Republicans vs. the Fourteenth Amendment
· The Atlantic
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In this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts on the Brexit vote, which was cast 10 years ago this month. David explains why Brexit has not only been a failure but has led to years of political instability in the U.K. in the decade following the British vote to leave the European Union.
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Then, David is joined by Professor David W. Blight to discuss the blood-soaked aftermath of the Civil War and the stumbling project to bring freedom to the former slaves of the South through the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments. David and Blight discuss Trump’s project to gut the Fourteenth Amendment to say that some people born on American soil will no longer be Americans.
Finally, David ends the episode with a discussion of 1873 by Liaquat Ahamed. David reflects on the financial crisis of that year and the long price depression that followed.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be David Blight: professor of history at Yale, biographer of Frederick Douglass, and expert on post–Civil War American history. We will be discussing the Fourteenth Amendment, which passed through Congress in June of 1866, and we’ll be talking about what that foundational document tells us about what it means to be an American, who counts as an American, who counted then, who should count now. My book discussion this week will be 1873 by Liaquat Ahamed, an economic history of the crisis of that year, the financial crisis of that year, and of the long deflation that followed and that helped to doom the Reconstruction hopes that are encapsulated in the Fourteenth Amendment.
Before either the dialogue or the book discussion, some opening thoughts on another anniversary: that of the British vote to quit the European Union, a vote that was cast 10 years ago this month in June of 2016.
The Brexit vote has been followed by 10 years of the most extreme political instability in modern British history. Since the vote, Britain has had six prime ministers: David Cameron, who was the prime minister at the time of the vote and resigned a month later; Theresa May; Boris Johnson; Liz Truss, who was prime minister for 50 days, the shortest tenure in British history; Rishi Sunak until July of 2024. Then there was an election. The Conservatives were crushingly repudiated, and Keir Starmer was elected with one of the largest majorities in British history: 412 MPs, a majority of 170. But that didn’t last either. Keir Starmer now faces a leadership crisis. Almost 100 members of his own party have called on him to resign. And so very soon there may be a seventh British prime minister in a span of a decade.
Now, British history goes back a long time, and there have been revolutions and wars, but since the coming of parliamentary government to Britain, Britain has not seen anything like this. The only thing comparable is the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when, again, there was a lot of turnover and changes in the party system as Britain tried to digest that appalling crisis. The idea that you would compare Brexit to the shock of the First World War, one of the greatest shocks of all of British history, gives you an idea of what Britain is going through.
Some thoughts on why this has been so turbulent and painful. Now, as like most North Americans, I was baffled by Brexit and opposed it. I was in Britain on the day of the vote, and it always seemed to me that it just didn’t make sense to widen the distance between a country, a midsize economy, and its nearest neighbors and closest trading partners. But there was an argument for it that I could respect, and it was summed up to me by a friend who took me on a walking trip through the British countryside shortly before, or a few months before, the Brexit vote.
We walked over hills and ridges to a very high point overlooking a network of irregularly shaped fields. My friend pointed out these fields with their hedgerows separating them into strange shapes and said, “These fields have had the same shape since more or less the Black Death. This is a very old country. We’ve governed ourselves for a long time. We’re good at it, and we wanna keep on doing it.”
Well, how do you argue with that? You have to respect it. The only thing that you can ask is to say, All right, but just make clear to people, just all you have to do—that’s a very legitimate position. I understand it. National sovereignty is a precious thing, and if you’re willing to pay the price for it, by all means pay it. Just make sure the voters know that there will be a price. That cutting yourself from your neighbors, making it more difficult for goods and services and people to move between Britain and France and Denmark and Germany, that that will have a cost. Just make that clear.
But of course, that’s not what British people were told. They were told that Brexit would mean more: more money for services, more lower taxes, fewer foreigners. When, in fact, it has meant less.
A recent study has made clear the cost of Brexit to the British economy. According to this authoritative study in 2025, British GDP per capita was 6 to 8 percent lower than it would’ve been without Brexit. Investment was 12 to 18 percent lower, employment 3 to 4 percent lower, and productivity 3 to 4 percent lower. What these economists who made this important study were surprised to discover is most economists in 2016 would’ve imagined Brexit as a onetime shock. It would’ve been expensive. The British would’ve digested it. They would’ve started at a lower level and then resumed their growth path.
But that’s not what happened. What happened instead was Brexit has been a permanent tax on British growth, because it’s contributed to all kinds of uncertainty. It’s, above all, discouraged investment—not only foreign investment, but even British investment. This has weighed on the economy’s trajectory for a decade and looks fair to continue to weigh on the economy’s trajectory going forward.
That discovery, that Brexit meant not more—not more money for the NHS, not more growth, not more freedom—but less, working more for less result? That has disillusioned British voters and to a great extent radicalized them and pushed them away from the traditional big parties—Labour and Conservatives—to new and more radical parties. Reform, Greens, and others. They’re in a trap. They can’t quite admit that they locked themselves into it. No working politician is quite prepared to go on record and say “Brexit was a costly mistake, and we have to undo it.” Everyone says, “We must work within it; we must try to make it a success”—but there’s no way to make it a success. And working within Brexit means accepting we’re all gonna have to work harder and longer and get less and pay for the national independence that my friend praised to me very movingly.
