ABSTRACT
Before the 14th Amendment, the US Constitution did not guarantee the equality of individuals before the law and had no impact on civil rights. Most of what 20th-century Americans view as the noble influence of the Constitution derives from the 14th Amendment. The Constitution requires three-fourths of the states to ratify an amendment. Some Confederate states would be needed even if all Union states ratified. The great moral blot of legalized slavery was exercised from the Constitution by these questionable means on Dec. 6, 1865. Under the original Constitution, a slave counted three-fifths as much as a free person in calculating the number of seats each state got in Congress. When the framers of the 1787 Constitution drafted Article V laying out the rules for amendments, they never intended for any state to have to ratify with a gun to its head. But that’s literally and figuratively what happened to the Southern states.
