Updated Wednesday, Nov. 9, at 12:44 p.m.
Vermonters on Tuesday overwhelmingly approved a constitutional amendment to explicitly prohibit slavery and indentured servitude in the state constitution.
With more than 290,000 votes counted by Wednesday, according to the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office, supporters of Proposal 2 outnumbered opponents 81-10%.
Though the Vermont Constitution was the first in the country to ban most forms of slavery, it included language carving out an exception: that no person serve any other “as a servant, slave or apprentice, after arriving to the age of twenty-one years, unless bound by the person’s own consent, after arriving to such age, or bound by law for the payment of debts, damages, fines, costs or the like.”
The amendment passed Tuesday removes that language and replaces it with: “therefore slavery and indentured servitude in any form are prohibited.”
“I’m elated with the really large margin of victory. It’s more than I was hoping for,” said Debbie Ingram, executive director of Vermont Interfaith Action and a former state senator from Williston who was a primary sponsor of the initiative in 2019.
“I’m just really grateful that Vermonters have acknowledged the morally reprehensible nature of slavery and I look forward to using this as a springboard to dismantle systemic racism in many forms in Vermont,” Ingram said late Tuesday.
Rev. Mark Hughes, executive director of the Vermont Racial Justice Alliance, said, “We’re not surprised with the number.”
“The overwhelming majority of folks that we spoke to over the last four years seemed to be unaware of the existence of the exception clauses in the Constitution and seemed to be eager to remove it,” Hughes continued.
He cautioned against drawing any conclusions from the vote tally, however. “Time will tell what this really means,” he said. “I think the extent to which we see an uptick of people being involved in the work of eradicating systemic racism is what we would call success.”
Adopted in 1777, the Vermont Constitution became the first to include exclusionary provisions, which other states and the U.S. Constitution’s 13th Amendment emulated.
“Even though we’ve been taught for generations that we were the first state to abolish slavery, that’s not really true, so we wanted to set the record straight,” Ingram said.
Rhode Island was the only state to have fully abolished slavery prior to the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865. In the last four years, three states have fully abolished slavery from their state constitutions: Utah, Colorado and Nebraska.
This year, Vermont was among five states to consider such constitutional amendments, according to the Abolish Slavery National Network. The others were Alabama, Louisiana, Oregon and Tennessee.
The network’s goal is to remove the exception clause and repeal and replace the 13th Amendment, which outlawed slavery and involuntary servitude “except as a punishment for crime where of the party shall have been duly convicted.”
In Vermont, constitutional amendments first require approval from two separate Legislatures before going before voters.
According to Hughes, the purpose of Proposal 2 has been to acknowledge systemic racism and do the work necessary to address it.
“This is not just Black people's work. This is actually primarily white people’s,” Hughes said. “But we’ve got to get people engaged and we’ve got to get people aware.”
