Thank you for responding. I appreciate the broader political framing — Johnson’s campaign against the Amendment certainly shaped the climate of 1866, and the midterm results strengthened Congress’s ability to enforce what followed.
My point is strictly chronological: the Fourteenth Amendment was drafted between January and April 1866 and passed Congress in June — several months before the election. (See Levine, The Failed Promise, ch. 3, esp. pp. 112–120.)
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Correction:
(See Levine, The Failed Promise, Part Two — especially chapters 5 and 6 — for the early 1866 political battles that predate the midterm election.)
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The 1866 wave helped secure its viability and ratification, but the Amendment’s creation predates that moment.
Both elements matter, especially for understanding how Congress — alongside Black activists like Frederick Douglass and freedpeople — built Reconstruction’s constitutional architecture.