Kurt T. Lash, the E. Claiborne Robins Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Richmond posted this eye opening post on Facebook:
Next term I will teach a course entitled "Abolishing Slavery, Building Liberty: The Adoption of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments." This coming Monday, I will give a lunchtime presentation for the students at Richmond Law School talking about the research which led to the creation of the course. In doing so, I will discuss three things I suspect students don't know about these three amendments:
First, the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery was preceded by a thirteenth amendment protecting slavery. Both “thirteenth” amendments were sent to the states for ratification. Before he supported the abolition Thirteenth Amendment, Abraham Lincoln supported the pro-slavery thirteenth amendment which would have made slavery an unamendable part of our Constitution.
Second, most students have studied Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment—it requires the states to protect the privileges and immunities of citizenship and the rights of due process and equal protection. Students also may have also studied Section Five of the 14th Amendment which gives Congress power to enforce Section One. But most student have not studied what, at the time of the amendment’s adoption, most people viewed as the most important and controversial part of the Fourteenth Amendment: Section Two. That section was so important, Congressional Republicans risked triggering a second civil war just to get it adopted.
Third, the Fifteenth Amendment prohibits racial discrimination in the right to vote. At the time of its adoption, there was only one part of the country that denied blacks the right to vote: the north. The strongest supporters of the amendment were voters in the former rebel states of the south. Among the strongest opponents of giving blacks the right to vote were northern women’s rights groups and equal rights advocates like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
It occurs to me that I knew none of this before I started working on the history of the Reconstruction Amendments.
Comments