One of the big drivers of the Constitution was the matter of preserving the balance between free and slave states, lest one faction gain more power over the other. That matter was conclusively put to rest with the Civil War and the resultant three Amendments.
But did anyone advocate for just ripping up the old Constitution and starting anew, considering that the factor that drove much of it was largely obsolete?
No. The business of trying to reunite the country and Reconstruction in the South was fraught enough without attempting a Constitutional Convention that would doubtless have reignited the flames, and the entire reason the South seceded was that those provisions no longer gave it sufficient power vice the more populated and industrialized North to perpetuate the practice of human slavery.
Stranger
What would the new Constitution do? The North considered the war the triumph of the Constitutional order, with only one aspect of it needing change. Certainly, no one thought that slavery drove the Constitution. While slavery was an important issue, and the only one that seems to matter today, most people in the North lived entire lives paying it no attention. Whenever the issue grew heated, politicians created Compromises (with a capital “C”, like the Missouri Compromise and the Compromise of 1850) that kicked the can down the road.
The balance between the slave and free states had been upended by the war. The winning Republicans had no need to alter the conditions. The war had barely touched the North. Even the slight incursions of Antietam and Gettysburg hardly created the epic carnage that the South suffered. The North gained hugely from the money spent by the government (similar to what happened in WWII). The population actually increased. By my calculations, a million people emigrated to the North during the war. Since many of them were young men interested in accepting the $300 bounty paid by northerners to hire alternates instead of serving, the Army of the North had more men of fighting age to draw upon at the end of the war than the beginning, a possibly unique circumstance. Changing the Constitution other than the three amendments that hurt only the defeated southerners would look as if the Northy had been wrong in defending it so strongly.
The Republicans rode that crest for an exceptionally long time. From 1868 to 1932, 64 years, Democrats had the Presidency for only 16 years, controlled the House for 22, and the Senate for 8. It took backlash to decades of Republican rule and the rise of third party antagonists to force through the four Amendments from 1909 to 1919. The Deep South was a nonentity, basically a third world nation that happened to be within the U.S. boundaries, for much of that time, even though as a solid Democratic Jim Crow racist political machine it would gain some disproportionate, though not dominating, power in Congress.
The nation returned to the pre-war stance the Republicans preferred, not having to take notice of black citizens and allowing the rich to proliferate as fast as immigrants could service their needs. That was winning enough for them.
The key point too is what would they want to change? They’d just proven that the federal government was paramount over the constituent states, even t the point that the previously “independent” states could no longer secede.
The Articles of Confederation failed because nthing worked at the federal level, from what I’ve read - no taxation power, no laws or courts, no means to compell the states to make the necessary contributions to keep the Congress running, etc.
If anything, the result of the Civil War showed the Federal Government worked just fine. The people who might have complained, were basically defeated, disenfranchised and their slaves liberated (so effectively, their property arbitrarily confiscated).
Is this entirely accurate? Slavery was certainly an issue, but I thought that the sharp distinction between free states and slave states, and the perceived need for balance between them, was more of an issue in the years leading up to the Civil War than at the time the Constitution was written, when (it was my understanding) many people thought that slavery would die out of its own accord (this was before Eli Whitney’s cotton gin was invented).
Agree with @Stranger_On_A_Train The biggest problem facing the North after the conclusion of the Civil War was how to reintegrate the South into the republic and allow them a voice in the federal government, when the South had indicated that given a free choice they wouldn’t be part of the USA at all. The annihilation of slavery and thus the South’s casus belli went far towards making this possible but it was still touchy enough that Reconstruction lasted ten years, with much of the South’s white population disenfranchised until 1872.
One thing I’ve wondered is whether the 14th amendment was unnecessarily overbroad. If the authors of the amendment had primarily intended to guarantee the citizenship of the freed slaves, they could have said so in so many words. Instead, as worded the 14th initially gave the federal government so broad an authority that it later provoked a backlash: Several later Supreme Court decisions beginning with Cruikshank would eviscerate the 14th’s “privileges or immunities” clause on the grounds that it effectively overthrew the principle of federation, elevating the federal government to virtually an overlord of the states.
Of course if that was actually the authors’ intent then again they should have said so in so many words, and explicitly overturned the Constitution’s original concept of federalism. But doubtless that would not have gone down well with the northern states.
The slave states had a smaller population than the free states in the 1780s. That would give them a smaller, and non-controlling, base in the House of Representatives.
Hence the infamous 3/5 rule. Note that the rule works exactly the opposite of how modern historic illiterates interpret it. The South wanted a slave to count as 1 person; that would give them the greatest total number and the most representatives. The North wanted slaves to count as 0, because slaves held as property were not free people.
Without that and the other compromises that allowed the South to continue profiting from slavery, the Constitution would never have been ratified. It got approved because of the balance between Northern and Southern interests, but also because it kicked the slavery can down the road for later generations to deal with.
This means that after the Civil War, the Southern representation in the House and Electoral College had the potential to increase (because former slaves would count as a whole person vice 3/5), which in something I had never thought of. Of course, after the war, many former slaves moved North. I’ll have to check how State representation in the House changed after the 1870 census
By 1860 only the balance in Senate counted. Northern population growth had overwhelmed the South; there was a 70/30 split in 1860, out of a population of 31 million. The South had around 4 million slaves, so they would have gained 1,500,000 extra in the Census, or about 5% of the total population, hardly enough to change the balance in the House. The 1870 census showed a population of about 38 million, making the free black population an even smaller proportion of the growing country.
Thanks. And the Senate balance was taken care of by the addition of West Virginia and Nevada during the war.
They made the change that they wanted-AMENDMENT XIII
Section 1.
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
I suppose they could have slipped in a clause that no state may unilaterally leave the Union, but the deciding case of “Grant vs Lee 1965” seemed to settle the issue.
Yes, exactly right. Jefferson et al, thought that slavery would just die out after importation of slaves was banned. The cotton gin changed all that radically.
Not quite- Virginia was the most populus
Virginia- 691K
Pann- 434K
Mass-378
etc-
Delaware, Georgia, & Rhode is all had under 100K- which is why the electoral college was invented.
I have not done the math, maybe all the slave states totaled had a slightly lower population than the free states?
It was very close and depends how you classify the states… The free states had 49.9% of the population, the slave states had 39.1%, and the border states of Delaware and Maryland had 9.6%. The slave and border states had over 600,000 slaves or 17% of the population. Removing 2/5 of them or 240,000, would be like removing the state of Connecticut, which would be significant.
Sounds about right, thank you.
Out of curiosity, why did you not include Missouri and Kentucky in this clause? I was always taught that Missouri was a border state, and I’m pretty sure Kentucky was also.
Looking back, I think the context was the 1780s (when the Constitution was ratified), before Kentucky and, especially, Missouri became states.
OK thank you for clarifying.
Yes, I used the 1790 census.