연방헌법 수정조항 제14조와 反노예제적 내셔널리즘의 승리

Abstract

Adopted in April 1866, the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, one of “Civil War Amendments” or “Reconstruction Amendments,” declared that all persons born or naturalized in the United States were citizens of the nation and citizens of their states and that no state could abridge their rights without due process of law or deny them equal protection of the law. This amendment nullified the Dred Scott decision of 1857, which had declared that blacks were not citizens. Second, the amendment guaranteed that if a state denied suffrage to any of its male citizens, its representation in Congress would be proportionally reduced. As well as that the Fourteenth Amendment revealed Republican Moderates’ growing receptivity to Radical demands, including black male enfranchisement, it was the first national effort to limit state control of civil and political rights. In some respects, it looks clear that the Congress took the most ambitious step after it had achieved the major object of the Civil War through the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, that is, abolition of slavery. Under the moderate Presidential Reconstruction, the ex-Confederate states took steps to recover their political powers and old racial order, and to ensure a landless, dependent black labor force, by passing black codes to replace the slave codes. The so-called “home rule” by the southern whites without federal interference would definitely make the Civil War meaningless. To frustrate the reactionary southern intentions, Congress adopted the Civil Rights Act, in March 1866, that made blacks U. S. citizens with the same civil rights as other citizens and authorized federal intervention in the states to ensure black rights in court. However, Republicans in Congress needed a more secure measures to protect the fruits of the Civil War against the obvious hostility and repulsion to the Civil Rights Act. So, they took their next step: the passage of a constitutional amendment to prevent the Supreme Court from invalidating the new Civil Rights Act and to block Democrats in Congress from repealing it. Unlike the Thirteenth Amendment, however, the Fourteenth Amendment have generated considerable interpretational confusion and misunderstanding among the Civil War historians and legal scholars. One school of interpretation claims that the Fourteenth Amendment, as a political compromise among several factions of the Republican Party, was fundamentally conservative rather than radical. These historians contend the true conservatism of Congressional Reconstruction policies and the manifest distaste of many Republicans for federal intervention in the South by stressing the ultimate change of language in the amendment. However, is it true that the understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment was so unclear and confusing as the historiography shows? Actually not. In a critical respect, the Fourteenth Amendment was not merely an outgrowth of antislavery project but, further, an embodiment of nationalist vision of the Republicans. In short, it signified the successful fusion of antislavery and nationalist beliefs. While radicalism of the 1850s denoted “a persistent refusal to compromise with the South on any question involving slavery,” radicalism, with the Civil War, took the form of unqualified devotion to the nationalist cause, including the major expansion of central authority. The Fourteenth Amendment, as a realization of the radicalism, did not merely amend the Constitution. Rather, it revolutionized the Constitution and the political structure. The local debates in Wisconsin over the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment provide a useful window into revolutionary transformation of Americans’ social vision and legal mind that had been under way since the eve of the Civil War, that is, away from the preservation of the existing federalism and proslavery constitutionalism to the establishment of forceful nationalism and antislavery constitutionalism. The ratification debates in Wisconsin, rather than simply reproducing the generally compromising and conciliatory attitude of Republican leaders in Washington, showed clearly that the advocates of the amendment did not conceal their intention of revolutionizing antebellum American political and economic structures by positing the amendment as foundational step for construction of a greater postwar nation. In short, Wisconsin’s nationalists endeavored to reaffirm and develop the cardinal nationalist principles of the Thirteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1866.