The Civil War in the lower Mississippi valley demonstrates the complexities of abolishing slavery. Focusing mostly on the Emancipation Proclamation, historians fail to explain how military emancipation was translated into abolition, viewing the Thirteenth Amendment as a stand-alone measure that gave constitutional sanction to the proclamation and that followed inevitably from it. However, abolition must be understood in conjunction with restoring the seceded states to the Union, since Americans generally believed that only states could abolish slavery. After the proclamation, Unionists in Louisiana and Tennessee split into free-state and proslavery – or “conservative” – factions, with both attempting to organize loyal governments. Taking proslavery Unionism seriously, Republicans insisted that the rebellious states abolish slavery in their state constitutions as a condition for readmission. The Thirteenth Amendment was thus originally envisioned to complement state action. Federal military success in the lower Mississippi valley first elucidated the problem of conjoining abolition and state restoration, and the region served as the crucible for transforming military emancipation into constitutional abolition.

Dec. 1, 1981.

These cases are brought here by writs of error to the Supreme Court of the State of Louisiana. They arise out of the efforts of the butchers of New Orleans to resist the Crescent City Live-Stock Landing and Slaughter-House Company in the exercise of certain powers conferred by the charter which created it, and which was granted by the legislature of that state.

Decades before the ACS even came to exist, white reformers had planned black colonies for what they imagined to be the vacant wilds of the American West. They discerned how internal colonization might address the “race question” while not wasting black labor overseas; for their part, black Americans took less offense at an idea that offered them autonomy without expatriation. But as white migrants, with slaves or without, settled the West at a rate few had foreseen, Americans abandoned continental black colonies. That changed with the Civil War, which rekindled northerners’ faith in internal colonization – but for the South, not the West. While chaos within the White House mothballed President Lincoln’s foreign colonization schemes, policy makers began to trust the white North’s salvation to “natural” trends of racial migration, which just might do the job that conscious design had failed to. Yet the postwar frustrations of conservatives such as President Andrew Johnson, and of the freedpeople (who craved ownership of the land that they had long worked), showed that black resettlement would continue to hold a place in American race relations.

The Introduction notes that the language of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution would, if fully embraced by courts, result in a jurisprudence more dedicated to equal educational opportunity. It argues that the disparities in opportunity currently in existence are inimical to a participatory democracy. The best tool to fight these disparities is social constructivism. The introduction previews the specific categories of educational injustice that the book intends to examine.

The Epilogue shows the conclusion of the constitutional conflict over slavery. As the North was poised to exert control over all three branches of the federal government, Southerners called for additional safeguards in the form of constitutional amendments. Americans from all walks of life participated in the constitutional conflict over slavery. They read the Constitution. They made their own interpretations of its provisions. And they acted on their constitutional beliefs by supporting secession, compromise, or coercion. Once the constitutional conflict over slavery became a shooting war, they volunteered by the tens of thousands to take up arms and fight for their understanding of the Constitution. In the end, the Civil War afforded the North the opportunity to realize the Constitution’s antislavery potential. In short order, Congress passed and the states ratified the Thirteenth Amendment (1865), which abolished slavery, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments (1868 and 1870), which compelled the states to recognize the rights of their African-American citizens. After the Civil War, the Founders’ Constitution was no more. In its place is the living Constitution that Americans have been expanding upon and improving ever since.