W.D.Moore – APSA-03– Slaughter-House – p.4
Controversy over the fourteenth amendment’s original validity persisted well after
Congress and Secretary of State William Seward formally (and equivocally, in the latter’s case)
declared it part of the U.S. Constitution in July of 1868.
6
Democrats made the validity of
congressional reconstruction, including the South’s military occupation and the fourteenth
amendment’s coerced ratification, a major issue in the 1868 presidential elections.
7
Although
Republicans retained control of national institutions as a result of those elections, criticism of
reconstruction policies persisted in the North and West as well as the South, among Republicans
along with Democrats.
Revealing was a comment by Oliver P. Morton, Republican Senator from Indiana, in the
course of congressional debates over ratification of the fifteenth amendment. He complained on
February 15, 1871:
That the adoption of the [fourteenth] amendment was strongly opposed by the
Democratic party in Congress and out; that the Democratic party everywhere
denied the power of Congress to require the late rebel States to ratify the
amendment as a condition to their restoration; that no Democratic convention,
Legislature, or leading statesman, so far as I know, has accepted or admitted the
validity of the amendment.
8
This claim that “no Democrat” had yet “accepted the validity” of the fourteenth amendment as late
as February of 1871 is remarkable. Although Morton’s comment doubtless contained elements of
overstatement, it seems accurate as a gauge of Democrats’ continued opposition to military
reconstruction and its legacies.
9
6
See United States Statutes at Large, Vol. 15 (1869), pp. 706-11.
7
See, e.g., Frank P. Blair, Letter to Col. James O. Broadhead, June 30, 1868, reprinted in Matthew Carey, Jr.
(pseud., supposedly Augustus R. Cazauran), ed., Democratic Speaker’s Handbook (Cincinnati: Miami Print. and
Pub. Co., 1868), at 355; Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York:
Harper & Row, 1977), pp. 337-45; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., ed., History of American Presidential Elections,
1789-1968 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1971), vol. 11, pp. 1247-99.
8
Congressional Globe, 41st Congress, 3rd sess., part II, p. 1252 (February 15, 1871).
9
See ibid., part III, app. 114 (February 15, 1871) (Francis Blair, Jr., now Senator from Missouri, reminded his
colleagues that “the Democratic party in the [1868] convention at New York [had] made this issue broadly and
unmistakably: that the reconstruction acts of Congress were unconstitutional and void.” He apparently thought
this criticism, which implicated the fourteenth amendment itself, remained viable at least as of February of 1871).
See also Foner (1988), esp. pp. 455 & 490.
Convention