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Whence Comes Section One? The Abolitionist Origins Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Randy E. Barnett

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications and Other Works

The contribution of abolitionist constitutionalism to the original public meaning of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment was long obscured by a revisionist history that disparaged abolitionism, the “radical” Republicans, and their effort to establish democracy over Southern terrorism during Reconstruction. As a result, more Americans know about “carpetbaggers” than they do the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment. Despite a brief revival of interest stimulated by the writings of Howard Jay Graham and Jacobus tenBroek, in the 1970s and 1980s abolitionist constitutionalism remains obscure to law professors and even to historians of abolitionism.

This study provides important evidence of the …