by Marvin Ramírez
Marvin J. Ramírez
This is the fifth part of the article: The lost 13th Amendment to the Constitution.
Last week we ran the forth part of this multi-part article, in hope that it will provide our readers with information that has been kept a secret by the controllers of our country – the bankers and their private army of lawyers.
What follows is an article reprinted from the “AntiShyster,” in “The Correspondent” of Condon, Montana. We suggest that in order to have a complete picture of the content of the article, one must read the previous parts of this series.
PROS AND CONS
Of course, there are two sides to this issue. David Dodge, the principal researcher, argues that this 13th Amendment was ratified in 1819 and then was subverted from the Constitution near the end of the Civil War. U.S. Senator George Mitchell of Maine, and Mr. Dane Hartgrove (Acting Assistant Chief, Civil Reference Branch of the National Archives) have argued that the Amendment was never properly ratified and only published in error.
There is some agreement.
Both sides agree the Amendment required the support of at least thirteen States to be ratified. Both sides agree that between 1810 and 1812, twelve States voted to support ratification.
The pivotal issue is whether Virginia ratified or rejected the proposed Amendment.
Dodge contends that Virginia voted to support the Amendment in 1819, and so the Amendment was truly ratified and should still be a part of our Constitution. Senator Mitchell and Mr. Hartgrove disagree, arguing that Virginia did not ratify.
Unfortunately, several decades of Virginia’s Legislative Journals were misplaced or destroyed (possibly during the Civil War; possibly during the 1930’s). Consequently, neither side has found absolute proof that the Virginia legislature voted for (or against) ratification, A series of letters exchanged in 1991 between David Dodge, Senator Mitchell, and Mr. Hartgrove illuminate the various points of disagreement. After Dodge’s initial report of a “missing” Amendment in the 1825 Maine Civil Code, Senator Mitchell explained that this edition was a one-time publishing error: “The Maine Legislature mistakenly printed the proposed Amendment in the Maine Constitution as having been adopted. As you know, this was a mistake, as it was not ratified.”
Further, “All editions of the Maine Constitution printed after 1820 [sie] exclude the proposed Amendment; only the originals contain this error.”
Dodge dug deeper and found other editions (there are 30, to date) of State and Territorial Civil Codes that contained the missing Amendment, and thereby demonstrated that the Maine publication was not a “one-time” publishing error.
YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A RATIFICATION
After examining Dodge’s evidence of multiple publication of the “missing” Amendment, Senator Mitchell and Mr. Hartgrove conceded that the Amendment had been published by several States and was ratified by twelve of the seventeen States in the Union in 1810. However, because the Constitution requires that a three-quarters vote of the States to ratify an Amendment, Mitchell and Hartgrove insisted that the 13th Amendment was published in error because it was passed by only twelve, not thirteen States.
Dodge investigated which seventeen States were in the Union at the time the Amendment was proposed, which States had ratified, which States had rejected the Amendment, and determined that the issue hung on whether one last State (Virginia) had or had not, voted to ratify.
After several years of searching the Virginia State Archives, Dodge made a crucial discovery: In spring of 1991, he found a misplaced copy of the 1819 Virginia Civil Code which included the “missing” 13th Amendment. Dodge notes that, curiously: “There is no public record that shows this Code [the 1819 Virginia Civil Code] exists. It is not cataloged as a holding of the Library of Congress nor is it in the National Union Catalog. Neither the State Law Library nor the law school in Portland were able to find any trace that this book exists in any of their computer programs.” 1/*
Dodge sent photo-copies of the 1819 Virginia Civil Code to Senator Mitchell and Mr. Hartgrove, and explained that: “Under legislative construction, it is considered prima facia evidence that what is published as the official Acts of the legislature are the official Acts.”
By publishing the Amendment as ratified in an official publication, Virginia demonstrated:
1. that they knew that they were the last State whose vote was necessary to ratify the 13th Amendment;
2. that they had voted to ratify the Amendment; and;
3. that they were publishing the Amendment in a special edition of their Civil Code as an official notice to the world that the Amendment had indeed been ratified.
Dodge concluded: “Unless there is competing evidence to the contrary, it must be held that the Constitution of the United States was officially amended to exclude from its body of citizens any who accepted or claimed a title of nobility or accepted any special favors. Foremost in this category of ex-citizens are bankers and lawyers.”
RATIONALES
Undeterred, Senator Mitchell wrote that: “Article XIII did not receive the three-fourths vote required from the States within the time limit to be ratified.”
(Although his language is imprecise, Senator Mitchell seems to concede that although the Amendment had failed to satisfy the “time limit,” the required three-quarters of the States did vote to ratify. It should be noted that there was no time limit given to ratify this (1810) Amendment as published in II Stat 613).
Dodge replies: “Contrary to your assertion … there was no time limit for Amendment ratification in 1811. Any time limit is now established by Congress in the Resolves for proposed Amendments.”
In fact, ratification time limits didn’t start until 1917, when Section 3 of the Eighteenth Amendment stated that: “This Article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified … within seven years from the date of submission, to the States by Congress.”
A similar time limit is now included on other proposed Amendments, but there was no specified time limit when the 13th Amendment was proposed in 1810 or ratified in 1819.
Senator Mitchell remained determined to find some rationale, somewhere, that would defeat Dodge’s persistence. Although Senator Mitchell implicitly conceded that his “published by error” and “time limit” arguments were invalid, he continued to grope for reasons to dispute ratification: “… regardless of whether the State of Virginia did ratify the proposed Thirteenth Amendment, on March 12, 1819, this approval would not have been sufficient to amend the Constitution. In 1819, there were twenty-one States in the United States and any amendment would have required approval of sixteen States to amend the Constitution. According to your own research, Virginia would have only been the thirteenth State to approve the proposed amendment.”
Dodge replies:
“Article V [amendment procedures] of the Constitution is silent on the question of whether or not the framers meant three-fourths of the States at the time the proposed amendment is submitted to the States for ratification, or three-fourths of the States that exist at some future point in time. Since only the existing States were involved in the debate and vote of Congress on the Resolve proposing an Amendment, it is reasonable that ratification be limited to those States that took an active part in the Amendment process.”
Dodge demonstrated this rationale by pointing out that: “President Monroe had his Secretary of State, [ask the] governors of Virginia, South Carolina, and Connecticut, in January, 1818, as to the status of the Amendment in their respective States. The four new States (Louisiana, Indiana, Mississippi, and Illinois) that were added to the Union between 1810 and 1818 were not even considered.”
[It should be noted that pursuant to a Resolution of the House of Congress, James Monroe made inquiries of ratification of the 13th Amendment by South Carolina and Virginia on February 4, 1818 (CIS U.S. Serial Set Index – Misc. 446 (15-1) ASP038)]
– With this last fifth article on the Lost Thirteen Amendment of the Constitution, we end this series. We hope we all have learned something about the hidden history of the United States.
