Description
Book SynopsisIn this first of three planned volumes for the University Press of Kansas’s
Constitutional Thinking series, Mark Graber aims to restore to contemporary memory the Fourteenth Amendment drafted by those Republican and Unionist members of Congress who supported congressional reconstruction.
Trade ReviewIn meticulous detail Mark Graber shows how in the run-up to the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment congressional Republicans shaped the provisions eventually written into that provision with an eye to ensuring control of the government by unionists, which is to say Republicans. He reorients our understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment away from the rights it undoubtedly guarantees to the political effects its framers sought to achieve, among which were unionist control of state governments so that rights could be protected. Though today we do not pay much attention to the sections of the Fourteenth Amendment its framers cared most about, Graber’s arguments tell us a great deal about how we should understand what constitutions actually do." - Mark Tushnet, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law emeritus, Harvard Law School, and author of
The Constitution of the United States of America: A Contextual Analysis"Mark Graber has opened our eyes not only to a lost history of the Fourteenth Amendment, but also to its Framers’ central purpose. They sought to create the conditions for a democratic politics that would protect and empower people, both Black and white, who had remained loyal to the Union during the Civil War. This brilliant book, part of a projected multi-volume series, teaches that the way we shape our political institutions is every bit as important as abstract guarantees of constitutional rights." - Jack M. Balkin, Knight Professor of Constitutional Law and the First Amendment, Yale Law School
Table of Contents
- Text of Amendment XIV (1868)
- Series Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- A Preface to the Forgotten Fourteenth Amendment Series
- Introduction: Three Republican Soloists and the Republican Chorus
- 1. The Exclusion Debate
- 2. The Problem of Rebel Rule
- 3. Protecting and Empowering the Loyal
- 4. Guarantees
- 5. To Colorado and Beyond
- Conclusion: Rebels, Loyalists, and Racial Equality
- Appendixes
- Table A.1: House Votes on the Fourteenth Amendment, the Exclusion Resolution, and Statehood for Colorado and Nebraska
- Table A.2: Senate Votes on the Fourteenth Amendment, the Exclusion Resolution, and Statehood for Colorado and Nebraska
- Table A.3: References to “:Rebel” and “Loyal” in the House of Representatives
- Table A.4: References to “Rebel” and “Loyal” in the Senate
- Table A.5: References Paired with “Rebel” in the Thirty-Ninth Congress, First Session: All
- Table A.6: References Paired with “Rebel” in the Thirty-Ninth Congress, First Session: Opponents of the Fourteenth Amendment
- Table A.7: Conditions for Readmission of Former Confederate States: Members of Congress
- Table A.8: Conditions of Readmission of Former Confederate States: Petitions
- Calendar of the Thirty-Ninth Congress, First Session
- Notes
- Index
