Part VI: Slavery and the Reconstruction Amendments

An Introduction To Constitutional Law Video Library: Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), The Slaughter-House Cases (1873), Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876), Strauder v. West Virginia (1880), The Civil Rights Case (1883), Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

⚖️ Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)

The History of the 13th and 14th Amendments

The Privileges or Immunities Clause

⚖️ The Slaughter-House Cases (1873)

⚖️ Bradwell v. Illinois (1873)

⚖️ U.S. v. Cruikshank (1876)

⚖️ The Slaughter-House Cases (1873)

The Enforcement Powers of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments

⚖️ Strauder v. West Virginia (1880)

⚖️ The Civil Rights Case (1883)

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment

⚖️ Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886)

⚖️ Plessy v. Ferguson (1896)

 

Comments

[Archibald Tuttle]

Someday, I would love to hear these professors discuss how all these protections excluded native Indians and chinamen until well into the 20th century.

It is particularly grating that the word "all people" excluded those two groups,
and that in some cases it was not considered a crime to kill Indians or chinamen because they were not human.

[Krayt]

History is messy. Rather than sit there agape with modern sensibilities, puzzled, if not stunned, at the past, treat it as a warning and a lesson at the difficulties of change, and the problems of “How do you get here from there?”

Philosophical reasoning it was wrong to own your fellow man was a novel thing that needed to grow. This in a context of industrialized slavery, yet, and not ancient “Your city-state lost, sux to be you, into the slave caste with you!”

[JoeFromtheBronx]

Yick Wo v. Hopkins specifically protected Chinese laundries.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

"chinamen"

TWEET! The referee just blew his woke-whistle, indicating that you just used an unacceptable word. The penalty is loss of 10 social credit points.

[bernard11]

Philosophical reasoning it was wrong to own your fellow man was a novel thing that needed to grow.

I think it was widely accepted on an abstract level, even by some slaveholders. What needed to happen was for people to feel strongly enough about it to act, even against their own interests.

But they didn't, and, IIRC, it ultimately took force - a lot of it - to make the philosophical idea reality.