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Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America
"Engaging . . . With a novelist's eye for biographical detail, Epps has written an . . . enthralling book."― David W. Blight, Chicago Tribune
The last battle of the Civil War wasn't fought at Appomattox by dashing generals or young soldiers but by middle-aged men in frock coats. Yet it was war all the same―a desperate struggle for the soul and future of the new American Republic that was rising from the ashes of Civil War. It was the battle that planted the seeds of democracy, under the bland heading "Amendment XIV." Scholars call it the "Second Constitution." Over time, the Fourteenth Amendment―which at last provided African Americans with full citizenship and prohibited any state from denying any citizen due process and equal protection under the law―changed almost every detail of our public life.
Democracy Reborn tells the story of this desperate struggle, from the halls of Congress to the bloody streets of Memphis and New Orleans. Both a novelist and a constitutional scholar, Garrett Epps unfolds a powerful story against a panoramic portrait of America on the verge of a new era.
The last battle of the Civil War wasn't fought at Appomattox by dashing generals or young soldiers but by middle-aged men in frock coats. Yet it was war all the same―a desperate struggle for the soul and future of the new American Republic that was rising from the ashes of Civil War. It was the battle that planted the seeds of democracy, under the bland heading "Amendment XIV." Scholars call it the "Second Constitution." Over time, the Fourteenth Amendment―which at last provided African Americans with full citizenship and prohibited any state from denying any citizen due process and equal protection under the law―changed almost every detail of our public life.
Democracy Reborn tells the story of this desperate struggle, from the halls of Congress to the bloody streets of Memphis and New Orleans. Both a novelist and a constitutional scholar, Garrett Epps unfolds a powerful story against a panoramic portrait of America on the verge of a new era.
352 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
29 people are currently reading
211 people want to read
About the author
Garrett Epps
13 books14 followersGarrett Epps (born in 1950 in Richmond, Virginia) is an American legal scholar, novelist, and journalist. He is Professor of Law at the University of Baltimore; previously he was the Orlando J. and Marian H. Hollis Professor of Law at the University of Oregon.
Epps attended St. Christopher's School and Harvard College, where he was the President of The Harvard Crimson. He later received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a law degree from Duke University, where he was first in his class. After graduation from Harvard, he was a co-founder of The Richmond Mercury, a short-lived alternative weekly whose alumni include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Frank Rich and Glenn Frankel. He also worked as an editor or reporter for The Richmond Afro-American, The Virginia Churchman, The Free-Lance Star, and The Washington Post. From 1983 until 1988, he was a columnist for Independent Weekly (then a bi-weekly). Immediately before coming to the University of Oregon, he spent a year clerking for the Honorable John D. Butzner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Epps has written two novels, including The Shad Treatment, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, as well as the nonfiction books To An Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, which was published in 2001 and was a finalist for the ABA's Silver Gavel Award, and Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Civil Rights in Post-Civil War America, which was published in 2006 and is the first comprehensive history of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. Democracy Reborn won the 2007 Oregon Book Award for non-fiction, and also was a finalist for the ABA Silver Gavel Award. He has also written numerous articles and editorials in newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
Epps attended St. Christopher's School and Harvard College, where he was the President of The Harvard Crimson. He later received an M.A. in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a law degree from Duke University, where he was first in his class. After graduation from Harvard, he was a co-founder of The Richmond Mercury, a short-lived alternative weekly whose alumni include Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Frank Rich and Glenn Frankel. He also worked as an editor or reporter for The Richmond Afro-American, The Virginia Churchman, The Free-Lance Star, and The Washington Post. From 1983 until 1988, he was a columnist for Independent Weekly (then a bi-weekly). Immediately before coming to the University of Oregon, he spent a year clerking for the Honorable John D. Butzner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.
