One chapter is dedicated to each of the three Reconstruction amendments, and we get an overview of how the legal decision-making evolved through the 19th century. This book describes the political battles that ensued after the Civil War in America, where there was a fight to ensure fair treatment for the former slaves with three Reconstruction amendments, which guaranteed freedom, equal treatment, and franchise respectively. Generally decent account by an extreme left-winger
Like all great works of history, this one informs our understanding of the present as well as the past: knowledge and vigilance are always necessary to secure our basic rights. The Jim Crow system was the result.Īgain today there are serious political challenges to birthright citizenship, voting rights, due process, and equal protection of the law. A series of momentous decisions by the Supreme Court narrowed the rights guaranteed in the amendments, while the states actively undermined them. In grafting the principle of equality onto the Constitution, these revolutionary changes marked the second founding of the United States.Įric Foner's compact, insightful history traces the arc of these pivotal amendments from their dramatic origins in pre-Civil War mass meetings of African-American "colored citizens" and in Republican party politics to their virtual nullification in the late 19th century.
The federal government, not the states, was charged with enforcement, reversing the priority of the original Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
They established the principle of birthright citizenship and guaranteed the privileges and immunities of all citizens. The Reconstruction amendments abolished slavery, guaranteed all persons due process and equal protection of the law, and equipped black men with the right to vote. The Declaration of Independence announced equality as an American ideal, but it took the Civil War and the subsequent adoption of three constitutional amendments to establish that ideal as American law. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar, a timely history of the constitutional changes that built equality into the nation's foundation and how those guarantees have been shaken over time.
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