Ratification in Virginia
Americans are the only race in America.
--A Republican delegate to Virginia's 1867 constitutional convention arguing, for a color-blind constitution
Once proud Virginia lay prostrate and wasted in the spring of 1865, its factories reduced to rubble, its bridges destroyed, its livestock slaughtered, its fields scorched. 1 Amidst this ruin, only its newest citizen--the freedmen--were jubilant. They imagined a future that most of Virginia's older, white citizens dreaded. These new citizens imagined a free economy in which they could rise according to their talents; a legal regime that treated all persons fairly and equally; and a political community indifferent to the color of its citizens. Thomas Bayne, a black delegate to the state's 1867 constitutional convention, evoked this dream with the following plea: "And so shall the colored people and the loyal white men of Virginia say, in one chorus. Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, we are together, one and indivisible and inseparable, for the procuring and perpetuation of civil and political rights to all men, of whatever shade or color of skin." 2
Blacks like Bayne also understood two other things. The Fourteenth Amendment was intended to insure the first two dreams, and its natural rights philosophy was wholly consistent with the third. Precisely because white Virginians shared that same understanding, most opposed ratification of the amendment. When they finally lost that battle, they fought to limit the amendment's practical impact. That battle they won. When Virginia was finally readmitted to the Union in 1870, its conservative white citizens had already "redeemed" its government.