The Three Reconstruction Amendments - sorry
Constitution—together known as the Reconstruction Amendments—abolished slavery, safeguarded a set of basic national liberties, and expanded the right to vote, respectively. This two-volume work presents the key speeches, debates, and public dialogues that surrounded the adoption of the three amendments, allowing us to more fully experience how they reshaped the nature of American life and freedom. Volume I outlines a broad historical context for the Reconstruction Amendments and contains materials related to the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, while Volume 2 covers the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments on the rights of citizenship and enfranchisement. The documents in this collection encompass a sweeping range of primary sources, from congressional debates to court cases, public speeches to newspaper articles. As a whole, the volumes meticulously depict a significant period of legal change even as they illuminate the ways in which people across the land grappled with the process of constitutional reconstruction. Filling a major gap in the literature on the era, The Reconstruction Amendments will be indispensable for readers in politics, history, and law, as well as anyone seeking a better understanding of the post—Civil War basis of American constitutional democracy. I much look forward to Prof. This post has been republished with permission from a publicly-available RSS feed found on Reason. The views expressed by the original author s do not necessarily reflect the opinions or views of The Libertarian Hub, its owners or administrators. Submit a DCMA takedown request. The Three Reconstruction AmendmentsThe Three Reconstruction Amendments Video
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Kurt Lash 4. Prior to this publication no such collection existed.
In this and three additional posts, I will explain the theory behind the collection, the nature of the included documents, and how scholars can use the collection to teach a basic course on the Reconstruction Amendments. My thanks to Eugene Volokh and the folks here at the VC for giving me this opportunity. Ten years in the making, the completed volumes contain over four hundred original historical documents which collectively tell the story of America's struggle to define The Three Reconstruction Amendments redefine the meaning of American freedom, national citizenship, constitutional federalism and the basic rights of all persons.
Beginning with the The Three Reconstruction Amendments public debates over slavery and the original Constitution, and ending with ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, the two volumes open a window on the grand national debates which attended the second most important period of The Three Reconstruction Amendments debate in American history. A great deal of this material, particularly documents relating to the ratification of the three amendments, has never before been published or, in many cases, even identified. The collection focuses on the public debates Amendmengs drove and accompanied constitutional reconstruction. The extraordinary constitutional conversation that prompted the adoption of the three Reconstruction Amendments included the voices of presidents, governors, military officers, radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, constitutional abolitionists like Lysander Spooner and Joel Tiffany, black civil rights activists like David Walker and Frederick Douglass, women's rights activists like Francis Watkins Harper, Susan B.
Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, pragmatist Republicans and obstructionist Amendmments, the participants in freedmen's conventions and the equal rights conventions, southern newspaper editors and northern political scientists, as well as politicians like Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, James F. Wilson, James Ashley, John A. Volume One begins with the antebellum debates that set the stage for constitutional reconstruction. This includes antebellum debates over the nature of federalism, the role of slavery in the original Constitution, the meaning of citizenship, and the scope of national liberty.
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The second half of Volume One presents the legislative and public debates attending the framing and ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. In my second post, I will describe some of the key documents in Volume One, including the first Thirteenth Amendment which would have constitutionally entrenched chattel slavery, and the extraordinary decision of the state of Wisconsin to nullify the federal Fugitive Slave Clause and invoke Madisonian federalism in support of anti-slavery state policy. Volume Two presents the legislative and public debates over the framing and ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. These documents include not only the congressional debates now word-searchablebut also the heretofore unavailable or unknown state ratification debates. Finally, I also have prepared a Teacher's Manual with a model syllabus and teaching notes for a The Three Reconstruction Amendments course on the Reconstruction Amendments.
This will be followed by a post on Volume Two, The Three Reconstruction Amendments then a final word on the collection and the available teaching materials.
In other cases, however, "essential" refers not to a particular document but to the essential importance of the issue The Three Reconstruction Amendments within that document. For example, for each amendment, I have included Reconstrucyion coverage of the framing and ratification efforts. These newspaper articles are meant to illustrate how closely the public was able to follow the framing debates, assess the arguments in favor of ratification, and consider the implications of failure or success.
This contemporary public awareness link itself an "essential" aspect of constitutional reconstruction.]
Here those on!