Its grand and beneficent provisions failed to attract the vote of a single Democratic member in any State Legislature in the whole Union.
Wherever the Democrats were in majority the Legislature rejected it, and in every Legislature where the Republicans had control the Democrats in minority voted against it.

Not only was this true, but the States of Ohio and New Jersey, which had ratified it in 1866-67 when their Legislatures were Republican, formally voted in 1868, when the Democrats had come into power, to recall their assent to the Amendment and to record their opposition to its adoption.

It is very seldom in the history of political issues, even when partisan feeling is most deeply developed, that so absolute a division is found as was recorded upon the question of adopting the Fourteenth Amendment.

It has not been easy in succeeding years to comprehend the deep-seated, all-pervading hostility of the Democratic party to this great measure.
Even on the Thirteenth Amendment, containing the far more radical proposition to abolish slavery, a few Democrats, moved by philanthropic motives, broke from the restraint of party and honored themselves by recording their votes on the side of humanity and justice; but on the Fourteenth Amendment the line of Democratic hostility in Nation and in State was absolutely unbroken.
It seems incredible that Democrats can be satisfied with the record made by their party on this most grave and important question.

Every one of the many objects aimed at in the Fourteenth Amendment is founded upon a basis of justice, of liberty, of an enlarged and enlightened nationality.