Birthright citizenship, voting, and history

I've been reading Eric Foner's The Second Founding. Foner has written extensively on the post-Civil War period and Reconstruction. This particular book looks at the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. Although in hindsight it seems like Congress clumped the three together rather quickly, it was 15 years from ratification of the 13th to ratification of the 15th.

The 13th amendment was pretty much a no-brainer immediately following the war. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves in the Confederacy; it didn't do a thing for slaves in border states that weren't in active rebellion, like Kentucky and Missouri. Congress recognized slavery everywhere had to be eliminated so they cranked out the 13th Amendment pretty quickly. It's short and simple: "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..."

Foner details the debates, which naturally included demands from slave owners for financial compensation for their lost property, but the committees working on the drafts managed to pare it down to a basic statement. In retrospect the exceptional clause has been repeatedly criticized. It's the rationale for prison labor. Need some road work done cheaply? Chain gangs. Or, a more modern example, need furniture for schools and state hospitals? Prison work shops. Or, as I read about not long ago, an airline reservation call center operating out of a prison, which really had me wondering about stuff like how secure is your credit card number when the person asking for it is sitting behind bars. But that's a digression. The exceptionalism clause wasn't seen as much of an issue in 1865; it took decades of Jim Crow and rising awareness of places like Angola (notorious Louisiana prison farm) for people to realize the exceptionalism clause has led to some horrific abuses. In any case, after both houses of Congress passed it, the amendment went to the states for ratification. Twenty-seven were needed for passage; there were 30 ratifications submitted before the end of December 1865. A few states were a little slow -- naturally, Mississippi was last, with the formal paperwork from Mississippi submitted in 2013. (And no doubt there are some Mississippians who think they could have waited a few more years.)

The 14th and 15th amendments did not sail through the process as quickly or as easily as the 13th. The 14th has been in the news a lot lately. It's the birthright citizenship amendment. In reading about the debates a number of oddities struck me. One was that for some Congress critters that big problem with affirming birthright citizenship wasn't that anyone black and born in the United States would automatically be a citizen, it was that birthright citizenship could apply to children born to Chinese laborers in California or Nevada or, possibly even worse, the children born to drunken Irish immigrants. In 1868 there were a lot of Chinese laborers in California. They were, as immigrants so often do, working at jobs sufficiently dangerous or arduous that most white guys wouldn't do them. In retrospect, the paranoia about the Chinese suddenly forming a voting bloc seems rather stupid. There may have been 50,000 adult men laboring on railroads and at other unpleasant tasks, but there weren't very many women immigrating -- and even if there were the amount of time from the amendment's passage to when new natural born citizens would be eligible to vote (age 21) seems like plenty of time for politicians to figure out how to manipulate the masses. 

The nervousness about the drunken Irish was an East Coast issue. Prejudice against the Irish was common in all the major cities. Despite Ireland being part of the United Kingdom at the time, the Irish were never seen as safely English. The Irish did not speak the King's English -- many no doubt were comfortable only in Gaelic -- and, even worse, they were Papists, the dreaded Roman Catholics who answered to the Pope, who was labeled by some American Protestant leaders as a despot. Again, in retrospect it seems rather odd, but while prejudice against the Irish has disappeared over time there is still a lot of fundamentalist Protestant prejudice against Catholics. (A minor digression, but I know people who were raised in a fundamentalist tradition -- not exactly snake-handling Pentecostal Holiness types, but close -- who were/are convinced Catholics worship idols because of the statues of saints in churches.) 

There was also discussion about Native Americans, but Congress concluded that if a Native American belonged to a recognized tribe that tribe was a sovereign nation and that's where a Native American's citizenship lay. Ergo, U.S. citizenship was a nonissue for indigenous persons. 

In any case, the important part of the amendment, Article 1, does three things: it says if you're born in the U.S., you're a citizen. As a citizen you are entitled to equal protection under the law, and, third, states can't take rights away without due process. The other sections of the amendment were basically cleaning up some issues after the war such as Article 3 saying if you'd rebelled (i.e., been in the Confederate army or government) you couldn't run for federal office (no convincing your fellow traitors that you belonged in Congress). Article 3 is often referred to as the insurrection clause; it's the clause some activists tried to use against Donald Trump running for a second term because he'd encouraged the January 6, 2021, rioters at the Capitol. The intent in 1868, of course, was to prevent the asshats who had been stupid enough to drag multiple states into seceding and causing a war from trying to get back into political power and doing something equally stupid again. And it worked, at least briefly, but mainly because Congress also passed the Reconstruction Act for the Confederate states. Reconstruction lasted until the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes effectively ended Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops, which is a subject for a different post.

The 15th amendment provided the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race or ethnicity. The wording is succinct -- "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." -- and is notable for what it omits (gender). Gender was debated, but apparently giving ladies the right to vote along with former slaves was a bridge too far for male legislators in the late 1860s. Not surprisingly, some of the same objections to the 14th admendment were recycled to argue against the 15th: omigod the Irish might vote! What about the Chinese? It probably helped that states would still control voting (when, where, limiting eligibility through requiring literacy tests or poll taxes, all of which and more states did in attempts to limit who actually got to vote). The amendment passed both houses of Congress in 1869 and was sent to the states for ratification, which took less than a year. 

So what did I learn from this book other than the basic facts? Well, it's pretty clear that there will always be some shit weasels politicians who worry a lot more about hanging on to their Congressional seat than they do about what's good for the country. It's also clear that the current criticisms of birthright citizenship aren't new. They're recycled bigotry from the 1860s. Ditto voting rights. There have always been and probably always will be people who think the ideal voting population consists of one person: one rich guy who's willing to subsidize your preferred lifestyle. Therefore the goal becomes to make voting harder, thus thinning the voting pool. Ecclesiastes 1:9.