Carpetbaggers split from Rethinking the Judicial Settlement o

Philip Leigh

formerly Harvey Johnson
Joined
Oct 22, 2014
Pamela Brandwein re-imagines Reconstruction jurisprudence






Citation: Kali Borkoski, Pamela Brandwein re-imagines Reconstruction jurisprudence, SCOTUSblog (May. 15, 2015, 1:18 PM), http://www.scotusblog.com/2015/05/pamela-brandwein-re-imagines-reconstruction-jurisprudence/

The speaker has two conclusions.

1. The Republican Party continued to fight for black equality until 1891. It did not give up in 1877.

2. The Supreme Court would have supported the Party if Republicans had prosecuted legal cases on her recommend tact.

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Although the second point renders the first point dubious, the speaker's underlying implication that Republicans wanted black equality as an ethical principle is the elephant in the room she fails to address.

Republicans focused on black voting rights. Whether they advocated those rights out of principle or for Republican control of the Southern state governments and their electoral votes is the chief question. The speaker's admission that her legal "discovery" would not have provided for social equality, suggests the latter. So does the opinion of Daniel Chamberlain who was the last Carpetbag governor who wrote in 1901:

…underneath all the avowed motives…lay a deeper cause…the will and determination to secure party ascendency and control at the South and in the nation through the negro vote. If this is hard saying, let anyone now ask himself…if it is possibly credible that the [1867] reconstruction acts would have passed if the negro vote had been believed to be Democratic.*
*Daniel H. Chamberlain, Atlantic Monthly “Reconstruction in South Carolina” Vol. 87, Issue 522 (April, 1901), 473-74
 
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