to pay for the re-admission to Congress of their senators and representatives.[1] The details belong to history: all we need here note is that these deep-reaching, but under the circumstances perhaps unavoidable, changes were carried through not by the free will of the peoples of three-fourths of the States, but under the pressure of a majority which had triumphed in a great war, and used its command of the National government and military strength of the Union to effect purposes deemed indispensable to the reconstruction of the Federal system.[2]
Many amendments to the Constitution have been at various times suggested to Congress by Presidents, or brought forward in Congress by members, but very few of these have ever obtained the requisite two-thirds vote of both Houses. In 1789, however, and again in 1807, amendments were passed by Congress and submitted to the States for which the requisite majority of three-fourths of the States was not obtained; and in February and March 1861 an amendment forbidding the Constitution to be ever so amended as to authorize Congress
- ↑ The thirteenth amendment was proposed by Congress in February 1865, ratified and declared in force December 1865, the fourteenth was proposed by Congress June 1866, ratified and declared in force July 1868; the fifteenth was proposed by Congress February 1869, ratified and declared in force March 1870. The fourteenth amendment had given the States a strong motive for enfranchising the negroes by cutting down the representation in Congress of any State which excluded male inhabitants (being citizens of the United States) from the suffrage; the fifteenth went further and forbade "race, colour, or previous condition of servitude," to be made a ground of exclusion. The grounds for this bold step were succinctly set forth by Senator Willey (of West Virginia) when he said that the suffrage was the only sure guarantee the negro could have in many parts of the country for the enjoyment of his civil rights; that it would be a safer shield than law, and that it was required by the demands of justice, the principles of human liberty, and the spirit of Christian civilization. The effect of these three amendments was fully considered by the Supreme court (in 1872) in the so-called Slaughter-house Cases (16 Wall. 82), the effect of which is thus stated by Mr. Justice Miller: "With the exception of the specific provisions in the three amendments for the protection of the personal rights of the citizens and people of the United States, and the necessary restrictions upon the power of the States for that purpose, with the additions to the power of the general government to enforce those provisions, no substantial change has been made in the relations of the State governments to the Federal government." — Address delivered before the University of Michigan, 1887.
- ↑ But though military coercion influenced the adoption of the thirteenth amendment, while political coercion bore a large part in securing the adoption of the others, it must be remembered that some changes in the Constitution were an absolutely necessary corollary to the war which had just ended.
