¶ … Constitution were the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments ratified in 1865-70, which abolished slavery and granted equal citizenship and voting rights to blacks for the first time in U.S. history. All of these passed Congress as compromise measures between the Radical and moderate Republican factions in Congress, and were resisted intensely by Democrats in the North and South as violations of the rights of states and a tyrannical exercise of power by the central government. Then as now, of course, these were often code words for the fact that many whites simply did not favor black equality and voting rights. In the South, the Ku Klux Klan used violence and terror to prevent these amendments from being fully implemented, and after 1876-77, they succeeded in making them dead letters -- rights that existed only on paper but never enforced in reality. So it remained until the civil...
Westward expansion and the idea of new slave or free states continued to polarize the nation, as well as the religious views denouncing slavery in some denominations and upholding it in others during the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, much of the rhetoric against slavery dealt with power and economics: the southern states believed in their right to uphold a 200-year-old institution. The northern states, where the large portion of the manufacturing was located, used the ethical and moral stance that slavery was evil to control U.S. fiscal policy and to attempt to wean the South away from Great Britain. The idea of slavery, though, was just part of the factors that led to southern secession -- and a new southern nation, the Confederate…
Reconstruction & the 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments The Civil War remains one the most momentous events in American history. The survival of the United States as one nation was at risk and on the outcome of the war depended the nation's ability to bring to reality the ideals of liberty, equality, justice, and human dignity. The war put constitutional government to its severest test as a long festering debate over the power
Plessy challenged his arrest, maintaining that the railroads use of racially segregated cars violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court disagreed with Plessy's assertion. The Court determined that racial segregation did not imply that Blacks were inferior. Furthermore, the Court found that the facilities provided to Blacks and whites were of equal quality. Because of this, the Court determined that separate but equal facilities did not violate the letter
The true spirit and meaning of the amendments, as we said in the Slaughter-House Cases (16 Wall. 36), cannot be understood without keeping in view the history of the times when they were adopted, and the general objects they plainly sought to accomplish. At the time when they were incorporated into the Constitution, it required little knowledge of human nature to anticipate that those who had long been regarded
The thirteenth amendment was a very important one, as it formally ended slavery in the United States. (House, 2012) the Emancipation Proclamation was only based on President Lincoln's war powers during the Civil War, and therefore the thirteenth Amendment was passed to solidify the end of slavery. (History, 2012) the fourteenth amendment guaranteed all Americans the right to representation and protection under the law, as well as prohibiting state
Civil Rights and Police Departments The outline for basic civil rights in America is deceptively simple and straightforward; it appears in the Bill of Rights, with a concentration on the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments. Taken together, these amendments govern the ability of the government to conduct searches and seizures, dictate the rules required for arrest, guarantee the right to remain silent, provide the right to an attorney, and prohibit
Tucker, deputy sheriff of said county, from giving and securing to the said Robert R. Smith and others, naming them, the due and equal protection of the laws of said state, in this, to-wit, that at and before the entering into said conspiracy, the said Robert R. Smith and others, naming them, were held in the custody of said deputy sheriff by virtue of certain warrants duly issued against
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