Although Taney and several of the other justices hoped that the decision would permanently settle the slavery controversy, which was increasingly dividing the American public, the decision's effect was the complete opposite. Taney's majority opinion suited the slaveholding states, but was intensely decried in all the other states, and the decision was a contributing factor in the outbreak of the American Civil War four years later, in 1861. After the Union's victory in 1865, the Court's rulings in "Dred Scott" were voided by the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed citizenship for "all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof."