The FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT: Citizenship, Southern Hatred, and Hope

Most scholars look to the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution which was written as a bill to support the Civil Rights Act of 1866; this particular act dealt with all things post Civil War in order for the Union (the victors) to maintain some semblance of order with those states that seceded and wanted their statehood back as part of the Union. However, it was argued that those states that had seceded had indeed lost their loyalty and allegiance to the United States of America.

The actual language of the “Citizenship Clause” pursuant to the Fourteenth Amendment, Section 1 states that “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

Please remember why this amendment was a necessity to the U.S. Constitution and for what reasons it needed to be clarified from the original writing just shy of 100 years earlier.

Senator Jacob Howard of Ohio was the author of the ‘Citizenship Clause’ and defended the new language against the charge that it would make Indians citizens of the United States. Senator Howard assured skeptics that “Indians born within the limits of the United States, and who maintain their tribal relations, are not, in the sense of this Amendment, born subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” (As a sidebar: Why would people from Middle or South America be construed as any different?)

Up to this point there has not been any mention whatsoever about those born on American soil would be Americas or American citizens – does it? We see this as the most egregious portion of the XIV Amendment insofar as 144 years later (inclusive) citizenship has been granted to babies and their respective families – in one way or another – without any professional leader, Congressional official, or President of the United States doing anything whatsoever to stop this ridiculous 28 word sentence to continue.

What is it that infuriates a politician more than everything else known to humankind? Think all you want however, we feel it has to be somewhere in the voting machinery, albeit, from ‘hanging and pregnant chads’ to being unable to read the ballot – both because of either one’s eyes, vision, or understanding of the English language. Ironically, this was not too much of a problem in post war politics insofar as either a person couldn’t read or made to do otherwise.

By the time the thirty-ninth Congress was seated in December 1865 their agenda resembled something along the lines of the following order: In every seceded state prior to the Civil War’s end their individual state legislatures had worked tirelessly adopting a legal code pertaining only to blacks that segregated the races, banned political participation, restricted social conduct, established severe vagrancy and labor laws that in turn created a peonage system and created extremely harsh criminal punishments.

Furthermore, the Senate and the House alike refused to seat the new southern representatives. Federal legislators quickly sought to strengthen the Freedmen’s Bureau to include utilizing the Army for protecting black civil rights. This particular measure failed in Congress by a margin of two votes to overcome a presidential veto!

By March 1866, Congress, aroused by the South, was ready to accept federal responsibility for guarding individual rights to make and enforce contracts, sue and give evidence, and own property. Despite initial hesitancy about intruding into what had traditionally been under the state’s authority the fed decided to push for the Civil Rights Act of 1866.

The battle over the Civil Rights Act of 1866 led directly to a campaign for a new constitutional amendment. The Joint Committee on Reconstruction understood that traditions and ways of life ran deep in the south and without an amendment there could never be rest or civil rights for more than just the black population, the entire nation whether 60 percent of it or 100 percent of it, were hell-bent on seeing to it that southern white hostility, the unrepentant southern states, would not be successful in undermining the north.

Therefore, the Joint Committee on Reconstruction's first amendment proposal sought to reduce proportionally the congressional representation of states that still denied the right to vote on the basis of race.

(End of Part 3)