In a message to the South Carolina legislature, Governor James Orr called for the rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, saying that giving other states the right to dictate who should be a citizen in South Carolina spells the end of the constraint guaranteed in the "limited powers" of the federal government. The legislature agreed and rejected ratification of the amendment in an almost unanimous negative vote. South Carolina eventually did ratify the change in July 1868, three weeks before it became an official part of the Constitution, but then under very different political circumstances. (By John Osborne)
Horace Edgar Flack, The Adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1908), 202.