Unable to cope with that, British voters are casting about blaming the politicians. Keir Starmer; when you ask British people, “Why is he so unpopular?” Well, they’ll tell you a story about how he chose an ambassador to the United States who was not forthcoming about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. There are a bunch of other mini-things, too. But the reaction to Starmer is too extreme to be explained as just the result of things he did, especially because the same forces brought down half a dozen of his predecessors before him and probably will bring down his successor, too, whenever that successor arrives.
Britain is struggling with a burden, and Americans have to understand that Britain got into this burden in part because of the bad influence of the United States. The United States is not blameless here. When Britain voted in June of 2016 to leave the European Union, that vote was not automatically binding. It was an advisory vote. It told the government of the day what the people wished it to do, but it didn’t tell the government of the day how to do it. And in fact, leaving the European Union is not a single choice. There were many, many versions of Brexit imaginable. Britain could have tried to renegotiate. Britain could have left the single-market part of the European Union but stayed within the customs union. That’s the way Norway, for example, has a relationship with the European Union. It’s not in the single market. It has its own currency, but it’s part of a customs union. But the Trump administration pressed Britain again and again and again to choose the most radical versions of Brexit. President Trump repeatedly warned British voters, most notably in an interview with The Sun newspaper in the summer of 2018, that if Britain chose any of the softer forms of Brexit, that would doom any hope of a U.S.-U.K. trade agreement. But the promise of it, or the threat that it wouldn’t materialize if Britain made other choices, pushed British politicians, the Conservative politicians, into choosing the most radical form of Brexit: the most expensive form, the most painful form, and the form that has been most destabilizing to them.
Now, someday Britain may revisit this decision. In the meantime, all of us who care about Britain, every American who values this longstanding U.S.-U.K. alliance and relationship has to hope that Britain will find some way to make a better success of it than it has made to date. But the best success means less prosperity than it had before, or less prosperity than it was on the way to having before. Britain is more isolated, more alone. It has incurred many, many costs and, most ironically of all, while British people voted for Brexit in hopes of reducing immigration from Europe, what they got instead was even higher levels of immigration from the rest of the world while European immigration dropped off. And not only do they have even higher levels of immigration from the rest of the world, but there is now steep and rising emigration of native-born Britons out of Britain looking for economic opportunity in other places of the world that they can’t find at home.
One of the themes of this whole discussion today, from Brexit at the beginning to 1873 at the end, is the refusal of English-speaking people in these two great economic powerhouses—the British economic powerhouse of the 19th century, the American economic powerhouse of the 20th century and 21st century—to accept that we live in a planetary economy. Always have, always will. We can’t exempt ourselves from that rule. We are bound by the same global economy that smaller and weaker societies also are bound by. It’s just less visible to us, and we have more temptation to believe that if we simply isolate ourselves, that we can somehow stop the flow of gravity from affecting inside the borders of these great economies as it affects everybody outside.
That is always an illusion. We are all part of a single world. It will affect us whether we like it or not. The slogan of the Brexiteers in 2016 was “Regain control or take control.” But the control was an illusion. You cannot exempt yourself. You cannot control events. You can only steer your country’s way forward through them, as best you can. And that means beginning by understanding the laws of economics really are binding on everybody. There’s no escape. You can only make better choices or worse choices, but you cannot spare yourself the need to make the choices. Britain tried to do that in June of 2016. The Trump experiment and many parts of the Biden experiment, too, have been American versions of the same error. We’re all paying the price for them. The most important question for the next decade of politics is: Will we ever learn our lesson?
And now my dialogue with David Blight.
[Music]
Frum: David Blight is professor of history at Yale University and director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition. His 2001 book, Race and Reunion, detailed how Black aspirations and contributions were sacrificed in the post–Civil War period as a price of North-South reconciliation. Blight won the Pulitzer Prize for History with his 2018 biography, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom. President Trump no doubt had Professor Blight’s work in mind when in February 2017 Trump acclaimed Douglass as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more.” So that turns out to be right. The Douglass biography is being adapted into a Netflix feature film by the Obamas’ Higher Ground production company.
We are here today to discuss the impending anniversaries of the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment is discussed a lot. Some of the principles of the Fourteenth Amendment are under fire from the Trump administration. It was adopted by Congress in June of 1866 and sent to the states for ratification, which was completed in July of 1868. So this summer is a season of many memorials. And I can’t think of a better person to discuss those memorials with than professor David Blight. Thank you so much for joining me today.
David Blight: Thank you, David. Great to see you, and thanks for having me on.
Frum: Let’s start, because we talk about things often without really reminding ourselves of their details. The Fourteenth Amendment is long, but would you be kind enough to read the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment for us and then summarize the next sections, 2 through 5?
Blight: Sure. Well, Section 1 is its ringing core, its statement. It reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Frum: So sections 2 through 5 are less ringing than that famous first section. I wonder if you would summarize for us what Section 2 says, Section 3, Section 4, and Section 5.
Blight: Well, Section 2 was a compromise forged in that winter of 1866 among the Republicans about the right to vote. They were not ready to declare what they will later in the Fifteenth Amendment, the right to vote as a constitutional amendment. So they reached this compromise that said that the percentage of people, Black people, denied the right to vote in any given southern state would have their representation reduced at that rate if indeed they denied the right to vote to 25 percent or 40 percent of their male citizens. It’s a rather vague provision, and they provided nothing in the way this was supposed to be adjudicated. But it was an attempt to put the right to vote in play without codifying it.
