Pamela Brandwein

Constitutional scholars have conceptualized Reconstruction debate mainly as a debate over the meaning of the original Constitution. However, Civil War narratives that identified "the problems" with slavery and emplotted the events of slavery politics were a major vehicle by which the Fourteenth Amendment was debated. Dispute over a text (the original Constitution) and dispute over the description of events intertwined. This article elucidates the content of slavery/war narratives and applies them to the domain of constitutional law. Crucial elements of the Northern Democratic war narrative were endorsed by the Supreme Court in the Slaughter-House Cases ( 1873), even though the Democrats were the legislative losers. Democratic history, grounded on a strong strain of white supremacy extending back to Stephen Douglas, played a crucial role in legitimating the Court's narrow doctrinal interpretations of the Fourteenth Amendment.

All knew," said President Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address, that slavery "was somehow the cause of the [civil] war" ( Fehrenbacher 1977 :686). Indeed, it is easy to find assent on the matter among Republicans and Northern Democrats in the Reconstruction congresses. "Slavery was the cause and the only cause of the rebellion." It was "the parent of secession." But the Civil War did not come to the congressmen "already narrativized, already 'speaking itself'" ( White 1987 :24). The way in which slavery was implicated in the war was disputed. Northern Democrats argued that Southerners' rejection of the popular sovereignty doctrine (i.e., the Southern claim to federal enforcement of slave law in the western territories) was where the slave states fell into error. Republicans identified a broader

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