Fifteenth Amendments Research Articles

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

Civil War Settlers: Scandinavians, Citizenship, and American Empire, 1848–1870

American Legal Realism and the Revitalization of Literary Realist History

American Legal Realism and the Revitalization of Literary Realist History

On First Reading Thomas Dixon Jr. in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today

On First Reading Thomas Dixon Jr. in 2021: What Racist Fiction from Reconstruction Can Teach Us About Building Multiracial Democracy Today

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

The Men of Mobtown: Policing Baltimore in the Age of Slavery and Emancipation

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Native American Voting Rights in Utah: Federal Policy, Citizenship, and Voter Suppression

Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship by Christopher James Bonner

Reviewed by: Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship by Christopher James Bonner Andrew Diemer (bio) Citizenship, Slavery, African Americans, Freedom, Civil rights Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship. By Christopher James Bonner. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 272. Cloth $34.95.) The U.S. Constitution, Christopher Bonner reminds us in the opening to this essential book, mentions the word "citizen" or "citizens" eleven times (4), and yet, just what it means by those terms and who is to be considered a [End Page 291] "citizen" was frustratingly ambiguous and would remain so for decades after the nation's founding. While this ambiguity provided reason to deny the rights of citizenship to free African Americans, it also presented opportunity, an opportunity seized upon by free Black writers and orators who, in the early decades of the republic capitalized on this ambiguity in order to stake their claim on American citizenship. Recent years have seen an outpouring of scholarship on this struggle for Black citizenship rights in the antebellum United States, which has taught us a great deal about how African Americans fought, and sometimes succeeded, in securing specific rights they broadly envisioned as the rights of citizens. Bonner's book is an essential contribution to this growing scholarship. To capture the sweep of Black politics in this era, Bonner looks to the abundant printed record of the public discourse of Black citizenship. He makes excellent use of printed accounts of speeches, meetings, and conventions and draws on the rich Black and abolitionist newspapers of the early nineteenth century. In contrast to other scholars who have focused in on a particular place in order to consider the granular details of the struggle for Black citizenship rights, Bonner pulls back the lens in order to provide the larger picture of the free Black activists of the North. What emerges is a vast network of men and women, contesting the status of free Black people, pushing to be considered as citizens in the land of their birth. The book takes up the story in the 1820s with the debate over African colonization and proceeds through six thematic but loosely chronological chapters, concluding with the legal transformations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The first chapter considers the struggle for suffrage, which Black activists argued was an essential right owed them as American citizens. At the same time, these same activists challenged the claims of colonizationists that free Black people did not belong in the United States at all. From here the book moves on to consider the connections between Black politics and the debates over the westward expansion of the United States. Bonner offers a particularly insightful chapter on the engagement of Black activists with the European revolutions of 1848. At a time when many Black abolitionists felt alienated from the land of their birth, the revolutionary struggles unfolding across the Atlantic allowed them to imagine "new kinds of communities with new criteria for belonging," communities "defined by an individual's work toward human liberation" (75). Ultimately, though, most Black activists continued to see the land of their birth as their true home and fought for the American citizenship they believed they were owed. From here, Bonner moves on to a [End Page 292] persuasive consideration of the importance of claims of citizenship for the protection of fugitive slaves. Black abolitionists saw security as a fundamental right of citizens, and argued that jury trials and other legal protections for accused fugitive slaves were therefore guaranteed by the Constitution. Next, Bonner shows us how Roger Taney's Dred Scott decision was a response to the protest tactics of African Americans which in turn spurred Black activists to renew their struggle for the very rights that Taney claimed they could never possess. Finally, the book carries the story through the tumultuous years of the Civil War, when Black service in the Union armed forces, and the pivotal contribution of that service to the defeat of the Confederacy, left African Americans with perhaps their most persuasive argument for the citizenship rights they had long claimed. Central to Bonner's picture of this struggle for Black...

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Christian Citizens: Reading the Bible in Black and White in the Postemancipation South

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America

Teaching the History of the Reconstruction Amendments: Syllabus and Teachers Manual for 'The Reconstruction Amendments: Essential Documents'

The publication of “THE RECONSTRUCTION AMENDMENTS: ESSENTIAL DOCUMENTS” (2 volumes) presents teachers and scholars a unique and unprecedented opportunity to construct a course around the original historical documents relating to the framing and ratification of the three “Reconstruction Amendments,” the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the American Constitution. The two volumes contain hundreds of original documents illustrating the grand public debate which took place from 1865 to 1870 and resulted in the abolition of slavery, the protection of the rights of national citizenship and the guarantee of the right to vote free from racial discrimination. The voices participating in this extraordinary constitutional event include U.S. presidents, military generals, radical abolitionists, pragmatist Republicans, obstructionist Democrats, black civil rights activists like David Walker and Frederick Douglass, the participants in freedmen conventions and equal rights conventions, petition writers, newspaper essayists, and women’s rights activists like Francis Watkins Harper, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. This syllabus and teachers manual present a fourteen-week model course studying the antebellum arguments that formed the historical background to constitutional reconstruction (slavery, federalism and the nature of the original constitution) and the congressional and public debates which accompanied the framing and ratification of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. In addition to a model syllabus, the teachers manual includes specific weekly reading assignments and suggested questions for class discussion. The manual also includes instructor notes providing the historical context surrounding each week’s assigned materials and their importance to the overall course.