In Section 3 is that section that was almost all forgotten until recent times because of President Trump. It’s the one that says no one who had taken an oath of office to the federal government, the United States, and then engaged in insurrection or anything like insurrection could never again hold office in the federal government. That section was (laughs), it was lost to history almost until just a couple of years ago.
And Section 4 is Congress saying, it’s the Republicans running Congress saying, “We’re not going to pay Confederate debts.” And this was a big issue at the time, because the Confederacy had run up all kinds of debts to Great Britain, to France, and others during the war. And there were already many claims being made for the nearly $4 billion worth of liberated slaves. So this was codifying the idea that the federal government would never pay any claims of Confederate debt in the future. Such an important issue at that time that they wanted it in the Constitution.
Frum: Well, let me add a note, because this also goes to the present day—because the first sentence says, “The validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned.” And President Trump has often talked about repudiating the public debt of the United States in some way or another. But again, that’s just as running for office after you’ve engaged in an armed insurrection against the United States is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, so is questioning the public, even discussing, even proposing to talk about repudiating the public debt is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Blight: Completely right, David. The Trump administration has brought back the entire Fourteenth Amendment into our discourse.
Frum: So before we go forward, and now quickly, Section 5, which is very short.
Blight: Well, Section 5 is in all of the three Civil War constitutional amendments. It’s the same language as the Thirteenth. It says, “Congress shall have the power to enforce this by appropriate legislation.” Now that’s always been vague, of course, but there it is for politicians to interpret: Okay, what would be appropriate legislation? And we’ve had a thousand examples of this over time to enforce these measures.
Frum: So the Thirteenth Amendment passed by Congress in 1865 forbids slavery ever to be repeated. The Fifteenth [Amendment] passed in 1870, or ratified in 1870, guarantees the right to vote regardless of race. And the Fourteenth, in the middle, is the one we’ve just discussed.
Let’s step back and talk a little bit about what this means. Because, again, we use this language so often, I really do think we need a refresher. We know these phrases: “equal protection of law,” “privileges and immunities.” But let’s start with the one that is currently in the course. The Trump administration is litigating right now to argue that people born on American soil who are not the children of diplomats should not be citizens after all. Why did the Fourteenth Amendment start there? Why was this so important? What’s at issue in this debate over whether persons born on American soil, apart from certain specified categories of exceptions, shall be American citizens?
Blight: This was extremely important to John Bingham of Ohio, who wrote Section 1 or was the primary author of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, and to many others among the Republicans at that time, especially the radical Republicans. In great part because the United States had never had a federal definition of citizenship. Citizenship had been defined at the state level. Citizenship had all kinds of symbolic meanings. Free Black Americans had claimed citizenship thousands of times in their public statements, in their demands on the government, as early as the petitions from Revolutionary War soldiers demanding what they called citizenship based on their service in the Revolutionary War. But there’d never been any codified federal definition of citizenship.
Frum: In 1859, an American was a citizen of New York, a citizen of Virginia—a white American was a citizen of New York and Virginia—and it was sort of inferred that therefore they must be a citizen of the United States, but there’s no way to test whether you were or not, that it was New York or Virginia or the other states that defined who was a citizen of each state.
Blight: Very good point. And this is John Bingham and the Republicans of 1866 saying to Justice Taney, Roger B. Taney, that the Dred Scott decision is now dead letter. Gone forever.
Frum: What did the Dred Scott decision say?
Blight: The Dred Scott decision of 1857 was the 7-2 decision that ruled not only that Dred Scott and his family could not sue in federal courts for their freedom because of residence on free soil; it went so far as to say Black people had no rights which white people were bound to respect, and that Black people could never be citizens of the United States. That decision had as much to do as anything in the 1850s with completely polarizing American politics, to use our term today, and, indeed, energizing the Republican Party of the late 1850s and winning, indeed, the presidency by 1860. And therefore disunion comes out of that.
These Republicans who wrote the Fourteenth Amendment cut their teeth on that history. And this not just mention, but this opening salvo on citizenship is their way of saying: We are making the Dred Scott decision, which removed Black people forever from the American polity. We are declaring it dead letter forever. The war had sort of declared it dead letter, but not so much in the Constitution. Because emancipation, remember, had been an executive order. It was not legislation. This is a constitutional amendment and therefore legislation. It’s an answer to Dred Scott.
Frum: So when the Trump administration argues that illegal aliens or people who are born on American soil to people who are here illegally, present illegally—or without authorization, because some are asylum seekers who are not here illegally but without authorization—they say, “Here’s the exception.” Here’s their case: It says all persons born are naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof. Now, for example, if your father or mother is a foreign diplomat, they don’t get citizenship, because foreign diplomats can’t be prosecuted in American courts.
What does it mean when you say, Okay, you’re in the United States, your parents are here illegally or without authorization, you’re born on American soil, and the claim is you are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and therefore can’t be a citizen. What would the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment have thought of that?
