The task of definition fell to the Supreme Court. Did the 13th prohibit only chattel bondage or extend to other elements of slavery, including racial inequality? Did the 14th shield Americans against violations of their rights only by state laws and officials (the so-called state action doctrine), or also against the acts of private individuals? Did the 15th prohibit laws that, even if race-neutral on their face, were clearly intended to limit black men’s right to vote? A series of interconnected questions about their precise meaning cried out for resolution.
The amendments were written in broad, sometimes ambiguous language. Taken together, as George William Curtis, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, wrote at the time, they transformed a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.” Yet they do not occupy the prominent place in public consciousness of other key texts in our history, nor are their authors, Representatives James Ashley, John Bingham and others, widely known. Nonetheless, the amendments should be seen not simply as changes to an existing structure but as a second American founding, which created a fundamentally new Constitution. The 15th allowed states to limit citizens’ right to vote for reasons other than race. The 14th mandated that a state would lose part of its representation in the House of Representatives if it barred groups of men from voting but imposed no penalty if it disenfranchised women. The 13th allowed involuntary servitude to continue for people convicted of crime, inadvertently opening the door to the creation of a giant system of convict labor. All three empowered Congress to enforce their provisions, radically shifting the balance of power from the states to the nation. The 15th sought to guarantee the right to vote for black men throughout the reunited nation. The 14th constitutionalized the principles of birthright citizenship and equality before the law.
The 13th Amendment irrevocably abolished slavery. Many Americans feel that we are living at a time like the end of the 19th century, when, in the words of Frederick Douglass, “principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled” were “boldly assaulted and overthrown.”ĭouglass was referring to the rights enshrined in three constitutional amendments ratified between 18. Among the unanticipated consequences of the election of Donald Trump has been a surge of interest in post-Civil War Reconstruction, when this country first attempted to construct an interracial democracy, and in the restoration of white supremacy that followed.
0 kommentar(er)
