B. U. G. S.

In December of 1865 the thirteenth amendment went into effect.

In December of 1865 General Grant had to free his own slaves. Asked why he had kept them as long as he could, Grant made a classic comment, “Good help is hard to find these days.”

Everybody thought that was cute.

Except maybe Grant’s slaves.

But there was another interesting situation between the feeing of slaves in December of 1865 and the adoption of hte fourteenth amendment in 1868. You see, some of the congressmen from the slave-holding border states who sided with the Union actually REPRESENTED slaves.

According to the Constitution, a slave state was allowed to count each slave as three-fifths of a white person in apportoning the House of Representatives. When Missouri, for example, sent its congressmen to Washington in 1867, it still had the number of representatives it had before, inclduing the ones it was given for its slaves.

But Missouri had no slaves, and blacks were not allowed to vote.

The fourteenth amendment SPECIFICALLY allowed states to ban blacks from voting. But it did so by punishing those who did not let them vote. States which banned blacks from voting were not allowed to count blacks as part of their population when it came to membes of the House of Representatives.

Today everybody says that the fourteenth amendment gave blacks equal rights.

It did nothing of the sort.

There is another testimony to the fact that teh fourteenth amendment did not give blacks equal rights, and, like that provision of the fourteenth amendment, it is right there in black and white in the Constitution itself.

It is called the fifteenth amendment.

That provision punished the border states, but it also made it clear in black and white that a state could deny the vote on the basis of race.