Some of the language of the Reconstruction amendments—due process, privileges or immunities of citizens, the right to vote—already existed in the Constitution or were commonplace in legal language. But not “equal protection,” the heart of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was, however, a staple of abolitionist discourse. As early as 1832, Garrison’s Liberator, referring to free blacks, insisted that “they have as good and true a right to the equal protection of the law as we have.” Four years later, an abolitionist convention declared: “We must bring back the lost rights of the
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