Opponents of slavery who wished to put an end to the institution.

A test to prove a person's abilities to read and write. Until 1964, such tests were used in various states to prevent minorities from voting.

A tax that voters in many states were required to pay in order to exercise their right to vote. These barriers were used until 1964 to prevent African Americans from voting.

In U.S. history, the act of states leaving the Union in 1861 following the election of President Abraham Lincoln; precipitated the Civil War.

Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States. He was a scientist, philosopher, diplomat, and architect. He supported the revolutionary cause and served as governor of Virginia. Between June 11 and June 28, 1776, Jefferson wrote the initial draft of the Declaration of Independence, which was amended by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin and submitted to Congress. Jefferson supported the Constitution but was critical of its lack of a bill of rights. He was the first secretary of state in Washington's cabinet and the leader of the Republican Party. Jefferson was elected vice president in 1796 and was chosen president four years later. He was reelected to the presidency in 1804.

Lincoln was the sixteenth president of the United States. In his Gettysburg Address he declared the aim of preserving a "nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."

Case Summary

Dred Scott was a slave in Missouri. From 1833 to 1843, he resided in Illinois (a free state) and in an area of the Louisiana Territory, where slavery was forbidden by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. After returning to Missouri, Scott sued unsuccessfully in the Missouri courts for his freedom, claiming that his residence in free territory made him a free man. Scott then brought a new suit in federal court. Scott's master maintained that no pure-blooded Negro of African descent and the descendant of slaves could be a citizen in the sense of Article III of the Constitution.

Question(s)

Was Dred Scott free or slave?

Answer(s)

Dred Scott was a slave. Chief Justice Taney argued that, under Articles III and IV, no one but a citizen of the United States could be a citizen of a state, and that only Congress could confer national citizenship. Taney reached the conclusion that no person descended from an American slave had ever been a citizen for Article III purposes. The Court then held the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional, hoping to end the slavery question once and for all.

See: The Oyez Project, Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857) available at:

Case Summary

Lambden P. Milligan was sentenced to death by a military commission in Indiana during the Civil War; he had engaged in acts of disloyalty. Milligan sought release through habeas corpus from a federal court.

Question(s)

Does a civil court have jurisdiction over a military tribunal?

Answer(s)

Yes. Davis, speaking for the Court, held that trials of civilians by presidentially created military commissions are unconstitutional. Martial law cannot exist where the civil courts are operating.

See: The Oyez Project, Ex parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866)

Case Summary

In 1851, Congress authorized the transfer of $10 million worth of United States bonds to the state of Texas. The bonds were payable to the state or bearer and were to be redeemable in 1864. In 1862, during the Civil War, an insurgent Texas legislature authorized the use of the bonds to purchase war supplies. Four years later, the reconstruction government tried to reclaim the bonds.

Question(s)

Was Texas a state in the union eligible to seek redress in the Supreme Court? Could Texas constitutionally reclaim the bonds?

Answer(s)

Yes. In a 5-to-3 decision, the Court held that Texas did indeed have the right to bring suit and that individuals such as White had no claim to the bonds in question. The Court held that individual states could not unilaterally secede from the Union and that the acts of the insurgent Texas legislature--even if ratified by a majority of Texans--were "absolutely null." Even during the period of rebellion, however, the Court found that Texas continued to be a state.

See: The Oyez Project, Texas v White, 74 U.S. 700 (1869)

Case Summary

Louisiana had created a partial monopoly of the slaughtering business and gave it to one company. Competitors argued that this created "involuntary servitude," abridged "privileges and immunities," denied "equal protection of the laws," and deprived them of "liberty and property without due process of law."

Question(s)

Did the creation of the monopoly violate the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments?

Answer(s)

No. The involuntary servitude claim did not forbid limits on the right to use one's property. The equal protection claim was misplaced since it was established to void laws discriminating against blacks. The due process claim simply imposes the identical requirements on the states as the fifth amendment imposes on the national government. The Court devoted most of its opinion to a narrow construction of the privileges and immunities clause, which was interpreted to apply to national citizenship, not state citizenship.

See: The Oyez Project, The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. 36 (1873)

Case Summary

The Oklahoma Constitution, while appearing to treat all voters equally, allowed an exemption to the literacy requirement for those voters whose grandfathers had either been eligible to vote prior to January 1, 1866 or were then a resident of "some foreign nation," or were soldiers. It was an exemption that favored white voters while it disfranchised black voters, most of whose grandfathers had been slaves and therefore unable to vote before 1866.

Question(s)

Are these kinds of exemptions to the literacy requirements a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment?

Answer(s)

Yes. Justice Edward White went on to strike down the grandfather clause. He saw the Oklahoma law for what it was--a bald-faced attempt to disenfranchise blacks. Justice White wrote that the act "inherently brings" discrimination based on race "into existence since it is based purely on a period of time before the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment and makes that period the controlling and dominant test of the right of suffrage.

See: 238 U.S. 347 (1915)

Case Summary

A resolution of the Democratic Party of Texas, a group that the Texas Supreme Court had deemed a "voluntary association," allowed only whites to participate in Democratic primary elections. S.S. Allwright was a county election official; he denied Lonnie E. Smith, a black man, the right to vote in the 1940 Texas Democratic primary.

Question(s)

Did denying blacks the right to vote in primary elections violate the Fifteenth Amendment?

Answer(s)

Yes. The Court overruled its decision in Grovey v. Townsend (1935) and found the restrictions against black people unconstitutional. Even though the Democratic Party was a voluntary organization, the fact that Texas statutes governed the selection of county-level party leaders, the party conducted primary elections under state statutory authority, and state courts were given exclusive original jurisdiction over contested elections, guaranteed for black people the right to vote in primaries. Allwright engaged in state action abridging Smith's right to vote because of his race. A state cannot "permit a private organization to practice racial discrimination" in elections, argued Justice Reed. (The Court's decision in this matter was amended on June 12, 1944.)

See: The Oyez Project, Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944)

South Carolina Declaration of Causes (1852).

Access the Material

Lincoln delivered his first inaugural address after seven states had seceded, inaugurated their own president and rose their own flag. He offered a conciliatory tone but warned that, if attacked, the union would respond with aggression. The U.S. Civil War began the next day.

Access the Material

The Three-fifths Clause of Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution determined that three-fifths of slaves would be counted to determine both the apportionment of representation and the amount of taxes distributed to slave states, both of which are based on population. It was determined at the Philadelphia Convention as a compromise between anti-slavery delegates, who wished only to count free people, and pro-slavery delegates who wished to include slaves in their numbers to garner greater congressional representation.

Access the Material

The text of the Constitution of the Confederate States of America in 1861. It is mostly a verbatim copy of the U.S. Constitution but includes key differences regarding slavery and the power of the central government.

Access the Material

The "Left Wing Manifesto" was a document by Benjamin Gitlow, published in The Revolutionary Age, a newspaper of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, and used as the basis for his prosecution on anarchy charges by the state of New York. He was convicted and sentenced to five to ten years in prison. The verdict was upheld by the New York Court of Appeals and affirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Gitlow v. New York but held that the Fourteenth Amendment's due process clause protected personal rights, like freedom of speech, as well as property rights, from infringement by the states.

Access the Material

The supreme law of the United States that provides the framework for the government. The Constitution outlines the nation's institutions of government and the most important rights of the people. The document was created in 1787 during the Philadelphia Convention. The government created by the Constitution took effect on March 4, 1789.

Access the Material