Has the validity of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments ever been formally challenged in court, on the grounds that the former rebel states weren’t free to not ratify them if they wanted to ever be represented in Congress again? If no actual rulings, have any respected authorities argued that this might be the case?
You seem to be suggesting that these amendments could be viewed as illegitimate on the argument that Southern states were voting under duress, or as you put it, “former rebel states weren’t free to not ratify them if they wanted to ever be represented in Congress again”. While it was true that unrepentant secessionists were largely purged from legislative roles in the immediate aftermath during Reconstruction, that was done because what they did was illegal, and the people elected to legislative positions, often with the voted of ’freedmen’ who were nonetheless not previously allowed to vote in many states because they were non-white, weren’t landed, or other exclusionary measures, voted in favor of ratifying the ‘Reconstruction Amendments’. There is no argument to challenging their validity as Constitutional amendments on that flimsy premise, although many provisions have been challenged, either in interpretation or because states altered their constitutions in efforts to reclassify former slaves and free blacks as non-citizens or otherwise restricted in the democratic franchise.
We might as well ask if striking the Nuremberg racial laws was illegitimate because former Nazis didn’t agree with eliminating them.
Stranger
It would be a subject for Great Debates as to whether the three postwar amendments were coerced or not. I prefer to limit this to the factual question of has this issue been raised in American jurisprudence or not?
I thought that the events happened:
–Confederate states secede from the union, so they are no longer part of the USA.
–Civil war.
–Constitutional amendments pass congress. None of the states that seceded are involved.
–Confederate states are readmitted to the USA on the condition that they acknowledge and agree to all parts of the constitution, including the new amendments.
This is where it gets complicated. It’s more like
Confederate states announce they are seceding. So they consider themselves no longer part of the USA. The USA disagrees with the announcement and with their right to secede. So as far as the USA is concerned, legally they are still part of the USA. But practically they are barred from having reps sit in Congress.
[Moderating]
The Factual Question here is whether this question has ever been tried by the courts. That’s it. Anything beyond that is probably better suited for a different thread.
@Stranger_On_A_Train, would you please summarize the conclusions and effects of those rulings?
Texas v White says this is not true. Also with the admission of West Virginia as later upheld in Virginia v West Virginia (1870) it was decided that Congress as the ones who guarantee states a republican form of government can decide which state government is the legal representative. So when the southern states ratified the amendments in 1868 all was legal as far as SCOTUS interpreted the Constitution.
Now one could argue if SCOTUS created a legal fiction in order to ruled the way they did given that Chief Justice Chase was an ardent Republican, especially how the Wheeling Convention was clearly NOT republican (small r) but then again whether or not it was was a question for Congress and not SCOTUS to decide.
I’m not your unpaid research clerk. You can find copious summaries and analysis for these cases on numerous sites such as Justia, the Federal Judicial Center, the Constitutional Accountability Center, Teachinghistory.org, and many law school websites as well as any textbook on Constitutional law as these are all notable cases in the history of conlaw.
Stranger
Are you taking a summer 1L Con. Law class or something?
No, I’m just old and tired and increasingly finding it difficult to go through the entirety of long, formally worded court decisions to finally arrive at an understanding of what the decision actually was.
Fair enough. If you’re interested in lighter reading, there are wikipedia articles for each of the cases that talk about the rulings, history, etc.
Will do.
To be fair, in my memory nothing in the Civil Rights Cases questioned the legality or authenticity of the Amendments; to the contrary they relied on their legitimacy. In a quick perusal, all of the other cases Stranger cited ruled similarly.
The OP’s question did not ask whether future decisions depended on these Amendments being part of the Constitution. Clearly they did, by the dozens. Notwithstanding, clever lawyers - and some mindless ones - have always found “creative” arguments so as to defend impossible cases. It’s not beyond belief that one of them was as given in the OP.
The question posed by the OP has never been directly answered by the Supreme Court. However there have been some rulings which danced around the edge of the issue, and leave little doubt that the “coercion” issue, if raised, would be dismissed as a political question already settled by Congress and the President in July 1868.
The ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments was a consequence of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which mandated biracial suffrage in ten Southern states. The existing whites-only government of Georgia immediately challenged its constitutionality. The Supreme Court upheld the Act in 1867-68 (Georgia v. Stanton), writing that “the rights of sovereignty, of political jurisdiction, of government, and of corporate existence” that the state government was seeking to maintain called “for the judgment of the court upon political questions, and, upon rights, not of persons or property, but of a political character”, over which the Courts had no jurisdiction.
From that point ratification followed almost inevitably, governments answerable to black voters wanted to ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Any judicial challenge would have been futile.
SCOTUS revisited the issue of ratification much later, in 1939, in a case (Coleman v. Miller) concerning the contested ratification by Kansas of (an ultimately failed) child labor amendment to the Constitution. The details of the case need not concern us, but SCOTUS had reason to discuss the Fourteenth Amendment and noted simply that Congress and the Secretary of State had both proclaimed its ratification valid and that “This decision by the political departments of the Government as to the validity of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment has been accepted.”
As for “respected authorities”, you can Google dozens of lengthy arguments that the Amendments are invalid. You will have to decide for yourself whether you “respect” any of them; I will not decide for anyone else.
Note that as of today, all 50 states have ratified the 13th.
In 1865, there were 36 states, 24 Union, 11 CSA and 4 border. To ratify, the 13th only needed 27 votes, so just the Union and 3 border states would have been enough.
Or May of 1865.
Unfortunately, Virginia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Arkansas, South Carolina, Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia all were part of the 27, making the question relevant.
That is true, but that was just the first 27 needed. States kept signing on, Mississippi was last and fairly recently.
The Union states were- California, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin and newly admitted states West Virginia and Nevada .
California ratified just after Georgia, followed by Iowa, Maine, Michigan, New jersey, New York, Oregon, etc etc. So even counting out the CSA state- and there is no good reason to- the 13th would have been ratified. But some took longer, since there was obviously no hurry, They would have gotten to 27 only a few months later if there was a need to hurry. As of today, every state has ratified it.
This is like arguing Lincoln didnt win his second term or that no actions of Congress after secession were valid, since the states that left the Union didnt get to vote.