Wilmot Proviso

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)
 

Wilmot Proviso (McPherson, 2001)

Textbook
On August 8, when the war was barely three months old, an obscure first-term Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania named David Wilmot offered an amendment to an appropriations bill: “that, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico…neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory.” The principle embodied in this amendment – the Wilmot Proviso, as it came to be known – remained the lodestone of sectional conflict for the next fifteen years…Northern Whigs voted unanimously for Wilmot’s proviso; so did all but four Northern Democrats, while every Southern Democrat and all but two Southern Whigs voted against it. Having passed the House, the proviso failed to come to a vote in the Senate at this session. At the next session, in February 1847, the House repassed the proviso; but the Senate with five Northern Democrats joining the Southerners, passed the appropriations bill without the antislavery amendment. Under heavy administration pressure, twenty-three Northern House Democrats then receded from the proviso and cast the necessary votes to pass the bill unamended.
James M. McPherson, Ordeal by Fire: The Civil War and Reconstruction, 3rd ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001), 65-66.

Wilmot Proviso (Garraty, 1994)

Textbook
Congressman David Wilmot of Pennsylvania introduced the Wilmot Proviso in the House of Representatives. The proviso called for prohibiting slavery "in any territory [taken] from the Republic of Mexico."
John A. Garraty, The Story of America (Austin:  Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1994), 438.
Date Event
- David Wilmot serves in the United States House of Representatives
Date Title
Carlisle (PA) Herald and Expositor, "A Bid for the South!," September 8, 1847
Raleigh (NC) Register, “Hon. David Wilmot in Poughkeepsie,” November 3, 1847
David Wilmot’s Speech in the House of Representatives, Washington, DC, August 3, 1848
(Natchez) Mississippi Free Trader, “Forney on Wilmot,” March 27, 1850
New York Herald, "The Boston Fugitive Case," June 3, 1854
Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Fry Speed, August 24, 1855
New York Times, "Views of Senator Cameron on Public Affairs," January 22, 1857
Washington (DC) National Era, "Slavery in Oregon," August 27, 1857
Chicago (IL) Press and Tribune, "The Passage at Arms between Lincoln and Douglas in 1854," July 1, 1858
Charleston (SC) Mercury, “The Missouri Compromise,” March 30, 1859
Charleston (SC) Mercury, “Virginia Will Lead,” June 22, 1859
Chicago (IL) Press and Tribune, “Worse than the Wilmot Proviso,” March 12, 1860
(Jackson) Mississippian, "The Objects of the Black Republican Party Boldly Avowed," May 22, 1860
Chicago (IL) Press and Tribune, “As Was Expected,” September 18, 1860
Fayetteville (NC) Observer, “North Carolina and Secession,” April 4, 1861
Chicago Style Entry Link
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
How to Cite This Page: "Wilmot Proviso," House Divided: The Civil War Research Engine at Dickinson College, https://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/9577.