Blight: Well, Bingham and the authors of Section 1 would say, Oh, no, no, no, no. We meant all persons. That’s what they said. Born here. It’s birthright citizenship, unmistakably. They meant it that way, because they intended it. And this was a rowdy debate back, oh, a few years ago—in fact, I was part of an amicus brief to the Supreme Court on this one—but they meant it not just for that moment of the status of the freed people, the 4 million former slaves; they meant it as a future measure. These men not only had cut their teeth on the great sectional crisis that led to the Civil War, the great slavery crisis; they’d also cut their teeth, if you like, politically on that first huge wave of immigration in the 1840s and 1850s. The German and Irish massive immigrations, 3 and 4 million people. They knew the world was coming to America and in the wake of the Civil War, probably more than ever. And, boy, were they right.
So they were actually visionaries of an America yet to be, where there were going to be all kinds of people, of all kinds of races and nationalities and ethnicities and religions, who are going to come here and then have children. And so what are the status of those people going to be? Would they be some kind of secondary citizens? Would they have some rights and not other rights? Would they be qualified in their place and their equality before law? Because in the next sentence of Section 1 of the Fourteenth, they’re going to codify equality before law. And if you don’t have any citizenship rights, you don’t have any protection; then you don’t have any equality.
So the two are linked. Yes, it’s unusual in the world in the 19th century. It’s not unique today, as the Trump White House keeps saying. They keep saying there’s nowhere else in the world that has birthright citizenship, and that’s not true. But nevertheless, it was quite unique in the 19th century for a country to declare, By birth, you are a citizen.
Frum: Well, I want to underscore something for those who are unfamiliar with the legal terminology. The Trump case boils down to that illegal aliens are not subject to the jurisdiction they’re of. They’re like diplomats. And the basic question, to translate this into plain speech is: Can the United States punish you? If you’re a person whom the United States cannot punish, like a diplomat, and you have a child on American soil, then your child is not an American citizen.
But if you’re a person that the United States can punish, that means you’re subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. It doesn’t mean you’re here legally. It means you’re subject to the power of the United States. And if you’re subject to the power of the United States, whatever your status, then your children, if born on American soil, are American citizens. They’re not like the children of diplomats, who are not subject to American power.
Blight: No, and they’re ostensibly here forever. They’re going to go to schools. Their parents are paying taxes. They’re going to own property. They’re going to do all the things that other Americans do—but not have citizenship, not have the right to vote, not have the right to participate in the polity on any level. I mean, it was impossible for these guys at this time, Bingham and his colleagues, to create this without imagining how it’s going to be used, how it’s going to be interpreted.
Frum: Well, and they had thought about this before the Civil War. Because one of the most powerful arguments that Republicans had before the Civil War—and Lincoln made this argument very poetically—is there is no necessary reason that the enslavement of propertyless people needs stop with people from Africa. And Lincoln has a famous syllogism where, If the Black man can be enslaved because his skin is darker than yours, then you can be enslaved by anyone whose skin is fairer than yours.
Blight: Yeah, it’s a great analogy. But also here, this part of the birthright-citizenship question is also part of John Bingham’s vision. That what he was really trying to do is, in his words—this is explicit—is to federalize the Bill of Rights, to make it possible now, for all those liberties we have in the First Amendment and in the Bill of Rights, to be enforceable by the federal government. Hence federal citizenship.
Frum: Let me slow you down a little bit, because I don’t think people will understand necessarily what you mean by “federalize the Bill of Rights.” Before the Fourteenth Amendment, what rights did you have under the Bill of Rights as an American?
Blight: Well, the First Amendment, if it could be enforced. Assembly, petition, speech, religion, etcetera.
Frum: But you had those rights only as against Congress. If the state of Virginia invaded your freedom of religion, then you could go look up what bill of rights does Virginia have, and appeal to a Virginia court to use Virginia statutes, the Virginia constitution, to protect you. But people would think it was weird. And so one of the things that is sort of a shocker to a lot of Americans, the First Amendment says Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion. Yet many states had established religions into the 19th century.
Blight: The Fourteenth Amendment is all caught up in federalism and this relationship with the states to the federal government. And, of course, the Civil War had been just fought over slavery, but it was also fought over states’ rights. Make no mistake. It was fought over this idea of what is a proper relationship of state powers, state laws, to federal powers and federal laws. The Civil War, these men had a right to think—the Republicans at that time in 1866–67—they had a right to think that the 700,000 dead in that war had made it now possible to alter this basic DNA of the Constitution. It’s federalism, but it’s all about how it gets enforced.
And the citizenship question, the birthright-citizenship question, is part of that effort to federalize power such that a confederacy, a secession or anything like it, could never happen again.
David Frum: Do I remember the story right, that after the Battle of Chickamauga, there was some effort to separate the bodies by states: the New England, the New York men here, the Massachusetts men here. Or wherever states; I don’t know if Massachusetts was at Chickamauga. And the commanding general said, Should we do this? Should we bury the men by state? And he, although a Virginian, a Union-loyal Virginian, said, No, we’ve had enough of that. Bury them together. Bury them by units, bury them by rank, but not by state. We’ve had enough of that.
Blight: Right. And eventually, of course, at Arlington. They were buried en masse.
Frum: So walk us now through the next sections. What is a privilege and immunity of a citizen of the United States?