Epps has written two novels, including The Shad Treatment, which won the Lillian Smith Book Award, as well as the nonfiction books To An Unknown God: Religious Freedom on Trial, which was published in 2001 and was a finalist for the ABA's Silver Gavel Award, and Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Civil Rights in Post-Civil War America, which was published in 2006 and is the first comprehensive history of the framing of the Fourteenth Amendment. Democracy Reborn won the 2007 Oregon Book Award for non-fiction, and also was a finalist for the ABA Silver Gavel Award. He has also written numerous articles and editorials in newspapers including The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Atlantic.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
August 21, 2018
Epps is such an interesting writer that one wouldn't think he'd be a law professor. (He teaches at University of Baltimore, previously the University of Oregon.) This is an excellent, if not too detailed history of the writing of the 14th Amendment. It's purpose is to call bull-shit on the supreme court that has used the amendment for the purposes of supporting Jim Crow, unfettered corporatism, and the relaxation of voting rights.
Written by the Republicans in the wake of the Civil War, the intent of the 14th was to spread all rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights to all persons born and brought into the United States, that all rights would be equally honored in all states, and that congress would have the power to enforce the rights of people throughout the nation. This fundamentally changed the meaning of what it is to be a state within the United States, no longer do states have the "right" to lift one individual's rights above another's by any means. The 14th is the legal basis for what we know to be our freedoms and individual rights within America.
The South hated it, the corporatists who use the advantages of limited liability to gain power over others hate it now, racists hate it. It is found in the doctrine that you can't trust the government for any reason-- this is directly from southern/slaver propaganda. Some people need to hide behind the law to give them power over others.
Written by the Republicans in the wake of the Civil War, the intent of the 14th was to spread all rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights to all persons born and brought into the United States, that all rights would be equally honored in all states, and that congress would have the power to enforce the rights of people throughout the nation. This fundamentally changed the meaning of what it is to be a state within the United States, no longer do states have the "right" to lift one individual's rights above another's by any means. The 14th is the legal basis for what we know to be our freedoms and individual rights within America.
The South hated it, the corporatists who use the advantages of limited liability to gain power over others hate it now, racists hate it. It is found in the doctrine that you can't trust the government for any reason-- this is directly from southern/slaver propaganda. Some people need to hide behind the law to give them power over others.
March 25, 2021
In this short book, Mr. Epps has presented a vast amount of knowledge about the 14th Amendment. Calling it the last battle of the Civil War and referring to it as the second constitution, Epps explains its importance in protecting the freedoms guaranteed to us by the Declaration and the Constitution as written in 1787 but at the same time warns us that since its adoption, the amendment has come under fire at times from the Supreme Court whose members are supposed to secure our rights.. From 19th Century cases where the Court attempted to divorce its meaning from protecting due progress of the countries citizens and giving it instead to corporations, to the current court which has also attempted to distort its purpose. The book provides education on the amendment and an implied warning to be ever vigilant about the protections it affords. This is a readable, important book about a topic that concerns us all.
September 10, 2010
Many people speak of the constitution with an air of reverence afforded to few other documents and yet have little understanding or knowledge of the document itself. Among those who have studied the document and its history, the majority know the story of the framers of the constitution and its first ten amendments, but very little about anything after that. Arguably the most important and long-reaching of the amendments to our constitution is the 14th Amendment, and in this book Garrett Epps reveals the history if its founders. Great read that covers an all too little covered subject.
April 25, 2025
Garret Epps, in his well-researched history of the Fourteenth Amendment, Democracy Reborn, makes a convincing case that Americans should know the authors of the Civil War Amendments as well as we know the Framers of the Constitution. Those who do not recognize the Founders of our greatest Constitutional change are likely to misunderstand what is now our nations’s core purpose: equality. Equality was not mentioned in the first Constitution, and, even after 650,000 died in the Civil War, inserting it into the text was not easy. Garrett Epps describes those who accomplished this difficult task:
Charles Sumner is best known for taking a severe physical beating in the Senate prior to the Civil War. In a speech opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he insulted the family of Senator Butler of South Carolina, who retaliated a few days later by inflicting head injuries with his cane. Sumner, who had been trapped by his desk and unable to defend himself, recovered after about 18 months, and returned to his role as an unflinching advocate of Union and Black civil rights.
Sumner believed that the Guaranty Clause in Article IV of the Constitution gave Congress the power to reshape the South, thereby guaranteeing a “republican form of government to every state.” He also recognized that, like the Emancipation Act, a Civil Rights bill would be vulnerable to change after an election. So, just as Lincoln and Congress had pressed for the Thirteenth Amendment, Sumner and the Radicals in Congress worked on the Fourteenth.
