The court treated the 13th Amendment as ensuring only what James A. His book recounts the indifference and outright hostility of the Supreme Court to the issue of full racial equality for almost a century, starting soon after Reconstruction, when it should have deferred to Congress’s view of the amendments. By concentrating on the history of these three amendments, Foner makes an outstanding scholarly contribution, showing how they helped fulfill the Constitution’s democratic promise while intensifying the contest over its meaning.

(The 19th gave female citizens that right, in 1920.) Foner agrees with the abolitionist senator Charles Sumner that the Reconstruction amendments were “sleeping giants,” and notes that they provided the foundation for the civil rights revolution of the 1960s.įoner argues that they can do the same today, enabling us to resolve those key issues they were formulated to address. The 15th gave black men who were citizens the right to vote, in 1870.

The 14th guaranteed equality and also citizenship for anyone born in America, in 1868. The enormous consequences of these events - the re-establishment of white supremacy, extreme disparities of wealth and power between whites and blacks, the entrenchment of racism - were divisive for the nation and devastating for blacks. Why does the brief period known as Reconstruction, a century and a half ago, still influence the state of the Union so heavily?Īs the eminent historian Eric Foner explains in “The Second Founding,” the failure of the United States “to build an egalitarian society on the ashes of slavery” between 18 - the years conventionally associated with Reconstruction - left defining national issues unresolved: who should have the right to vote who should get citizenship and the imprimatur of belonging in the United States and how to provide equal opportunity for people who lack wealth and power.Ī generation ago, in his masterly account “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,” Foner detailed why the attempt to rebuild the country on a racially egalitarian footing after the Civil War failed: political factionalism, financial corruption and the vindictive President Andrew Johnson’s efforts to subvert reform an economic depression that triggered “a resurgence of overt racism” and a campaign of terror against blacks that went unchecked by law enforcement. THE SECOND FOUNDING How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution By Eric Foner

The second founding by eric foner