By 1868, the western wars had made many easterners revise their belief in the concept that “all men were created equal.” When Congress hammered out the Fourteenth Amendment, the members explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed”—that is, those either on reservations, still fighting the U.S. Army, or considered too poor and undesirable—from being counted for a state’s representation in Congress. That would avoid the problem apparent in the South, where not-yet-enfranchised black voters would swell a state’s population for the purposes of representation but would not have a say in their actual
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