July 9 is the 153rd Anniversary of the ratification of the 14th Amendment by Louisiana, the last state needed for its incorporation into the Constitution. Charles Blow has an interesting column today in the New York Times on Thad Stevens, the 14th Amendment, and the modern guarantees of citizenship. Here is a link to the full article, and here are a few excerpts. After the Civil War, Blacks were free from slavery, but they were not recognized as citizens in many parts of the U.S.
Black people were the United States’ original Dreamers. For three years the dilemma lingered until my home state, Louisiana, along with South Carolina, voted to ratify the 14th Amendment on July 9, 1868, 153 years ago this Friday.
(In all candor, Congress required these Southern states to ratify it as a condition of regaining representation. This wasn’t receptivity, it was ransom.)
Among other things, the amendment stated forthrightly, “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.”
This created the concept of birthright citizenship, a provision by which many immigrants’ children became citizens. This is also the concept that has drawn contempt from conservatives who deride immigrants for purposefully seeking to give birth on American soil, their children described pejoratively as “anchor babies.”
The citizenship portion of the 14th Amendment was tied together with the idea of suffrage for all men. If Black men were made citizens, for the most part, they could also be made voters.
(This didn’t work as smoothly as some had thought. It would require the adoption of the 15th Amendment two years later, in 1870, to guarantee that right, as it read: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”)
One of the heroes of the 14th Amendment as well as the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, was Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. He badgered Lincoln on abolishing slavery and he helped to write the 13th Amendment. Indeed, he gave the closing remarks on the debate of the amendment.
As the National Endowment for the Humanities noted in its magazine, when the House passed the bill that authorized the 13th Amendment, Stevens said, “I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus, ‘Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, and who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he had striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color.’ ”
Stevens would also help write the 14th Amendment, and in the lead-up to it he was quite prescient on “universal enfranchisement,” offering words then that we would do well to heed today.
In January of 1868, Stevens wrote in The New York Times:
“So far as I took any position with regard to Negro suffrage, it was and is that universal suffrage is an inalienable right, and that since the amendments to the Constitution, to deprive the Negroes of it would be a violation of the Constitution as well as of a natural right. True, I deemed the hastening of the bestowal of the franchise as very essential to the welfare of the nation, because without it I believe that the Government will pass into the hands of rebels and their friends, and that such an event would be disastrous to the whole country.
With universal suffrage, I believe the true men of the nation can maintain their position. Without it, whether that suffrage be impartial, or in any way qualified, I look upon this Republic as likely to relapse into an oligarchy, which will be ruled by coarse copperheadism and proud conservatism.”
Copperheads were Northern Democrats, mostly in the Midwest, who opposed the Civil War and emancipation and wanted to negotiate a compromise with the South to preserve the Union. The name comes from the copperhead snake, a notoriously sneaky serpent.
But the 14th Amendment would go on to be passed and ratified, and it signified the birth of Black citizenship.
The day is such an important marker of citizenship that when the first Black senator, Hiram Revels of Mississippi, arrived in Washington to be seated in 1870, his being seated was objected to by conservative congressmen, some arguing that he had only been a citizen since the ratification of the 14th Amendment two years earlier and thus didn’t meet the citizenship requirements for a senator. (By the way, Revels was born in America and fought in the Civil War.)
We just came off the celebration of Juneteenth, which was made into a national holiday, and rightly so. But I have always held July 9 in higher regard. I celebrate both, obviously, but this Friday I ask you to also remember the importance and weight of that day, when the Constitution was bent and made to recognize the equality and inclusion of Black people as citizens.
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