Academic

Student Blogger - #13Amend Live Blog: History on Its Terms

The history surrounding the Thirteenth Amendment was a history of modest steps. Professor Dennis Hutchinson asserted that Lincoln was a pragmatist; he did not call for any sort of revolutionary reform. The "Radical" Republicans were tepid in what they accomplished. Several Republican congressmen made proposals based on antidiscrimination, such as Thaddeus Stevens, but these proposals were rejected as politically impossible. The Thirteenth Amendment was a narrow resolution of one particularly egregious problem. The Fifteenth Amendment does not protect the right to vote itself, just its denial for a particular class. President Grant, in his second inaugural address, expressed approval that relations with parts of the South had been restored. He stated that protection of African Americans should be addressed to the extent the executive could feasibly do so, but he disclaimed addressing social inequality. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 got off to a bad start. It passed a lame-duck Congress and copies were not even sent to US Attorneys. Courts often sat on the cases without enforcing them. In many people's minds, social inequality was an impossible, dangerous goal.

What motivates Supreme Court justices? In the Slaughterhouse Cases, Justice Miller may have been thinking that he was supporting biracial government; the beneficiaries of the ruling, he thought, would be African Americans and immigrants who could not afford their own slaughterhouses. This may not make him a good figure, but he should be judged on his own terms, like all of the historical figures of the time. We may bewail the failed opportunities of the past, but we have to live going forward.

Full post as published by The University of Chicago Law School Faculty Blog on April 17, 2009 (boomark / email).