John Bingham, representing Ohio in Congress, committed himself to incorporating the Bill of Rights to the States. Bingham was the powerhouse behind Article I of the Fourteenth Amendment, which includes the edict that “no state shall…abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States” and he wrote the strong “equal protection” clause, the first place the word “equal” appears in the Constitution.
Bingham had been especially troubled by the suppression of ideas in the South. Abolitionist newspapers had been burned before delivery for decades, and whites regularly supervised Black worship services. He wrote, “the equality of the right to live, the right to know,; to argue and to utter… to enjoy the product of their toil, is the rock on which the Constitution rests.” Bingham believed that the Constitution could, and should, bring about the kingdom of God on earth, in which brethren would live together in equality and harmony, each free to listen to his conscience.
Lyman Trumbull, an Illinois Senator and Lincoln ally, is responsible for writing a Thirteenth Amendment that could actually pass. Sumner’s version would have proclaimed all Americans “equal before the law.” In an era when no women voted anywhere and many Northern blacks could not vote, this was too controversial. Trumbull chose language from the old and respected Northwest Ordinance:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Then he added a sentence that changed the entire relationship between nation and state:
Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This marked the first time that an amendment increased federal authority, rather than reining it in. The nation now held the responsibility for protecting citizens’ rights against the states.
Thaddeus Stevens, perhaps the least likeable of the architects of the new Constitution, viewed the Southern states as traitors, pure and simple. His fingerprints are on the most punitive sections of the Amendment. The Southern war debt would never be repaid. States that suppressed Black voting rights would lose representation in Congress.
Stevens advocated long and hard for land reform - the breakup of the old plantations and the settlement by blacks on homestead-like portions of land. This idea - begun by General Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” order - had a promising beginning and a tragic end, when Congress, fearing the results of a precedent for seizing property without compensation, returned the land to its original owners.
Stevens’ appetite for punishment, though, had its uses. Declaring former Confederate states to be territories (“dead states,” in his terminology) under federal control allowed Congress to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, and to demand its ratification in order for Southern states to rejoin Congress as voting members.
Robert Dale Owen held no political office during the Civil War or after, but, as a friend of Thaddeus Stevens, he was extremely influential. Owens was an Enlightenment thinker in the style, says Garrett Epps, of Thomas Paine. He took rational thinking to its logical extremes. If people deserved freedom, then free love and birth control were as important and necessary as abolition. Naturally, he was controversial. However, his words were the first draft of the Fourteenth Amendment. In that time and place, someone with an idea could contact a senator, lay out a plan for a new society, and the senator might actually take action. Those who believe that the Amendment “was never intended” to do this or that are probably wrong. Owen put the “radical” in “Radical Republican.”
Henry Wilson believed that the Thirteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to protect certain civil rights for black people. He wrote the first Civil Rights Act, which failed, but passed over Johnson’s veto a year later. He was a force in the fight against the “Slave Power,” the inflated voting rights enjoyed by white southerners due to the Three-Fifths Compromise and later caused by voter suppression. Wilson argued in favor of admitting Arkansas after it formed a new state government comprised of Union loyalists, Blacks, and whites who had moved south. Similarly, he supported seating the first Black Senator, Hiram Revels. Wilson represented Massachusetts in the Senate before serving as Grant’s second vice president.
William Pitt Fessenden, Senator from Maine, was committed to equality and union, but open to compromise where Sumner and Stevens might not have budged. Along with Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary Chase, he was responsible for financing the Civil War. Today’s history students might blame him for the assumption, present in the Fourteenth Amendment, that states have the power to deny the vote to some people, but one should also thank him for the fact that it passed.
Schuyler Colfax of Illinois was Speaker of the House during the most productive period of Congressional Reconstruction, and then as Grant’s first vice president. His mission, he stated on election to that office, was “to guarantee to every state a republican form of government” - in other words, to prevent the return of the Slave Power. He succeeded long enough to give Black Americans the brief flowering of Civil Rights that animated the memories of those who worked for the same goals 100 years later.
