Charles Sumner, perhaps the most principled egalitarian in Congress, explained how his thinking had evolved: “For a long time I was perplexed by the subtlety so often presented, that the suffrage is a ‘privilege’ and not a ‘right,’ and being a ‘privilege,’ it was subject to such limitations as the policy or good will of the legislature chose to impose. The more I think of it, the more it seems to me an essential right.” But it was not only the radical Sumner whose concept of rights expanded during Reconstruction. The Civil War crystallized in the minds of northerners the idea of a powerful
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