What powers did the Reconstruction Amendments grant to the national government?

0:05We wrote the Bill of Rights, thinking that we were going to limit the federal government's power vis a vie the people. We're going to stop the federal government from regulating free speech, regulating religion, things like that. There's one that probably no one knows about in a general audience, which is quartering soldiers, where you couldn't take over someone's house and put other soldiers in it. Those were the rights that were built in, and the idea was restrict the federal government's power. Suddenly everything changed, not suddenly, but after the Civil War, there was a fundamental reorientation in thinking about what the Bill of Rights before. The idea was the relationship between the people and the national government and the state shifted. Prior to this, the idea was the states would protect their own people and we would trust them in protecting their own people,

0:53and the only person we need to worry about in the constitution is the federal government. After people saw what was happening in the south, they realized that actually the federal government needs to play a different role. It needs to protect people in the states from the state. That's a fundamentally different idea. What the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendment did is it gave Congress important powers. Again, enumerated. It's naming them.

1:22Important powers to regulate the states in a way that we've been quite unexpected earlier on in our history, and those regulations universally had to do at the moment when they were thinking about it with helping the people, freed slaves who were in the south.