The section was proposed during the concluding stages of the Australian frontier wars in the 1891 constitutional convention by Andrew Inglis Clark, the then Tasmanian Attorney-General. Clark adapted some minor wording from section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which was introduced in 1868 following the US Civil War during the Reconstruction era and intended to deter states from excluding certain races from voting in the United States of America. Unlike section 25 in Australia, however, the US provision made no direct reference to race, and was designed for a different purpose with the Confederate States of America. For instance, the population of the Union was 18.5 million around the time of reconstruction, when the 14th Amendment was included as a discretionary provision. However, in the Confederacy, the population during the civil war is listed as 5.5 million free and 3.5 million enslaved - which made a clear statement to the confederate states that representative numbers on a federal level would be effected, if they precluded their respective citizens on grounds such as race, on a state level, after their defeat by the Union in 1865.