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It might be useful to ponder Amendments and legislation passed with the aid of what was essentially an imposed, occupation government in the south. Representative of the will of the people?

This is a point I raise every time this aspect comes up. How can you claim a legitimate vote when you have guns pointed at people's heads with direction from Washington DC telling them how they will vote?

It was literally impossible to pass the 13th amendment without guns pointed at people's heads.

This is about as a fundamental undermining of the "consent of the governed" as it can get. This was a pretend Democratic process, in the manner of a Potemkin village.

RegulatorCountry: "It might be useful to ponder Amendments and legislation passed with the aid of what was essentially an imposed, occupation government in the south. Representative of the will of the people?"

DiogenesLamp: "This is a point I raise every time this aspect comes up.
How can you claim a legitimate vote when you have guns pointed at people's heads with direction from Washington DC telling them how they will vote?
It was literally impossible to pass the 13th amendment without guns pointed at people's heads."

So yet again, like all Democrats our DiogenesLamp wishes to have his cake and eat it too -- he wants a "natural right of secession", he wants to be in rebellion against the United States, he wants to wage bitter war for years and years against the United States, refusing any offer of peace short of Unconditional Surrender, and then he still wants full protection of all provisions of the constitution, including the slavery he fought & lost defending!

Here's the truth: having first declared themselves seceded from the Union, then declared & waged bitter war on the United States (making them treasonous), many Confederates became effectively non-citizens after Appomattox in 1865.
Instead, voting rights passed to those the Confederates so wanted to keep such rights away from: Southern Unionists and former slaves.

That lasted at least in part until the 1876 election, at which time full white citizenship rights, unsupervised by the US Army, returned to all Southern states and so they became what they most wanted to be: Democrat Black Codes, Jim Crow, segregation and KKK-type enforcers.

Now nobody claims former Confederates traitors had much say in ratifying the 13th, 14th & 15th amendments, thank God, but they did have a vote before 1865 and that "vote" cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of young soldiers.
And they again voted after 1876 and that vote effectively nullified the 13th, 14th & 15th amendments for the next ~100 years.