Jackson, J., dissenting
breaking up the Union.”[1] After the war, Senator John Sherman defended the proposed Fourteenth Amendment in a manner that encapsulated our Reconstruction Framers’ highest sentiments: “We are bound by every obligation, by [Black Americans’] service on the battlefield, by their heroes who are buried in our cause, by their patriotism in the hours that tried our country, we are bound to protect them and all their natural rights.”[2]
To uphold that promise, the Framers repudiated this Court’s holding in Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857), by crafting Reconstruction Amendments (and associated legislation) that transformed our Constitution and society.[3] Even after this Second Founding—when the need to right historical wrongs should have been clear beyond cavil—opponents insisted that vindicating equality in this manner slighted White Americans. So, when the Reconstruction Congress passed a bill to secure all citizens “the same [civil] right[s]” as “enjoyed by white citizens,” 14 Stat. 27, President Andrew Johnson vetoed it because it “discriminat[ed] … in favor of the negro.”[4]
That attitude, and the Nation’s associated retreat from Reconstruction, made prophesy out of Congressman Thaddeus Stevens’s fear that “those States will all … keep up
- ↑ An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage, Atlantic Monthly (Jan. 1867), in 2 The Reconstruction Amendments: The Essential Documents 324 (K. Lash ed. 2021) (Lash).
- ↑ Speech of Sen. John Sherman (Sept. 28, 1866) (Sherman), in id., at 276; see also W. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 162 (1998) (Du Bois).
- ↑ See Sherman 276; M. Curtis, No State Shall Abridge: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights 48, 71–75, 91, 173 (1986).
- ↑ Message Accompanying Veto of the Civil Rights Bill (Mar. 27, 1866), in Lash 145.