A Glorious Liberty: Frederick Douglass and the Fight for an Antislavery Constitution

"Root . . . appears more interested in proving that the U.S. Constitution, if interpreted correctly, was not a document that would permit racism, especially once abolitionists had prevailed with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The narrative has very little to say about Frederick Douglass, following the highlights of pro- or anti-slavery moments in relation to the Constitution more than the ebb and flow of Douglass’s ideas. Douglass appears less as a man with complex thinking processes that developed over time and in response to multiple factors than as an icon supplying optimistic quotes about the Constitution as a document of freedom."

The Second Founding and the First Amendment

Constitutional doctrine generally proceeds from the premise that the original intent and public understanding of pre-Civil War constitutional provisions carries forward unchanged from the colonial Founding era. This premise is flawed because it ignores the Nation’s Second Founding: i.e., the constitutional moment culminating in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and the civil rights statutes enacted pursuant thereto. The Second Founding, in addition to providing specific new individual rights and federal powers, also represented a fundamental shift in our constitutional order. The Second Founding’s constitutional regime provided that the underlying systemic rules and norms of the First Founding’s Constitution of Enslavement would be modified as necessary in order to give rise to a “new birth of freedom.” Contemporary constitutional doctrine, however, has rarely grappled with the question of whether and to what extent the Second Founding’s Framers and general public might have had a different or more nuanced understanding from their First Founding counterparts of prior constitutional provisions. The Supreme Court’s approach to First Amendment interpretation largely ignores the Second Founding. The Court’s cases generally view the colonial Founding era as the sole source of evidence for ascertaining the original intent and public understanding of the Constitution’s guarantee of freedom of speech. This Article, by contrast, contends that the intent and understandings of the Second Founding provide an additional and under-explored source of constitutional meaning and therefore examines freedom of speech through the lens of slavery, abolition, and Reconstruction. This Article breaks new ground in legal scholarship by extensively reviewing slave narratives that illuminate the experiences and perspectives of enslaved persons regarding freedom of speech. This Article contends that by virtue of the Second Founding, enslaved persons’ views and experiences regarding freedom of speech should directly inform the meaning of the First Amendment. Accordingly, this Article makes a novel contribution to the literature regarding the Second Founding by centering enslaved persons’ voices as constitutional actors whose views on freedom of speech matter.

A Republic, If the Courts Can Keep It?

This contribution to a conference celebrating Andrew Coan’s Rationing the Constitution: How Judicial Capacity Shapes Supreme Court Decision-Making (Harvard Univ. Press, 2019) makes three primary points. First, I explain why the Supreme Court’s flawed reasoning in INS v. Chadha supports Coan’s judicial capacity theory of Supreme Court decision making. Second, I show why judicial capacity concerns do not support the Supreme Court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause to treat the constitutionality of partisan gerrymandering as a nonjusticiable political question. The Court could and should have announced a bright line rule against any partisan calculation in districting decision making, and let lower courts adjudicate the pure question of fact that such a rule would raise. Recent scholarship is converging in this direction. The weakness in Justice Kagan’s dissent lay in conceding any place for partisan calculation in districting. Predominant purpose tests, pulled across from racial affirmative action cases, do not fit partisan gerrymandering. Even the Court’s staunchest opponents of racial affirmative action concede that the goals of that action may be laudable; those opponents just contend that weightier moral reasons call for race neutrality in almost all circumstances. No one on the Court uses “laudable” to describe the goals of partisan gerrymandering. Partisan reasons are not redeemed by being low impact. Partisan reasons should have no impact on governing actions. Third, I argue that the Court should have identified a nonjusticiable political question not in Rucho, but, as other recent scholarship has suggested, in Shelby County v. Holder. Congress’s provision for preclearance in the Voting Rights Act serves not only to uphold the promises of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, but also to fulfill the national government’s constitutional duty to guarantee every state in the Union a republican form of government. The Court has long held that it will not second guess the judgment of the elected branches about what republican form requires.