Blight: It’s your rights before law. It’s your privileges in court. It’s your right to go to the law. It is—I mean, it has had many definitions through time, of course—but it is your immunity from prosecution without being indicted. It is your rights in court. It is your right to jury trial. It’s Bill of Rights rights. And they put it in here because they’ve just defined who’s the citizen. So what do you get as a citizen? You get all these rights.
And of course, that very spring—April of ’66, just before passing the Fourteenth—they had just passed the first ever civil-rights act in American history. Now, it wasn’t a fulsome civil-rights bill like we would see in the 1960s. It’s the first time they truly gave meaning to the Thirteenth Amendment. Who are these people who’ve been freed now? What are they? Well, here are some rights they have. Civil rights had nothing to do with political rights. It did create a kind of national citizenship basis, and it gave certain fundamental rights to things like contract law and protection of free labor. Now, it dealt only with really private and not public acts of discrimination. So it had its limitations. But for its moment, it was a pretty radical act. So they’ve just passed two months ago, this first civil-rights act of American history, giving meaning to what they’re about to do with birthright citizenship.
Frum: That’s vetoed by President Andrew Johnson, correct?
Blight: In a strident, aggressive veto message by Andrew Johnson. And then he will issue several more of those to other kinds of legislation, all the Reconstruction.
David Frum: And the veto is overridden.
Blight: The veto is overridden. They had a veto-proof Congress at that moment in time.
Frum: Yeah; so let’s track the progress of these various amendments. So the Thirteenth Amendment is passed, and that constitutionalizes the Emancipation Proclamation and says Okay, that’s it. And the Thirteenth Amendment is relatively uncontroversial, right? The Confederacy understood it’s beaten; slavery’s dead. We accept this. This is, we’re not going to … we’re going to try to harass and burden the freed slaves, but we accept that this was the issue of the war, and we’ve lost.
Why didn’t the United States stop there? Why was the Fourteenth Amendment necessary? What prompted it to happen, and what is the course by which the Fourteenth Amendment moves from idea on a drawing board to passage by Congress to ratification by the states?
Blight: Well, the Thirteenth Amendment left the country with 4 million freed slaves, undefined. Undefined, without liberties, who would have to be protected by military occupation, and they will be for least roughly a three-year period, four-year period. And again, the visionaries of the radical Republican regime of Reconstruction understood they had to go further than that. They had to somehow codify a new status. And that’s what Section 1 is trying to do. And it does it, frankly.
But crucial here is the Fourteenth Amendment comes out of that wintertime, January, February, six-, seven-week meeting of what was called the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. And that that was an unprecedented sort of entity, institution. Congress had never set up a huge committees like this to attempt to adjudicate such huge issues. They saw some 144 witnesses, many of them southerners, including Robert E. Lee himself. They had Freedmen’s Bureau agents come and testify. They collected a mass of data and information and opinions about what’s going on in the South. They did their job in that sense, and they didn’t have a lot of history to draw on here. There’d never been such a committee.
Frum: And what’s going on in the South is, if you’re a Black person in that first year after the war, and you—I guess they didn’t have jaywalking, but you do the equivalent of jaywalk—you will be arrested and sentenced to unpaid labor working for the state government. In effect, slavery by another, not private-property slavery, public-property slavery. But you’re back in slavery for the most trifling infractions of any kind of statute.
Blight: Those were called Black Laws. All kinds of them. Some of the states in the South passed as many as 70 and 80 so-called Black Laws. These were to control the lives and control the movements, control any attempt at owning property, any attempt at physical liberty, really, for the freedmen. They were passed in the latter part of 1865 and early part of 1866. And this joint committee investigated that and said, Halt. We are going to have to intervene, establish occupation in the South. And they will do that the following year, with the Reconstruction Act.
And it’s remarkable how fast this happened for the 19th century, or for that matter, any century. They wanted to get into law a statement of the liberties and status of the freed people over against what they already saw happening. There’s no understanding the Fourteenth Amendment without understanding that unique committee on Reconstruction, which came out with a whole set of policy suggestions. But it also made a moral statement. It said explicitly, it would be a terrible mistake—in fact, they even use the word crazy in their document, in their report—if they let ex-Confederates back into authority in the southern states.
Frum: So, 1865: Thirteenth Amendment, a formal constitutional abolition of slavery. Reaction of the South, Black Laws, harassment. A creation of a kind of public ownership of Black people on the most trivial provocations under conditions where white people would not be subject to the same punishments. Congress reacts in the summer of 1866 by enacting the Fourteenth Amendment in Congress. That’s maybe not the right word; passing it through House and Senate. If the South is in such reaction against the Thirteenth Amendment, how did the Fourteenth Amendment get ratified as fast as it did? How is that possible?
Blight: Well, in great part because there are 11 ex-Confederate states not in the union that do not get to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment is ratified by the Union states; let’s put it that way. Because, for this purpose, the radical Republicans considered the ex-Confederate states out of the union. Now, Lincoln—who’s now dead and gone, of course—had always said, Well, they never really left the union. That was his way of hoping to get them back in more quickly, and so on. But no; the Republicans in Congress called a halt to all of that.
