Historian Forrest McDonald : ' The Fourteenth Amendment was never constitutionally ratified'. Famous Constitutional Historian Tells The Truth In Georgia Journal of Southern Legal History.

Georgia Journal of Southern Legal History has this article from celebrated American historian Forrest McDonald concerning the 14th Amendment:

The numbers cited concerning the vote in the Senate mask some chicanery. One of the fifty non-southern senators was the newly elected John P. Stockton of New Jersey, an outspoken opponent of the Fourteenth Amendment, who took the oath of office and was formally seated when the Thirty-ninth Congress convened on December 5, 1865. Later, after informal polls revealed that only thirty-three senators favored it (one short of the necessary two-thirds) a motion was made not to seat Stockton. The motion not to seat was resorted to, even though he had already been seated, because Article I, Section 5, of the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote to expel a member, and that majority could not be mustered. Following a great deal of debate, a vote was taken and the motion not to seat failed twenty-two to twenty-one. Overnight, however, one member of the Senate was persuaded to change his vote. The next day the same motion passed. Stockton was thus unconstitutionally expelled, and only in that way did the thirty three votes for the Fourteenth Amendment become a two thirds majority.


Even more vexing questions arise when we consider the process of ratification. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts had, as early as 1862, formulated his “state suicide” theory, which held that the very act of seceding destroyed a state and dissolved its lawful government. In the House the Radical Pennsylvanian Thaddeus Stevens advanced the alternate theory that the eleven southern states were conquered provinces without any political rights. Either way, the ex-Confederates were governable exclusively by Congress under its express power to govern territories, and could have no voice in ratifying amendments. Accordingly, nineteen of the twenty-five loyal states would constitute the three-fourths majority necessary to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, not twenty-seven of thirty-six states counting the South.

An article , well worth your time. This isn't some crank saying this, it's the man the National Endowment for the Humanities selected to give the Jefferson Lecture on the 200th anniversary of the United States Constitution in 1987.