tion of States' Rights by Fourteenth Amendment.=--These acts and
others not cited here were measures of centralization and consolidation
at the expense of the powers and dignity of the states. They were all of
high import, but the crowning act of nationalism was the fourteenth
amendment which, among other things, forbade states to "deprive any
person of life, liberty or property without due process of law." The
immediate occasion, though not the actual cause of this provision, was
the need for protecting the rights of freedmen against hostile
legislatures in the South. The result of the amendment, as was
prophesied in protests loud and long from every quarter of the
Democratic party, was the subjection of every act of state, municipal,
and county authorities to possible annulment by the Supreme Court at
Washington. The expected happened.

Few negroes ever brought cases under the fourteenth amendment to the
attention of the courts; but thousands of state laws, municipal
ordinances, and acts of local authorities were set aside as null and
void under it. Laws of states regulating railway rates, fixing hours of
labor in bakeshops, and taxing corporations were in due time to be
annulled as conflicting with an amendment erroneously supposed to be
designed solely for the protection of negroes. As centralized power over
tariffs, railways, public lands, and other national concerns went to
Congress, so centralized power over the acts of state and local
authorities involving an infringement of personal and property rights
was conferred on the federal judiciary, the apex of which was the
Supreme Court at Washington. Thus the old federation of "independent
states," all equal in rights and dignity, each wearing the "jewel of
sovereignty" so celebrated in Southern oratory, had gone the way of all
flesh under the withering blasts of Civil War.

RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH

=Theories about the Position of the Seceded States.=--On the morning of
April 9, 1865, when General Lee surrendered his army to General Grant,
eleven states stood in a peculiar relation to the union now declared
perpetual. Lawyers and political philosophers were much perturbed and
had been for some time as to what should be done with the members of the
former Confederacy. Radical Republicans held that they were "conquered
provinces" at the mercy of Congress, to be governed under such laws as
it saw fit to enact and until in its wisdom it decided to readmit any or