- Joined
- Oct 22, 2014
1. The Fourteenth Amendment was an honest effort to confer civil rights upon the freedmen, under the protection of the federal government. It was intended to be revolutionary, to change the legal relation between the federal government and the states. It was unsuccessful because it failed to protect the freedmen and before long, as we shall see, the Supreme Court returned enforcement of civil rights to the states.
2. The new state constitutions [of the Southern Republicans], written by "black and tan" conventions, were on the whole good. In most cases they provided for more democratic government than of old, for free-school systems, property rights for women, tax reforms, state charitable institutions, and the abolition of imprisonment for debts. A high tribute to these constitutions is that they were not abolished when the last Northern troops were withdrawn in 1877.
3. [After the Civil War] all over the South the ruined planters were selling their great holdings at bargain prices. The small yeomen farmers were buying. . . .Land could have [also] saved the black man—land and education. If the black man had been made a property-owner, and if his thirst for learning had been slaked at federal expense, he would have become a truly free man. . . . Instead, as Frederick Douglass wrote. . . ."He was turned loose, naked, hungry and destitute to the open sky."
2. The new state constitutions [of the Southern Republicans], written by "black and tan" conventions, were on the whole good. In most cases they provided for more democratic government than of old, for free-school systems, property rights for women, tax reforms, state charitable institutions, and the abolition of imprisonment for debts. A high tribute to these constitutions is that they were not abolished when the last Northern troops were withdrawn in 1877.
3. [After the Civil War] all over the South the ruined planters were selling their great holdings at bargain prices. The small yeomen farmers were buying. . . .Land could have [also] saved the black man—land and education. If the black man had been made a property-owner, and if his thirst for learning had been slaked at federal expense, he would have become a truly free man. . . . Instead, as Frederick Douglass wrote. . . ."He was turned loose, naked, hungry and destitute to the open sky."
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