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Notes -
Senator Johnson: But this amendment does not go far enough. I suppose the framers of the amendment thought it was necessary to provide for such an exigency. I do not see but that any one of these gentlemen may be elected President or Vice President of the United States, and why did you omit to exclude them? I do not understand them to be excluded from the privilege of holding the two highest offices in the gift of the nation. No man is to be a Senator or Representative or an elector for President or Vice President
Senator Morrill: Let me call the Senator's attention to the words "or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States."
Senator Johnson: Perhaps I am wrong as to the exclusion from the Presidency; no doubt I am; but I was misled by noticing the specific exclusion in the case of Senators and Representatives.
So Johnson brought up the theory, Morrill denied it, and Johnson chose not to argue further. But I didn't say the theory was accepted then; I said it wasn't novel. It's not novel.
Jefferson Davis was not involved. Jefferson Davis was disqualified by the fact that he was a Senator before he joined the confederacy; it is true that if the Presidency was not an "office" he would not have been disqualified from running for President, but nobody was worried about that; they were worried about him re-entering the Senate. Nor was anyone worried about some rebel President or Vice President running for office, for the simple reason that there weren't any.
“I am anxiously looking forward to Jefferson Davis’s Trial,” the Columbia law professor Francis Lieber wrote to Sumner at the close of Wirz’s trial. But “suppose he is not found guilty; is he not, in that case, completely restored to his citizenship, and will he not sit by your side again in the Senate? And be the Democratic candidate for the next presidency? I do not joke.”
If Lieber said that, it was not part of the debate over the 14th Amendment, since Lieber was not involved in that debate, and if it concerned Sumner, he did not mention it.
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