Opinion: Why March 2 is the true birthday of modern America (via latimesopinion )
Amendment, which granted citizenship to formerly enslaved people and guaranteed equal protection of the laws to all, and the 15Amendment, which prohibited racial discrimination in voting, formed what I call the Reconstruction Constitution — one very different from the Constitution of 1787.Amendment was drafted in 1866, during the post-Civil War era of Reconstruction. Slavery was over, at least in name, but Americans had not agreed on the new order going forward.
The 14th Amendment was designed to place these issues beyond the reach of pro-slavery judges or ordinary politics. It would set the terms of a new American social contract, one based on inclusion and equality. By the end of 1866 it was clear that the 14th Amendment could not get ratification from three fourths of the states as Article V required. The attempt to change America through the existing legal framework had failed.In February 1867, Congress passed the first of what would be four Reconstruction Acts. That first act declared that no legitimate governments existed in 10 former Confederate states. It abolished those state governments and placed them under military control.
This might sound like a bold claim. But Florida, Georgia and Alabama, which sued the secretary of War, alleged exactly this: the Reconstruction Acts were an extinction of the existing state and the creation of a new one, not by consent but by force. Similarly, the 1868 platform of the Democratic Party decried the Reconstruction Acts as unconstitutional and revolutionary.
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