37. A Turning Point in Black Americans’ Allegiance to the US
The freeing of slaves via the Emancipation Proclamation was followed during Reconstruction by three constitutional amendments. The Thirteenth abolished slavery, the Fourteenth promised equal rights, and the Fifteenth secured blacks the right to vote. Much of the substance of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments went unfulfilled for generations. Indeed, practice sometimes falls short of the theory when it comes to those amendments even today. Still, a turning point had been reached in America’s relationship with its black population.
Until then, black Americans – even free blacks – were residents and subjects of America, rather than American citizens. Just a few years before the Civil War, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sandford that the US Constitution was not meant to include citizenship for blacks, whether slave or free. As such, blacks were outside the scope of constitutional rights and privileges granted to citizens. Against that backdrop, it is unsurprising that for generations, while America signified liberty to much of the world, it did not signify liberty to its own black population. Instead, Britain was more of a beacon of freedom for black Americans than was the Land of the Free.