Lectures from the Allen Room & Wertheim Study: Framing Treason : War, Reconciliation, and Memory in the Making of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

While the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution granted citizenship rights to millions of former slaves, its mandate simultaneously imposed unprecedented limitations on the citizenship rights of white male Southerners.  Those limitations purported to permanently disqualify from public office holding tens of thousands of Confederate soldiers, officials, and sympathizers who had earlier taken an oath to uphold the laws of the federal government.  Following ratification, however, a more nuanced scene unfolded as Congress -- first in drabs, then in a flood -- extended amnesty to nearly all of those affected.  Their stories, and the story of the failed implementation of the Amendment, narrate a crisis of constitutionalism not seen again in the US until Prohibition.

Taja-Nia Henderson, a writer in residence in the Wertheim Study, is associate professor at Rutgers School of Law, Newark.  She teaches courses on punishment, procedure, and property in American law and history.  Publications include work on the continued viability of the Thirteenth Amendment for civil rights legislation, the societal functions of jails and prisons in the slaveholding American South, and remedying public and private discrimination against persons accused or convicted of crimes.  A graduate of Dartmouth College and New York University, her current research centers on the use of disqualification from public office holding as "punishment" for former Confederates and their supporters in the wake of the American Civil War.