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

by Eric Foner

The Enforcement Acts brought the enhancement of federal power spawned by the Civil War to the outer limits of the constitutional revolution. The states had always had exclusive jurisdiction over murder and assault. Could the federal government, James A. Garfield asked, prosecute citizens for such crimes? “This,” he declared, “would virtually abolish the administration of justice” by the states. To which the Civil War general Benjamin F. Butler, now representing Massachusetts in the House, replied, “If the federal government cannot pass laws to protect the rights, liberty, and lives of citizens of the United States in the states, why were guarantees of those fundamental rights put in the Constitution at all?”