The Commonwealth Memorial: A New Sculpture for the Capitol Grounds

ABSTRACT A bronze memorial scheduled for dedication on the grounds of the Pennsylvania Capitol Complex in 2020 promises to honor Harrisburg's historical African American community and commemorate the vanished neighborhood of the Old Eighth Ward. The installation, timed to mark the anniversaries of the ratification of the Fifteenth and Nineteenth amendments, will create a new destination place for historical tourism.

A Special Relationship: Winston Churchill and the American Constitution

This Article is the first detailed treatment of Winston Churchill's views on the United States Constitution. In his multi-volume A History of the English Speaking Peoples, Churchill discussed the drafting and ratification of the Constitution in detail. In a series of op-eds and magazine articles based in part on his trips to the United States, Churchill brought his acute political sense to bear on the operation of the Constitution during Jim Crow, Prohibition, and the New Deal. And in speeches to British and American audiences over many decades, Churchill frequently turned to the Constitution as both a model and a foil. From these rich sources, three relevant themes emerge for modern jurisprudence and constitutional design. First, Churchill emphasized the continuity between British tradition and the great eighteenth-century texts written here, most notably in his innovative claim that the Declaration of Independence was the supreme articulation of the common law. Second, he argued that judicial review was essential in the United States because of its diversity; an argument that challenges James Madison’s analysis of factions in Federalist #10. Third, Churchill thought that the failure of the Fifteenth and Eighteenth Amendments in his time resulted from a significant majority with good intentions enacting a substantial change that was too unequally spread throughout society. His hard-headed realism about how disparate impact in constitutional law can cripple its authority is a lesson that constitutional theory should heed.

Grant by Ron Chernow

Reviewed by: Grant by Ron Chernow John T. Hubbell Grant. By Ron Chernow. (New York: Penguin Press, 2017. 1,074 pp. Cloth $40.00, ISBN 978-1-59420-487-6.) This volume is not likely to become a Broadway musical. It may be the most satisfactory biography of Ulysses S. Grant yet written. “In truth, Grant was instrumental in helping the Union vanquish the Confederacy and in realizing the wartime ideals enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The Civil War and Reconstruction formed two acts of a single historical drama to gain freedom and justice for black Americans, and Grant was the major personality who united the two periods” (xxii). His place as military leader remains reasonably secure, but Chernow’s major contribution is his compelling description of Grant’s rule as liberator and protector of the slaves and freedmen. He concludes, with Sean Wilentz: “The evidence clearly shows that [Grant] created the most auspicious record on racial equality and civil rights of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson” (xxii). Chernow’s account of Grant’s military success is a familiar story, with some stimulating insights. The war was an escape of sorts for Grant, not the least from his father and father-in-law. Having Elihu B. Washburne as a political guide and patron was as consequential as what seemed to be innate leadership qualities and a pronounced, if veiled, ambition and self-regard. He almost left the army in 1862 because he felt unappreciated by Henry W. Halleck, but a timely promotion for Halleck rescued Grant for continued success in the west. He fully deserved credit for Vicksburg and not quite so much for Chattanooga, but these victories and reassurances to Lincoln that he was not interested (as yet) in becoming president led to his elevation to command of the Union armies. The great campaigns of 1864–65 secured Grant and Sherman’s reputations, but with reservations. Sherman’s capture of Atlanta may have won the election of 1864 for Lincoln, but historians of consequence believe that he should have done it earlier. Grant led the Army of the Potomac to eventual victory, but Robert E. Lee is often regarded as Grant’s equal, if not superior. Proximity to the cotton curtain has affected opinions about the Civil War, even among academic historians. Chernow clearly admires Grant and with good reasons. This does not preclude a thorough discussion of Grant’s two major missteps—the attack at Cold Harbor and the Battle of the Crater. Why did this ordinarily clear-minded officer contribute so directly to these disasters? Grant suffered from severe headaches during the overland campaign, due no [End Page 91] doubt to the stress of combat. And to the political pressure to carry the war to Lee. His soldiers paid the price for ill-advised tactical decisions, and Grant has yet to fully overcome the belief that “He had merely been the lucky beneficiary of superiority of men and resources.” He always resented this verdict. Long after the war, he recalled that “southern generals were [seen as] models of chivalry and valor—our generals were venal, incompetent, coarse . . .” (516). And often drunkards. Grant’s early comments after the war stressed reconciliation, but events of the Andrew Johnson administration convinced him that the radical Republicans’ approach to Reconstruction was necessary. Far from accepting military defeat, southern whites began a campaign of terror against the freedmen and their allies. Armed and organized whites, many of them Confederate veterans, resolved to negate the results of the war. And they had a willing ally in President Johnson. Grant’s election in 1868 and the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment were encouraging signs. Grant termed the amendment a “measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free government to the present day” (68). The Reconstruction amendments provided that Congress could enforce them through appropriate legislation. This Congress did, including the creation of the Department of Justice. Grant, at least for a time, brought the full power of the federal government, including the army, to the defense of the freedmen and the eradication of the Ku Klux Klan. “For...

