In the two years since the Emancipation Proclamation, Maryland and Missouri had freed their slaves, the Fugitive Slave Law was repealed, and Congress had passed the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which provided that "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."With that amendment, Lincoln had steered the nation from a house divided over slavery to one reunited without it. He laid the groundwork for this approach in his second inaugural when he said, "With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan-to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations. By 1945, Churchill was shrewdly trying to manipulate American power like a "great umvieldy barge," steering it into the "right harbor," lest it "wallow in the ocean." Churchill remained clear eyed about the long-term threat posed by an expansionist, communist Soviet Union. His March 5, 1946, speech to Westminster College in Missouri proclaimed that "an iron curtain has descended across the continent," placing the nations of Eastern Europe under a "high and in many cases increasing measure ...