The Republicans had proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution to enshrine the Civil Rights Bill of 1866 in the Constitution itself. They wanted to protect it from the Supreme Court and future congresses, a particular danger since the end of slavery meant the demise of the three-fifths clause, which would add a million and a half people and twenty congressional seats to the South’s total. Unless black people could vote, those seats would probably be overwhelmingly Democratic. Politically, the Republicans also needed to provide a route to eventual peace as an alternative to Johnson’s
...more
