2. Race Relations

What happened from the hey-day of slavery to the new day of legal freedom? Here, we have to deal with the United States Constitution. There were three amendments added to the United States Constitution in the late 1860s into the early 1870s. Three that, in various ways, dealt with the plight of African-Americans in the United States. Three amendments to the Constitution that, in their own separate ways, have profoundly influenced our society from that day to this.

The first problem faced by Northerners eager to reconstruct the South was to abolish the institution of slavery, to achieve that long-standing goal of the abolitionists and of the Radical Republicans in Congress. Supposedly, slavery was already done with. You may recall that on January 1st, 1863, Abraham Lincoln enunciated his famous Emancipation Proclamation. That proclamation supposedly freed the slaves. In point of fact, it did nothing of the sort. The Emancipation Proclamation freed only those slaves who were already free. That is, those slaves who had made it across Union lines and therefore were free. It did nothing about the bulk of slaves throughout the Confederacy. Besides, as many legal scholars argued, the President's proclamation was of very dubious constitutionality. So, the first task was to make certain that the institution of slavery was abolished.To gain this end, Radical Republicans pushed through Congress, in 1864, the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution:

13th Amendment
Section 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

Well, that took care of the matter. Slaves were no longer to be slave, they were to be free, and the plight of African-Americans was done with. African-Americans were on full equality with whites in American society. True? False. Various Southern states, in the immediate aftermath of the war, enacted what came to be known as "Black Codes." Remember from our last lecture that, between the end of the war (1865), and the summer months of 1867 (when the Reconstruction Acts went into effect), Southern states were left to govern themselves. Every Southern state enacted a series of laws that, collectively, came to be known as "Black Codes"--laws that, collectively, prohibited blacks from owning property, prohibited blacks from voting, prohibited blacks from gaining or utilizing any civil rights open to any white Americans. Recognizing that the Thirteenth Amendment, in and of itself, would not change the system of race relations in the South, Radical Republicans in Congress pushed for a Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution. The Fourteenth Amendment was debated in Congress, and finally ratified by the requisite number of states in 1868:

14th Amendment
Section 1 [Equality clause]. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Section 2 [Voting clause]. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

Take an example (regarding Section 2): a state is fifty percent black, fifty percent white. That Southern state does not allow its male, black population to vote. That state would have its representation in the halls of Congress reduced by the the percentage of the number of people to whom it refused access to the polls. Southern states, in the aftermath of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, consistently denied the right to vote to black, male voters. That clause of the amendment was never enforced in the nineteenth century. In fact, Southerners were absolutely brilliant. We have to take our hats off to them. They were brilliant in finding ways around the Fourteenth Amendment. And so, the Radical Republicans introduced in Congress the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. That amendment gained ratification and went into effect in 1870:

15th Amendment
Section 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Legally, therefore, by 1870, African-Americans were not to be denied the rights of citizens, either in voting, in the holding of property, or in exercising any of the other rights of life and liberty in this great democracy. But, legal position and social position are often two very different states of affairs. In most respects, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment were not enforced nationally until 1954.

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