Frum: So this will have mighty portents for the future, because the Fourteenth Amendment is ratified by two-thirds of the loyal states, not by two-thirds of the states. And during the second civil-rights era of the 1950s and ’60s, certain kinds of very conservative people will argue, because of this, that the Fourteenth Amendment is being used to justify the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights [Act] of ’65. And people will argue at that time, “The Fourteenth Amendment is unconstitutional. It’s an unconstitutional amendment.” And I think some of the things that are going on with the Trump people and their attempt to overturn birthright citizenship are an echo of this challenge in the existence of the Fourteenth Amendment itself, because it was ratified only by the loyal states, not by all the states.
Blight: I think you’re dead right. It’s that kind of redeemer mentality. By redeemer, we mean the effort of the white South and the Southern Democratic Party to redeem control of their states. This is a modern, much later effort in the view, I suspect, of many Trumpists of redeeming a union that they in some ways wish had never really been changed. But yeah, I mean; this is a revolutionary time. We have to keep remembering that. This is a remodeling, a remaking, a reconsideration of an American union. And those three constitutional amendments with the adjoining Reconstruction Acts and Civil Rights Acts—there’ll be more of those. Remake a Constitution.
We don’t really live, frankly, under the Constitution written in Philadelphia in the 1780s. We really live under the Constitution written in Washington in the 1860s. If we’re considering questions of liberties and rights and equality and so on, we live in a second Constitution invented by the Republicans of the Civil War era.
Frum: Let me take you back to our chronology. So the Fourteenth Amendment is ratified in summer of 1868 with the votes of the free states, not all the states. And why didn’t it include the right to vote at that time?
Blight: Too big an issue. The right to vote was, as Frederick Douglass once called it, the liberty that built a ring of fire around all other rights. Well, even the radical Republicans were not quite yet ready to go that far. And even in the Fifteenth Amendment; of course, that’s a modified amendment. It only really gave the right to vote to Black southern men, not in the North. So each one of these—well, the Thirteenth wasn’t so much a compromise—but the Fourteenth, Fifteenth are full of compromises, because they’re dealing with issues that truly are radical and revolutionary.
And the right to vote, especially. The right to vote—you know, when the Fifteenth Amendment passed and finally was ratified in 1870, it’s amazing how the country reacted to it. Headlines everywhere. The Civil War is finally over. Reconstruction is finally over. The New York Tribune, the largest-circulation paper in the United States, edited by Horace Greeley. Headline: “We have now done with Reconstruction.” It’s all over. You give people the right to vote, what else can you do? You know; okay, well, there’s all that economic problem, which will come back with a vengeance after the Panic of 1873 sets in. But the right to vote is fundamental in the whole political discourse of this period. And so it was something they were really reluctant to fully touch. And when they did touch it in the Fifteenth Amendment, it’s very modified.
Frum: And it’s hedged in another way. Which is—I think people may have the idea that before the Fifteenth Amendment, the United States was a country in which every white man voted, but Black men and women did not. And so now that you’re extending the presumption, well, everybody should vote except for certain categories, which were the freed slaves and women. But that’s not quite how it was. In 1869, ’70, even the northern states were not so certain about letting everybody vote.
Blight: Oh, absolutely not. In fact, Connecticut itself, where I live, Connecticut in 1865 passed a referendum denying Black men the right to vote. Right after the Civil War ended.
Frum: But it wasn’t just about race. When the southern states begin importing various kinds of restrictions—poll taxes, literacy taxes, which were unfairly administered—in a kind of early version of what we would now call a troll, they would copy the laws of northern states, Massachusetts and New York. Which had similar kinds of measures to prevent Irish people from voting. And they say, Okay, we are going to have exactly in South Carolina the same language that you have in Massachusetts that you are using to exclude your undesirable voters. We will use them to exclude our undesirable voters. Go tell us why we’re wrong when you do the same thing.
Blight: Yeah, and they weren’t wrong. I mean, in terms of the model that they were adapting.
The right to vote has always been so fundamental that it was almost like a rail of politics they were so reluctant to touch, as they were so reluctant to touch this business of federalism. But they did. And of course, that’s going to set up a constitutional crisis when the increasingly conservative Supreme Court during Reconstruction and after will start first modifying and then all but destroying the Fourteenth Amendment.
Courts are always more conservative than legislatures, usually. But this right to vote and this question of federalism were two things that Americans in the 19th century were reluctant to touch. Because voting rights—you know, the whole theory of voting rights is that it gives you then the liberty to protect your other rights. And the right to vote meant the right to hold office. And they now had a history, a relatively short history, of hundreds of Black men holding office in the South during Reconstruction. So when the southern states start to get into the business of disfranchisement, the business of Jim Crow laws, their history now is: “My God, all those Black men who served during Reconstruction in government, and there’s one or two of them still left in the 1890s.” That is never going to happen again, was their attitude.
Some of these liberties and rights did last all the way to the late 1890s in certain places in the South. It’s a mistake for people to think that all the lights went out at once. That’s not the case. And particularly in North Carolina, for example, but it’s a slow process. But it is a process of revolution and counterrevolution and the destruction of those liberties that the war had been fought to create.
Frum: Let’s end here as we move into another chapter of history. How does this revolutionary period come to its end?
Blight: First, it was a kind of wearing-out of the passion and zeal of these leaders of the Republican Party of the 1860s. Many of them are dead and gone by the 1870s, or they’re elected out of office. Then you get the [President Ulysses S.] Grant years and a lot of scandals, which were mostly financial scandals. Third, you had a massive depression hit the country in 1873, and it’s going to last right on, in certain ways, all the way to the 1890s. Terrible unemployment in the 1870s. Some railroads went out of business. Millions lost jobs. Their attention and their interest in the North in particular went other directions.
