Civil War and Reconstruction

How and to what extent did the Civil War and Reconstruction refound the United States?
- Civil War: talk about: federalism and anti-federalism, reasons for secession (legal or moral?), Confederacy
- Reconstruction: talk about: First Founding vs Second Founding, Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendment, states rights vs federal rights as a zero sum game

Reconfiguration of constitutional compact
- Transference of authority from the states to the federal government on the matter of master-slave relationships by virtue of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendment
- Civil rights are rarely self-activating but come by way of federal powers, which explains the need to reconfigure this relationship
- Expanded federal powers to every individual in the Union, including those not previously protected
- Lives of newly freed people were not so radicaly changed, because of the failure to push through land reform, large numbers of freedmen tenants remained under explotative sharecropping arrangements in the same plantations where they once worked as slaves

Positive rights are granted by the federal government instead of the state
- From start to finish in the Civil War, participants on either side wrestled with the constitutional meaning of states' rights in the context of federal power. These rights were immunities operating at the vertical distribution of power; as opposed to the modern idea of rights as a horizontal set of claims of citizens against fellow citizens.
- These rights are secured by way of prohibition against state laws and state proceedings affecting those rights and privileges, as concluded in the invalidation of the public accommodations provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
- Justice Joseph Bradley on the Fourteenth Amendment: "it is only state action of a particular character that is prohibited. Individual invasion of individual rights is not the subject matter of the amendment." Thus the Court did not stymie the moral vision of the Radical Republicans, but merely clarified their developmental goals