Kindle Notes & Highlights
Started reading
July 12, 2012
Moreover, Johnson decreed that once a majority of a state’s voters had taken this oath, they could form a state government and rejoin the Union. White Democrats in the South immediately took advantage of this proclamation to elect ex-Confederates as their leaders and enact “black codes” to regain their control over the freedmen. The state laws, among other things, allowed for blacks to be arrested as “vagrants” and forced to work, without pay, for whites that paid off their “fines.” These laws, observed Massachusetts senator Henry Wilson, made the freedmen “the slaves of society.”
ALTHOUGH THE FOUNDING FATHERS waxed eloquent about protecting individual liberty and freedom, the Constitution they drew up in 1787 was, in essence, a pro-slavery document. Not only did it authorize slavery in the Southern states, but it made the federal government the guardian of the slave owner’s property rights. Article IV, section 2, clause 3 of the Constitution declared that if a slave escaped into a Northern state, the state would have to hand over the person upon “claim to the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” All states were duty-bound to cooperate with slave-catchers,
...more
The protection of nearly all civil rights had to remain with the states, for to “transfer the security and protection [of these rights] from the States to the Federal government” would “radically change the whole theory of the relations of the State and Federal governments to each other and of both these governments to the people.” No such radical change was “intended by Congress,” Miller insisted. As such, it was up to Louisiana—and not the federal government—to protect the butchers’ property rights. The only rights that fell under federal protection, Miller added, were those that could be
...more
Had only one justice in the majority voted differently, the next hundred years of American history might have been dramatically different, and the suffering of blacks in American society not nearly so great. But the Slaughterhouse cases were now precedent law, and with that decision serving as a guide, the Supreme Court quickly tore down the entire edifice of Reconstruction law, brick by brick. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), it effectively gutted the Federal Enforcement Acts, ruling that the federal government did not have the constitutional authority to prosecute the leaders of a
...more
