Constitutional Revision and the City
The Enforcement Acts and Urban America, 1870–1894
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 12178135 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Quigley (Boston College, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 20 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 64-75 |
| Publication date | 2008-01-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Policy History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0898-0306 • E-ISSN: 1528-4190 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1353/jph.0.0001 |
| OpenAlex | W1966542004 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 13 |
Congressional enactment of the Enforcement Acts in 1870 and 1871 marked an unprecedented federalization of voting rights. The various election laws aimed to make real the promise of the recently enacted Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the constitution. A complex duality characterized this new departure in the constitutional understanding of democratic suffrage. On one hand, Republican leadership looked to secure the rights of freedmen in the Reconstruction-era South. At the same time, from the outset, northern Republicans strategically worked to strengthen the party in all regions with a particular interest in urban America. From the immediate postwar years down to the early 1890s, congressional committees regularly investigated the problematic and deeply partisan politics of enforcement. Often, House and Senate investigators were more concerned with developments in northern cities than with the state of African American voting across the rural South. This urban story of the consequences of constitutional revision illuminates the often-obscured national dimensions of Reconstruction and its aftermath, while also alerting us to shifting visions of the vote across the final third of the nineteenth century. This essay explores this nationalization of Reconstruction in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment's enactment by first documenting the central place of New York City in the emerging postbellum electoral regime and then expanding out from Manhattan to look at broader patterns of urban experience with enforcement
Constitution · Democracy · Enforcement · Fifteenth · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Suffrage · Vision · Voting · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · History · Law · Public Administration · Race, History, and American Society
Reconstruction
Yankee Leviathan
The Two Reconstructions
Building a New American State
The Trial of Democracy
Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869-1879
The Trial of Democracy
The Two Reconstructions
The Politics of Judicial Interpretation
Federal Regulation of Congressional Elections in Northern Cities, 1871-94
Democracy and Its Discontents
The Political Economy of Voting Rights Enforcement in America's Gilded Age
| Citations per year | 0.12 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2009 - 2017 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |