With all due respect to professor Fairman, I read the Congressional debates surrounding the ratification of the 14th Amendment, I mean the actual primary source documents, for a research paper I wrote at Columbia. The people who actually wrote the Amendment, including John Bingham, were crystal clear that they intended the Amendment to apply the Bill of Rights to the states. They made it abundantly clear the Bill of Rights were the privilidges and imunities referred to in the first clause.
Having read the actual primary source documents, I also became appauled at the degree to which people like Fairman and Raoul Berger mine quotes and rip them out of context to argue against incorporation. That the framers intended the Amendment to incorporate the bill of rights is so obvious from the text, that I can only conclude Berger and Fairmen are either deliberately duplicitous or blinded by their ideology.
I find it hard to believe you've done serious research into this and can conclude that those who wrote the Amendment were "crystal clear" in intending to make the first 8 amendments to the Constitution applicable against the states...much less conclude that others in Congress and the various state legislatures understood that that was the intent...at very best, its quite unclear what even Bingham himself believed
You state that Fairman and Berger had an interest in slanting their findings so as to reach a conclusion that the 14th Amendment was not understood to incorporate the Bill of Rights. I don't know your basis for that opinion...Fairman's article (unlike those of some of his detractors like Michael Curtis and Akhil Amar) is almost completely based on the documentary history of the 14th Amendment.
One fact that I would think would be pretty persuasive to anyone with an open mind on this subject is that Fairman, in the pages in his article he devoted to covering the debates in the all of the various state legislature debates over the 14th Amendment, found not a single reference to suggest that anyone in those state legislatures believed that the 14th Amendment was to make the BOR applicable to the states. We are supposed to believe that (at least a significant number of...presumably most if, as you say, the Amendment's purpose was "crystal clear") state legislators were ratifying such a monumental transformation of the federalist American system...a transformation that would have made every state law subject to the federal courts' review and, indeed, resulted in many state laws being rendered unconstitutional...and yet, no one even discussed this in any state ratifying debate?
Ridiculous