The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

by Eric Foner

With the South unrepresented in Congress, few members directly defended slavery. Instead, the party’s congressmen fell back on familiar arguments against abolition, notably the alleged incapacity of blacks. “The wooly-headed Negro,” declared Senator Lazarus Powell of Kentucky, was “an inferior man . . . and no fanaticism can raise him to the level of the Caucasian race.” Some Democrats warned that future congresses would wield the “revolutionary power” of Section 2 to force black citizenship, black suffrage, racial “amalgamation,” and black land ownership upon the states. Others claimed that abolition threatened private property in general. If the Constitution could be amended to abolish one form of property without monetary compensation, why not others? In the future, asked Senator Willard Saulsbury of Delaware, would Congress confiscate the factories of New England? Fernando Wood, the former mayor of New York City now a member of the House of Representatives, painted a lurid picture of the amendment’s consequences: “It involves the extermination of the white men of the southern States, and the forfeiture of all the land and other property belonging to them.”