Reply #14: well, no.

[Lexingtonian]

People who write a law don't own it for all time.

The Constitution of 1787 and Bill of Rights contain and permit the defect that was slavery. This prevented them from being written to contain a proper definition of citizenship and the government-citizen relationship.

This had to be solved in 1865 as a general problem, not merely as the narrower question of black ex-slaves' minimal rights. The excessive rights the upper Southern castes gave themselves prior to and during the Civil War were the flip side of the problem. There had to be a principled and situationally reasonable set of criteria bring them both to equal before the law. The debate was pretty extensive- and the people writing the amendment worried alot about language that would be an invitation to women, Indians, free blacks, and immigrants to demand rights perceived as not due them at the time. So they wrote a very minimal positive statute and pretty detailed bars that would give great leeway to the Supreme Court to interpret and the Congress to enforce it.

It remains the controlling statute defining citizenship and what constitutes fairness to citizens as groups. It is not simply a pragmatic statute about forcing state governments to let ex-slaves vote- the defect in the Constitution it remedied (to some degree, anyway) was enormous.

Since 1941 the essential motif of American domestic politics is different groups deciding they are mature enough, and unfairly legally disadvantaged historically, that the time has come to demand a fullness of rights as citizens. There is no other Constitutional test or definition of fullness of due rights other than those written out in Section 1 of the 14th Amendment.

All of our present Constitutional fighting with pretty much revolves around this one bit of the Constitution. The verdict today about 'Intelligent Design', Kitzmuller v Dover Area School District, uses the Due Process Clause to extend the Establishment Clause application to individual students, parents, and teachers. All social rights cases revolve around it- from Brown v Board, Griswold v Connecticut, Baker, Goldberg, Lawrence v Texas, and Roe. Grutter v Bollinger. Schiavo v Schiavo. Ayotte v PPNNE. Goodridge v DPH. The Guantanamo Bay inmate cases. The death penalty cases (the criteria of the 14th control the argument about what constitutes 'cruel and unusual').

The Right has in fact created whole judicial ideologies to bypass and void the plain language and integrity of interpretation of Section 1 of the 14th- 'strict constructionism' is the more famous one, 'originalism' is sort of its ugly gangster cousin. They've spent an awful lot of energy confusing and filling 14th Amendment jurisprudence with specious arguments (i.e. the bogus states' rights/antifederalist doctrine created during Reconstruction) and all kinds of grotesque misapplications and inversions to protect privilege. Plessy v Ferguson and Bush v Gore are the classics of the genre. Richardson v Ramirez is the great early Rehnquist travesty not yet overturned. Santa Clara Cty v Southern Pacific RR is one of the great defectives.

You may also want to read up on the sheer amounts of war debt run up during the Civil War. As GNP- number of years to repay it- it was far greater than the amount we have now, utterly crushing in its size then. There simply wasn't a way for the North to assume the Southern debt without itself going bankrupt, that was part of it. But there was also horrible moral revulsion in the North at recompensing the people who funded a war against them to create an aristocracy if not monarchy, retain if not intensify further the evil of slavery, wrote a new constitution to enable all that, and- the crowning vileness- purported to believe this to be just and Divine Will.

I doubt the South would have had a much better fate if its badly incurred debts had been repaid. There simply wasn't the educated/skilled labor base the North had for industrialization, or the ores and coal, and the rigid caste system was retained that made collective action and infrastructure improvement politically impossible before FDR brought in federal money and Northern contracting and employment practices. The rich Southerners and British who owned almost all the Southern war debt would have used any money given them to speculate locally in real estate or invested it in Northern industries. Or Caribbean plantations. It would simply not have benefited average Southerners beyond the initial reconstruction phase.