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One Hundred and Twenty‐Five Years after Slaughterhouse : Where's the Beef?
Author(s) -
LURIE JONATHAN
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
journal of supreme court history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1540-5818
pISSN - 1059-4329
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-5818.1999.tb00167.x
Subject(s) - supreme court , law , constitution , political science , government (linguistics) , nothing , unintended consequences , secession , meaning (existential) , irony , continuance , spanish civil war , politics , literature , epistemology , psychotherapist , psychology , art , philosophy , linguistics
You never know. Historical events intended for one purpose sometimes result in the unintended, and American history is far from immune to this tendency. Thus the Civil War—first considered by Lincoln as nothing more than an attempt to prevent Southern secession—ultimately went far beyond an effort to preserve the Union, far beyond ending African‐American slavery, far beyond even ensuring continued western expansion. By 1866, the war had wrought changes in the relationship between the federal government and the states, the federal government and its people, as well as the states and their citizenry. Although they may well have been unintended and their extent unclear, these transformations doomed continuance of the Union as it had been—producing instead a new connection between the American people and their legal order that is still evolving. 1 One manifestation of such change was the Fourteenth Amendment adopted by Congress in 1866. Ratified by the states as part of the Constitution in 1868, five years later the Supreme Court first considered its meaning and scope; and thereby hangs a story rich in irony.