The South

Abstract

This chapter is here introduced as a means of calling attention to the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is no longer a Southern question. Public opinion is in many respects slow and conservative. The new and living ideals of one generation become the settled dogmas of the next. What was true of certain social situations decades past is believed to be true for the present. This condition of the social mind is inevitable on those questions which are not openly agitated and those not adapted to popular investigation and discussion. The Fourteenth Amendment was in its inception purely a Southern question. In the political campaigns during the Reconstruction it was the most important issue. At that time it became firmly fixed in the public mind that the Amendment was directly related to the South and the negro and to nothing else.