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The Undiscovered Country: Northern Views Of The Defeated South And The Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
The Undiscovered Country: Northern Views Of The Defeated South And The Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
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In 1866, Harper's Weekly announced a new series of woodcuts of Southern life with the remark, "[t]o us the late Slave States seem almost like a newly discovered country." It is difficult for Americans in the Twenty-First Century, in a culture of cable news coverage and national newspapers, to appreciate just how mysterious the former Confederacy seemed to Northerners in the months after Appomattox. It was not simply that four years of war had made communication between the two halves of the nation difficult - though that was true, and both Northern and Southern society had changed during the searing …
The Antebellum Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
The Antebellum Political Background Of The Fourteenth Amendment, Garrett Epps
All Faculty Scholarship
Understanding the Fourteenth Amendment is the key question of Constitutional law, both as it pertains to individual rights and, in many areas, as it relates to questions of Congressional power as opposed to the reserved powers of the states. The Amendment is often disaggregated and read clause by clause - but the intellectual and political background of its framers suggests that the Amendment in fact forms a coherent whole and that reading it as a whole might be a fertile source of new meanings. The Amendment was written by politicians who had spent their careers deeply involved in anti-slavery politics. …