On one level, what Stevens and others did was exactly what Baldwin calls us to do: They went back to where we started. They understood that the three-fifths clause and the fugitive slave clause had tilted the balance of power to the slaveholding states; that the Constitution did not live up to the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality; that the actions of states and of the courts consolidated a view of black people that mandated their inferior place in American society. With the Civil War amendments, they aimed to begin again. But the country, just as it did with the Second
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