Invisibile but effective African: American female civil rights leaders: A specific focus on Dorothy Irene height and Rosa parks

Despite the provisions of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the American Constitution following abolition of slavery, meant to give Blacks equal protection under the law, the latter have been kept under a new form of domination by their former white masters; the situation became lawfully dramatic with Jim Crow which openly set the freed Blacks as separate citizens in the United States of America. The then segregation laws have generated frustrations in the black communities which lead black Americans, men and women, to join and fight for equal opportunities, better job opportunities, for good education and housing, in short, for civil rights. But in the process, men have been more visible as it was not conceivable having women (even whites) leading any social or political movement. Although men held the majority of leadership positions in the civil rights organizations, African American women were also active leaders at all levels of the Civil Rights Movement. Only recently have historians sought to explore the contributions of women during the civil rights struggle. Though there were hundreds of black women who devoted themselves to securing rights for African-Americans, a few of them have been considered in the frame of the present study; they include Ella Baker, Dorothy Irene Height, Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer.

THE SEQUEL: THE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT, THE NINETEENTH AMENDMENT, AND SOUTHERN BLACK WOMEN'S STRUGGLE TO VOTE

This essay reframes both the woman suffrage narrative and narratives of African American voting rights struggles by focusing on the experiences of southern African American women between the 1870s and the 1920s. It argues that the Fifteenth Amendment remained central to their suffrage strategy long after the failure of the “New Departure” to win court sanction caused white suffragists to abandon it. As white supremacists in the South worked at the turn of the century to disfranchise black men, leading African American suffragists such as Mary Church Terrell, Gertrude Bustill Mossell, and Adella Hunt Logan called for the enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as well as the enfranchisement of black women. After the federal woman suffrage amendment was ratified in 1920, many southern African American women encountered the same barriers to voting—obstructionist tactics, threats, and violence—that black men had faced a generation earlier. In short, for aspiring African American voters in the South, the failure of the Nineteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black women constituted a sad sequel to the failure of the Fifteenth Amendment to secure voting rights for black men.This interpretation offers three significant interventions. It pairs the Reconstruction-era Amendments with the Nineteenth Amendment, recognizing their shared focus on voting rights. It connects the voting rights struggles of southern African Americans across genders and generations. Finally, it finds that, for some women, the canonical “century of struggle” for voting rights continued long after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified.

How the United States Supreme Court Diminished Constitutional Protections of the Right to Vote and What Congress Can Do About It

Under the United States Constitution, States determine who is allowed to vote in federal and state elections. Historically, the right to vote has been steeped in discrimination. For most of United States history, African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans and women have been denied the right to vote. Due to this history of discrimination and because of the importance of the right to vote in a republican democracy, the United States Supreme Court held in the 1960’s and 1970’s that new State restrictions on the right to vote are subject to strict scrutiny review under the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, in the Supreme Court’s decision in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, 553 U.S. 181 (2008), a majority of justices applied a balancing test in an equal protection challenge to Indiana’s new requirement that registered voters must present a government-issued photo identification before being allowed to vote. None of the justices in Crawford explained why strict scrutiny review of the new Indiana voting restriction was abandoned in favor of a balancing test review. The balancing test review constituted a much more deferential review of Indiana’s new voting restriction than strict scrutiny review and thereby significantly diminished constitutional protection of the right to vote. The purpose of this article is to describe the historical development of constitutional protections of the right to vote and to explain how the Supreme Court diminished that protection in Crawford. After Crawford, lower federal courts have held that new voter identification requirements that were imposed in several States violated the constitutional rights of certain registered voters. As a result of this unconstitutional pattern of using new voter identification requirements to violate the constitutional rights of some voters, Congress has the authority under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to enact legislation that is designed to prevent or remedy unconstitutional restrictions on the right to vote that result from voter identification requirements.

Dred Scott on the Pacific

In 1857, hundreds of black Californians migrated to western Canada, where they sought to become naturalized British subjects. In less than a decade many of them returned to California. They were propelled, in the first instance, by the Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) ruling that U.S.-born African Americans were not citizens, and in the second instance by the Fourteenth (1868) and Fifteenth (1870) Amendments that reversed Dred Scott and promised voting rights. The article explores the reasons for Vancouver Island’s racial liberalism and its initial acceptance and later political reversal of African American settlers’ rights. In the long run, this pair of transnational migrations illuminate the significant roles of African Americans in shaping the course of westward expansion of both California and Vancouver Island.