The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution (Politically Incorrect Guides) by Kevin R. C. Gutzman

Author:Kevin R. C. Gutzman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Reference, humour, Philosophy, Politics, History
ISBN: 9781596985056
Publisher: Regnery Publishing
Published: 2007-05-14T00:00:00+00:00

In an essay on the Confederacy, journalist H. L. Mencken noted that it was the South that was fighting for “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” He could have added that the southern states had a higher regard for the Constitution than did the president who forcibly returned them to the Union.

The “reconstruction” of the Constitution

After the war, the North occupied the southern states with the intent of “reconstructing” them on a submissive line. Lincoln hoped to incorporate the southern states into his remade United States as quickly as possible. So as the Federal armies brought wide swaths of the Confederacy under Union control, he favored leniency in allowing former Confederate officers to vote and hold office. He tried to persuade southerners of his conciliatory intentions by running on a Union (not a Republican) ticket in 1864 with Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson as his running mate.

Lincoln’s assassination at the end of the war made Johnson president. Johnson immediately antagonized the Republican Congress (which didn’t like him anyway) by pardoning high-ranking and wealthy Confederates. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1866 as a violation of states’ rights (on the grounds that contracts, real estate transactions, and access to courts had always been within states’ rights to regulate, and nothing had happened to change that).

Republicans in Congress responded with the Fourteenth Amendment. Here we have a budding revolution in American constitutional government-if indeed it can still be called that. The Fourteenth Amendment was ulti mately “ratified” in 1868, according to the official version. In reality, as eminent constitutional historian Professor Forrest McDonald has demonstrated, the Fourteenth Amendment was never ratified at all.

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