Timothy Sandefur has a moving discussion of Frederick Douglass, the Fourteenth Amendment, and the McDonald case over on PLF Liberty Blog. I wish I could just post the whole thing here, but you should really click over. Here is how it opens:
In December of 1872, Frederick Douglass, civil rights leader and former slave, published an editorial in his newspaper, the New National Era, entitled “Give Us The Freedom Intended For Us.” In it he demanded that Congress pass Sen. Charles Sumner’s proposed Civil Rights Bill, to protect the rights of black Americans who were entitled, under the new Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, to equality and freedom, but who were suffering under a reign of terror in southern states ruled by the Ku Klux Klan and allied white supremacists. Americans needed federal protection against abusive state governments, he insisted. In the years since the Civil War, there were some 1500 recorded lynchings, and southern states were not only barring blacks from voting or serving on juries, but from owning weapons to defend themselves. Citizenship, Douglass was to say in his memoir, rested on the three boxes: “the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.”
Douglass had good reason to worry. Violence against the newly freed slaves was aided and abetted by state governments, whose officials were often members of white supremacist terrorist groups themselves. Although black voters had immediately elected black members to southern state legislatures—and even the United States Senate—they were being rapidly disenfranchised, and their elected representatives excluded from office, and the federal government was showing an increasing reluctance to do anything about it. The Johnson Administration had openly fought against Reconstruction efforts to protect blacks in the south, and the Grant Administration, though less openly hostile, was more willing to compromise. Exhausted northerners lost interest in protecting the former slaves, and demanded that the troops be “brought home” from a region that they believed was forever doomed to chaos, ignorance, and tyranny. “Let us have peace” be[came] Grant’s slogan. “Yes, let us have peace,” Douglass responded in one of his greatest speeches, “but let us have liberty, law, and justice first. Let us have the Constitution, with its thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments, fairly interpreted, faithfully executed, and cheerfully obeyed in the fullness of their spirit and the completeness of their letter.” The southern states were “under the idea of local self-government,” trying “to paralyze the arm and shrivel the body of the National Government so that it cannot protect the humblest citizen in his rights.”
Less than two months after Douglass’ editorial was published, lawyers assembled in the United States Supreme Court to argue the Slaughter-House Cases, a dispute over a Louisiana law that prohibited butchers in New Orleans Parish from slaughtering cattle except at a single, privately-owned slaughterhouse. . . .
Read the rest here.
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