And then you get the revival of the Democratic Party in the South and this process of what historians have come to call Southern Redemption. They called it that themselves, redeeming control of southern state legislatures and governors’ offices by the Southern Democratic Party. And that process, though it’s still not complete—it’s going to take the 1880s to be completed—was the counterrevolution of white supremacy. The Southern Democratic Party, and a decreasing interest, to say the least, in the northern states in the so-called southern question or the so-called race question.
And I’d add one other thing here: The decline of Reconstruction and its overthrow is also part—and I’ve, of course, written two whole books on this—of this massive process of sectional reconciliation of the Civil War. This is a reunion eventually of North and South, and it’s a cultural reunion, it’s a political reunion, it’s an economic reunion. Southerners are begging northerners for investments in their economy, as long as they’d be left alone with their own politics and their own race relations. And this kind of culture of reunion and reconciliation by the late 19th century, turn of the century, had by and large taken over American society. Americans wanted to forget about that massive war, get on with making money, get on with dealing with these teeming cities now full of immigrants. And all that trouble of the Civil War and Reconstruction, enough of it. And, of course, that left undone, unfinished, undone. Betrayed that great revolution of the 1860s.
Frum: We now live in a moment when many American ideals do seem to be going into regression. And yet, for all that we want to be wise and not too enthusiastic about progress, progress, progress, these legacies are there. Resources for the future waiting to be used.
Blight: They are, and you wouldn’t have had a modern civil-rights movement without the Fourteenth Amendment. You wouldn’t have—and let’s remind people that in Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, the second paragraph is all about the Declaration of Independence. And he also mentions Reconstruction. He mentions the Fourteenth Amendment. Without that Fourteenth Amendment having been laid down, without a history of jurisprudence over it, without its great symbol, I don’t think you could have a modern civil-rights movement.
In fact, some of us used to make the case during all of the protests about apartheid in South Africa that one of the problems South Africa faced in its crusade to get rid of apartheid was that it didn’t have this story. It didn’t have this liberation story from the previous century. It had to make it up. And it did. But here, we did have the story of Reconstruction. The story of Reconstruction had been, of course, soiled badly by the historians’ profession, to be honest. And yet the ’64 Civil Rights Act and the ’65 Voting Rights Acts are direct responses to the civil-rights Acts, the Reconstruction Acts, and the amendments of Reconstruction. They are the renewal of those. Even though—
Frum: And even though the Supreme Court of the United States is right now effectively repealing the Voting Rights Act—
Blight: Exactly.
Frum: It too remains a resource for the future, a reminder of what was, what might be.
Blight: And if anybody didn’t believe in revolutions and counterrevolutions and cycles of history, they’re certainly getting a lesson in it now. We now have a Supreme Court full of people who’ve been itching for years to turn around those great changes of the 1960s. And they have all but accomplished it, although they haven’t quite destroyed birthright citizenship yet.
Frum: David Blight, thank you so much for joining me today on The David Frum Show. I’m very grateful for your time, your wisdom, your expertise, your great scholarship. Thank you.
Blight: Thank you, David. This was fun, and I hope useful.
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Frum: Thank you so much to David Blight for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I said at the top of the show, this week’s book is 1873 by Liaquat Ahamed: an economic history of the financial crisis of that year and the long price depression and deflation that followed the crisis of 1873. I chose to talk about this book today because I think it casts some additional light on the conversation with David Blight about the Fourteenth Amendment and the end of Reconstruction.
Now, as David Blight said, Reconstruction comes to its effective end beginning with the congressional elections of 1874. Republicans lose their majority in the House of Representatives that year, and they’re on their way to a very close election in 1876, which is ultimately resolved by a deal in 1877 whereby the Republicans get the presidency, or keep the presidency, in exchange for withdrawing federal troops from the former occupied South.
The withdrawal of federal troops from the South in 1877 allows the southern whites to reimpose Democratic Party rule all over the former Confederacy and begin the process of political and social exclusion of the freed slaves. Such that within 20 years, Jim Crow and whites-only voting is the rule across the former Confederacy.
What happened to cost the Republicans their majority in the House of Representatives in 1874? It was the economic crisis of 1873 and the prolonged price deflation that followed. And Ahamed’s book is the best study I’ve ever read, I think that could ever be achieved, of that economic crisis.
There’s a problem with American economic history that Ahamed is one of the rare American writers to avoid, as he does in both in this book, 1873, and in his previous Pulitzer Prize–winning history, Lords of Finance, published in 2008. Ahamed really understands the American economy as part of a global economic system—something that a lot of other writers refuse to do. And because he thinks globally, he can cast light locally in a way that is really remarkable.
So here’s his story. The world economy sees a tremendous expansion in the 1840s and 1850s. The United States economy joins in this expansion. It’s in the decade of the 1850s that the northern United States builds the factories and the railway network that will win the Civil War for them. In order to fight the Civil War, the United States suspends payments in physical metal. Before the Civil War, the United States used gold and silver as money, but mostly silver. And in that, it was like most of the economies around the world, which used a mix of gold and silver, but mostly silver. The United States adopts paper money during the Civil War, which causes an inflation. And at the end of the Civil War, it wants to end the paper money and return to some kind of metal money system as it had before. How to do that was a very vexed and complicated problem.
