The Supreme Court’s decision in The Slaughter-House Cases was released a day after the single bloodiest racial massacre in the history of Reconstruction. Mere miles from the slaughterhouse at constitutional issue, a White mob murdered scores of Black Republicans in Colfax, Louisiana at the encouragement of Democratic gubernatorial candidate John McEnery. The Colfax Massacre took place on Easter Sunday, April 13, 1873, and effectively ended Reconstruction in Louisiana. When the Court three years later overturned the convictions of the massacre’s ringleaders, it cited Slaughter-House.
Few ideas have proven more generative or inspirational on the American left than abolition democracy. As articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in his magisterial Black Reconstruction, abolition democracy encompasses two closely related concepts. It was a large-Republican political bloc that emerged after the Civil War and played a leading role in Reconstruction. It is a political aspiration to build a small-r republican polity that is free of racialized domination. The coalition’s “splendid failure” to realize the aspiration was confirmed when Northern industrial capital withdrew its support for Reconstruction and the federal government withdrew troops from the former Confederate states. This Essay draws upon Du Bois’s concepts of abolition democracy and his account of the relationship between constitutionalism, economic power, and violence to understand and evaluate The Slaughter-House Cases and the work of the Reconstruction Court afresh.
Few ideas have proven more generative or inspirational on the American left than abolition democracy. As articulated by W.E.B. Du Bois in his magisterial Black Reconstruction, abolition democracy encompasses two closely related concepts. It was a large-Republican political bloc that emerged after the Civil War and played a leading role in Reconstruction. It is a political aspiration to build a small-r republican polity that is free of racialized domination. The coalition’s “splendid failure” to realize the aspiration was confirmed when Northern industrial capital withdrew its support for Reconstruction and the federal government withdrew troops from the former Confederate states. This Essay draws upon Du Bois’s concepts of abolition democracy and his account of the relationship between constitutionalism, economic power, and violence to understand and evaluate The Slaughter-House Cases and the work of the Reconstruction Court afresh.
Bernick, Evan D., Slaughtering Abolition Democracy (February 6, 2024). Rutgers Law Journal Forthcoming, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4718746 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4718746
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