source: Earl1911
When the concept of “State’s Rights” (10th Amendment to the Constitution) is brought up, generally people consider the issue belonging to the Southern states. However the South was not the exclusive advocate of the concept of State’s Rights and interposition. In earlier days it was the New England and Northern states that were the first to advocate and stand for these principles. They were also more successful in their efforts to use such to protect their vested interests. In 1808 Connecticut and Massachusetts endorsed interposition; the famous New England Secession Convention was held at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1814; the House of Representatives of Massachusetts in 1846 declared the war with Mexico to be unconstitutional; and many Northern states successfully nullified the fugitive slave acts, thereby overruling both the federal Congress and the federal Supreme Court.
Following the War between the States, the radical congress had revenge in mind. In its zeal to punish, plunder, and reconstruct the South, it greatly increased the congress at the expense of the states. Part of its tactics was the imposition of “forced” amendments, adopted without Constitutional justification and procedure. The process of adopting the Fourteenth Amendment, for example, was an example of repeated irregularities that gives insight into the glaring arguments regarding the legitimacy of all of the reconstruction era congressional acts.
In Ex parte Milligan, for example, the United States Supreme Court ruled that martial law could not be constitutionally imposed in the absence of war or rebellion and in areas where the civilian courts were functioning. The Reconstruction Act of March 1867 was a brazen and flagrant violation of this decision. Also, since congress had declared that the Southern states were without legal governments, it had trapped itself in a contradiction. Earlier Congress had accepted the ratification by the Southern states to the Thirteenth Amendment, but now Congress had declared these same states to be illegal. It was also apparent that this act denied civil rights to upwards of nine million Southerners. As such, it violated the Fifth Amendment guarantee of due process and was in direct violation of constitutional prohibitions against bills of attainder.*
To make the point of just how absurd it is to contend that the Fourteenth Amendment was legally ratified, assume the following:
1. Assume that the amendment had been constitutionally proposed, then;
2. Assume that the ratifications of Tennessee, Oregon and West Virginia were proper, then:
3. Assume that the rescission by New Jersey and Ohio were illegal.
THEN you are left with the problem that still Congress is six votes short of the number necessary for ratification.
Now comes the interesting part. To obtain the ratification of the remaining states, Congress required the Southern states to ratify in order to get back into the Union. But remember, states can vote on ratification of a constitutional amendment only if they were duly recognized as governments at the time they acted on the amendment. But Congress had already declared these “states” to be illegal governments and not a part of the Union – therefore their ratifications, according to constitutional principle, cannot be counted toward final ratification. Thus we are left with an amendment that was never ratified!
But let’s not stop there. The Southern States were forced to ratify the amendments. After learning that the South had rejected the Fourteenth Amendment, Senator James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin declared that the north would “march upon the them and force them to adopt it at the point of the bayonet.” Their ratification was therefore also illegal on the basis of duress.
Clearly, the Fourteenth Amendment was never constitutionally ratified, even if it had ever been constitutionally proposed.
* NOTE: A Bill of Attainder is described as a legislative act, no matter what its form, that applies either to named individuals or to easily ascertainable members of a group in such a way as to inflict punishment on them without a judicial trial.
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