fuller, John D. P. "The Slavery Question and the Movement to Acquire Mexico, 1846-1848." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 21, no. 1 (June 1934): 31-48. | View Record |
Going, Charles Buxton. David Wilmot, Free-Soiler: A Biography of the Great Advocate of the Wilmot Proviso. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1924. | View Record |
Graebner, Norman A. "1848: Southern Politics at the Crossroads." Historian 25, no. 1 (1963): 14-35. | View Record |
Holt, Michael F. The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension, and the Coming of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2004. | View Record |
Jay, William. A Review of the Causes and Consequences of the Mexican War. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: U. Hunt & Co: 1849. | View Record |
Lee, R. Alton. "Slavery and the Oregon Territorial Issue: Prelude to the Compromise of 1850." Pacific Northwest Quarterly 64, no. 3 (1973): 112-119. | View Record |
Morrison, Chaplain W. Democratic Politics and Sectionalism: The Wilmot Proviso Controversy. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1967. | View Record |
Perkins, Howard C. "A Neglected Phase of the Movement for Southern Unity, 1847-1852." Journal of Southern History 12, no. 2 (1946): 153-203. | View Record |
Rayback, Joseph G. Free Soil: The Election of 1848. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971. | View Record |
Sewell, Richard H. “John P. Hale and the Liberty Party, 1847-1848.” New England Quarterly 37, no. 2 (June 1964): 200-223. | View Record |
Silbey, Joel H. "The Slavery-Extension Controversy and Illinois Congressmen, 1846-50." Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society 58, no. 4 (1965): 378-395. | View Record |
Silbey, Joel H. "The Southern National Democrats 1845-1861." Mid-America 47, no. 3 (1965): 176-190. | View Record |
Stenberg, Richard R. "The Motivation of the Wilmot Proviso." Mississippi Valley Historical Review 18, no. 4 (1932): 535-548. | View Record |
Walton, Brian G. "The Elections for the Thirtieth Congress and the Presidential Candidacy of Zachary Taylor." Journal of Southern History 35, no. 2 (May 1969): 186-202. | View Record |