Driving the problem was: A lot of people had lent money to the government. A lot of Americans had lent money to the Union government, and they wanted to get as much money back as possible for their loans. On the other hand, other Americans, farmers especially, had borrowed money to grow more food and to build more factory goods. And so you had this contrast between the interests of creditors and the interests of debtors. Creditors wanted the money to be restored as expensively as possible. Debtors wanted the money to be restored as cheaply as possible.
In the middle of all of this, the United States and other countries, too, make a fatal economic decision. In the good years of the 1840s and 1850s, the world had seen a lot of gold mining. But world gold production triples over the single decade of the 1850s, driven by new mines in California, in Australia, and to a lesser extent, in Colorado and British Columbia. Abundant gold creates a growing gold-money supply, which means there’s plenty of money to handle financial transactions. As Americans remember the prosperity of the 1850s, they make a decision in the 1870s to go back not on the mixed silver-and-gold system they used before the Civil War, but on a true gold standard like that of the world’s leading economy, Great Britain, which gave a lot of the fashion to the rest of the world.
At the same time, as the Americans decide to go on the gold standard, other important economies do so too. Especially Germany, but all across Europe. So we have moved from a world of mixed silver and gold in the 1840s and ’50s to a world of gold only in the 1870s—at exactly the point that the world pauses in its discovery of new sources of gold.
So Americans go back onto gold at exactly the moment gold is becoming relatively scarce. And that makes prices go down, and that imposes this heavy burden, intensifies the burden on anyone who’s borrowed money. Especially the farmers who borrowed money to buy more land, to plant more seed, to get more equipment, to grow more crops to feed the Union army. And those farmers are horribly disillusioned by this intensifying deflation and depression that spreads after 1873. And they turn against the Republican Party, and the American political system will, for the next 20 years, be very unstable. There are no majorities for anything, least of all for upholding the rights of the freed slaves in the South.
When this story is told in most conventional history books, it’s told as an American story only. But the story begins with economic crisis in the American financial system in the fall of 1873, and then it just takes for granted that there’s going to be pages you skip over in the history books about currency and coinage and banking, and it’s all very technical and dreary. And no one pays attention to it—to understand what happened that drove Americans who had shed blood to free slaves in the 1860s to give so utterly up on them in the 1870s and after.
As Ahmed points out, the period of the great price deflation after the return to the gold standard in the 1870s is a period of social reaction—not only in the United States, but all over the world. The League of Antisemites is the world’s first explicitly anti-Semitic political party, formed in Germany in 1879. Germany, Austria, and other countries turn to protectionism, xenophobia, militarism. All kinds of other reactionary social ideas spread. Now, it’s not just because of the deflationary mood, but there’s something about tougher times and deflationary times that cause people to become more inward-looking, more protectionist, more conservative, more reactionary. Whereas in the ebullient days of the 1850s, the ideas that had the upper hand were optimistic, and free trade and global integration. There’s a lesson here: not just about the need to study the whole world economy when you do economic history, but to understand how seemingly technical economic choices can have large cultural consequences.
The United States made a decision in the 1870s to give up on the mixed gold-and-silver system of before and go on gold after the war—in great part because it seemed like a good idea. That’s what Britain did, and the British seemed to know what they were doing. Also in part to serve the interests of those people who had lent money to the Union armies. But I think above all is it just seemed like a rational, modern, grown-up idea. The British did it. They must know what they’re doing. If you wanted to be known as a serious person after 1870, you were a person who advocated a gold-only standard. And because of that decision, the Republicans lose the House in 1874, Reconstruction ends, Jim Crow is imposed. And the whole world turns in darker, darker directions, because of similar decisions made in Germany and other countries.
A lot is at stake with the economic decisions we make. And at a time when so many of us seem to be getting our political ideas from memes on short-form video, it’s a reminder of the supreme importance of paying attention to the deep details. The kinda excitement and issues and the kind of excitement and fizz of politics is driven by things that it is really worth investing the time and labor and mental energy to understand on a deeper level.
That’s what 1873 does, in a book that is, by the way, beautifully written and very accessible. That’s what Lords of Finance did: Liaquat Ahamed’s previous book on the Great Depression, which helped us understand that as an international—not just an American—event. And it helps us to understand, too, why the deep choices we make in favor of economic freedom must be sustained even when times turn choppy and difficult. Because if you give up on the ideals of economic freedom when times turn choppy and difficult, you lock yourself onto paths that go in directions that are really pretty horrible to contemplate. They lead from the ebullience of the 1920s to the downturn of the 1930s to all the crises that followed. And in the 1870s, they lead to the end of the optimistic ideas of the mid-Victorians and to the darker mood of the late Victorians in the United States, an end to hopes for racial equality for a century in Europe, to the path that begins to take that continent toward the First World War.
Thanks so much for joining me today. If you value this program, I hope you will subscribe to it on whatever platform you use and share it with friends who you think might enjoy it. As ever, the best way to support the work we do here at The David Frum Show is by subscribing to The Atlantic. That way, you get the work of not only of me, but of all of my colleagues at The Atlantic. Thanks again for joining. See you next week here on The David Frum Show. Bye-bye.
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