Functional Federalism: The Jurisprudence for Postbellum Sovereignties

This thesis argues that federalism was the operative constitutional principle governing the Supreme Court's Reconstruction-era jurisprudence from 1867 to 1886, and that the Court's apparently inconsistent decisions reflect a coherent logic that this thesis names functional federalism. Existing scholarship has framed judicial Reconstruction as either a failed project of rights protection or an ambivalent retreat from congressional Reconstruction's transformative ambitions, struggling to reconcile holdings as divergent as Ex parte Siebold's sweeping endorsement of federal election authority and United States v. Cruikshank's gutting of federal prosecution for racial violence. This thesis argues that the divergence demonstrates the Court allocating federal power according to the operational needs of the national government rather than the substantive rights of citizens. Federal power expanded robustly when the functioning of national governance required it and receded when invoked solely to protect the civil and social rights of emancipated Black Americans. Working through the three doctrinal domains of habeas corpus, civil rights, and electoral federalism, this thesis traces how this logic produced structural paradoxes. The exhaustion requirement converted the liberatory writ of habeas corpus into a remedy of last resort. State-action doctrine rewarded sophisticated nonenforcement over flagrant lawlessness. A doctrinal trap between Reese and the Civil Rights Cases rendered meaningful federal protection against voting discrimination structurally impossible. The Court did not create functional federalism from a cynical manipulation of precedent but rather from the constraints of an antebellum jurisprudential inheritance inadequate to the demands of a bona fide second founding. The dissolution of functional federalism, concomitant with the collapse of the political will sustaining federal enforcement, confirms its structural incapacity to protect the rights it declined to secure. The freedmen lived within the gap between the promises of the Reconstruction Amendments and the reality that functional federalism foreclosed.