Ulysses S. Grant and His Presidency During the Reconstruction (original) (raw)

The significance of this topic shows the impact that Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution during the Reconstruction, not only in the nineteenth century, but how they later impacted other legislation into the twentieth century. Grant, in 1871, formally initiated an Act to Enforce Provisions in the Fourteenth Amendment to hold the Ku Klux Klan accountable for their actions in the South. Historians have left out many personal accounts of how appointed Southern officials were scared for their lives and the freedmen they protected from the atrocities of the Ku Klux Klan.

Liberalism, the Thirteenth Amendment, and the Seeds of Destruction of Reconstruction

2011

On February 3, 1875, during debates on the Civil Rights Act of that year, Representative Niblack of Indiana 1 posed this question to Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts, sponsor of the bill: 2 "If the State courts will not guarantee the rights of the citizens of the United States, ought we not in some way to take away from the States the right of self-government and say that self-government is a failure?"

The Spectre of the Second Amendment: Re-reading the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) and US v. Cruikshank (1876) in light of the KKK Cases (1871-2)

2006

In 1866 Members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction introduced the Fourteenth Amendment into the House of Representatives and the Senate, respectively. Several speakers indicated that the force of the new amendment would be to protect basic or fundamental citizen rights against adverse action by state governments and would allow Congress for the first time to protect such rights against such state action. One speaker in the House, John Bingham, who had written Section One of the amendment, indicated that among the protected "privileges or immunities of citizens" were those rights listed in the first eight amendments to the Constitution, rights that previously had been enforceable only against Congress, not against state governments. He specifically cited the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments by way of example. 1 In the U.S. Senate it was Sen. Jacob Howard 1 CONG.GLOBE, 39 th Cong., 1 st Sess 1088-1095 (Feb.3, 1866); 2542-3 (May 8, 1866). Rep. Bingham makes clear his understanding that the Fourteenth Amendment would apply the privileges listed in the Bill of Rights against state governments by stating that the amendment would overturn Barron v. Baltimore, 32 U.S. 243 (1833), the case that had established the contrary rule. Four years later, Bingham had occasion to discuss the Amendment again 65 Thomas M. Cooley, ed. Joseph Story's Commentaries on the

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