Many today disagree about what type of equality the nation owes its citizens, and, despite the 14th Amendment, some today even disagree about who should enjoy birthright citizenship. No one, though, disputes that equality should be a goal. We share assumptions about equality and political rights because of a generation of people who had a vision, fought for it, and left a legacy of a profoundly different nation. These people deserve to be named, honored, and
Charles Sumner is best known for taking a severe physical beating in the Senate prior to the Civil War. In a speech opposing the Kansas-Nebraska Act, he insulted the family of Senator Butler of South Carolina, who retaliated a few days later by inflicting head injuries with his cane. Sumner, who had been trapped by his desk and unable to defend himself, recovered after about 18 months, and returned to his role as an unflinching advocate of Union and Black civil rights.
Sumner believed that the Guaranty Clause in Article IV of the Constitution gave Congress the power to reshape the South, thereby guaranteeing a “republican form of government to every state.” He also recognized that, like the Emancipation Act, a Civil Rights bill would be vulnerable to change after an election. So, just as Lincoln and Congress had pressed for the Thirteenth Amendment, Sumner and the Radicals in Congress worked on the Fourteenth.
John Bingham, representing Ohio in Congress, committed himself to incorporating the Bill of Rights to the States. Bingham was the powerhouse behind Article I of the Fourteenth Amendment, which includes the edict that “no state shall…abridge the privileges or immunities of the citizens of the United States” and he wrote the strong “equal protection” clause, the first place the word “equal” appears in the Constitution.
Bingham had been especially troubled by the suppression of ideas in the South. Abolitionist newspapers had been burned before delivery for decades, and whites regularly supervised Black worship services. He wrote, “the equality of the right to live, the right to know,; to argue and to utter… to enjoy the product of their toil, is the rock on which the Constitution rests.” Bingham believed that the Constitution could, and should, bring about the kingdom of God on earth, in which brethren would live together in equality and harmony, each free to listen to his conscience.
Lyman Trumbull, an Illinois Senator and Lincoln ally, is responsible for writing a Thirteenth Amendment that could actually pass. Sumner’s version would have proclaimed all Americans “equal before the law.” In an era when no women voted anywhere and many Northern blacks could not vote, this was too controversial. Trumbull chose language from the old and respected Northwest Ordinance:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Then he added a sentence that changed the entire relationship between nation and state:
Section 2: Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
This marked the first time that an amendment increased federal authority, rather than reining it in. The nation now held the responsibility for protecting citizens’ rights against the states.
Thaddeus Stevens, perhaps the least likeable of the architects of the new Constitution, viewed the Southern states as traitors, pure and simple. His fingerprints are on the most punitive sections of the Amendment. The Southern war debt would never be repaid. States that suppressed Black voting rights would lose representation in Congress.
Stevens advocated long and hard for land reform - the breakup of the old plantations and the settlement by blacks on homestead-like portions of land. This idea - begun by General Sherman’s “40 acres and a mule” order - had a promising beginning and a tragic end, when Congress, fearing the results of a precedent for seizing property without compensation, returned the land to its original owners.
Stevens’ appetite for punishment, though, had its uses. Declaring former Confederate states to be territories (“dead states,” in his terminology) under federal control allowed Congress to pass the Fourteenth Amendment, and to demand its ratification in order for Southern states to rejoin Congress as voting members.
Robert Dale Owen held no political office during the Civil War or after, but, as a friend of Thaddeus Stevens, he was extremely influential. Owens was an Enlightenment thinker in the style, says Garrett Epps, of Thomas Paine. He took rational thinking to its logical extremes. If people deserved freedom, then free love and birth control were as important and necessary as abolition. Naturally, he was controversial. However, his words were the first draft of the Fourteenth Amendment. In that time and place, someone with an idea could contact a senator, lay out a plan for a new society, and the senator might actually take action. Those who believe that the Amendment “was never intended” to do this or that are probably wrong. Owen put the “radical” in “Radical Republican.”
Henry Wilson believed that the Thirteenth Amendment gave Congress the power to protect certain civil rights for black people. He wrote the first Civil Rights Act, which failed, but passed over Johnson’s veto a year later. He was a force in the fight against the “Slave Power,” the inflated voting rights enjoyed by white southerners due to the Three-Fifths Compromise and later caused by voter suppression. Wilson argued in favor of admitting Arkansas after it formed a new state government comprised of Union loyalists, Blacks, and whites who had moved south. Similarly, he supported seating the first Black Senator, Hiram Revels. Wilson represented Massachusetts in the Senate before serving as Grant’s second vice president.
William Pitt Fessenden, Senator from Maine, was committed to equality and union, but open to compromise where Sumner and Stevens might not have budged. Along with Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary Chase, he was responsible for financing the Civil War. Today’s history students might blame him for the assumption, present in the Fourteenth Amendment, that states have the power to deny the vote to some people, but one should also thank him for the fact that it passed.
Schuyler Colfax of Illinois was Speaker of the House during the most productive period of Congressional Reconstruction, and then as Grant’s first vice president. His mission, he stated on election to that office, was “to guarantee to every state a republican form of government” - in other words, to prevent the return of the Slave Power. He succeeded long enough to give Black Americans the brief flowering of Civil Rights that animated the memories of those who worked for the same goals 100 years later.
Many today disagree about what type of equality the nation owes its citizens, and, despite the 14th Amendment, some today even disagree about who should enjoy birthright citizenship. No one, though, disputes that equality should be a goal. We share assumptions about equality and political rights because of a generation of people who had a vision, fought for it, and left a legacy of a profoundly different nation. These people deserve to be named, honored, and
December 30, 2008
This is a great historical book that goes deep into the battle to pass the 14th amendment. It is really about the people involved, but this carries some great lessons about how political change occurs.
December 29, 2021
Another men's book club selection; and really worthwhile to spend the time continuing through very dense history, written at times in a ponderous style, but worth the (at times) slog. I was foggy at best on the sequence of the chronology between the Emancipation Proclamation and the right to vote for both all adult men and women. A small chart showing the E.P. along with the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and nineteenth Amendments would have been helpful.
President Andrew Johnson comes across as a person who could not deal with moves to immediate racial equality, understandable after such a long time of servitude and separation of the white and black races. He was a disappointing leader and his impeachment - along with Clinton and Trump (twice) in modern times - is a hallmark of a failed Presidency; Johnson came within a single Senate vote of being removed from office. There is a blizzard of important names, of which most of us have heard nothing, or have forgotten. After some time, the (mostly) men and women become lost in a snowstorm of detail.
One important fact, nearly buried in the maze of detail, is how the Republican and Democratic political parties have done a virtual one-eighty in terms of both geographical location and political belief structures since the Civil War. That alone is worth a book.
Another key point, well developed, is how the ideology of Abolition and Feminism were at one point identically aligned but came apart and were competitors in terms of emphasis. (See the timeline for Suffrage for the Nineteenth Amendment compared with the Fifteenth)
"Slave Power," a term denoting the political power of the (mostly but not all) Southern States depicted a very powerful (and enduring) feeling on many of the inequality of black people. The author makes it clear that "States Rights" and the opposition to repubicanism (small r), or the precedence of federal power over the power of the states, is an ongoing factor today. In fact, the "New South," a term used after the Civil War, was not new at all; it was a continuation of the antebellum white Planter Rule enforced by repressive laws and covert violence. Vestiges of that are quite visible today, hidden under terms such as "States Rights."
This is a powerful book and one worth the time to read, and to "get," the complex background of the United States. At times, one wonders if this country will stay together or legally break into the sections clearly different in many ways.
President Andrew Johnson comes across as a person who could not deal with moves to immediate racial equality, understandable after such a long time of servitude and separation of the white and black races. He was a disappointing leader and his impeachment - along with Clinton and Trump (twice) in modern times - is a hallmark of a failed Presidency; Johnson came within a single Senate vote of being removed from office. There is a blizzard of important names, of which most of us have heard nothing, or have forgotten. After some time, the (mostly) men and women become lost in a snowstorm of detail.
One important fact, nearly buried in the maze of detail, is how the Republican and Democratic political parties have done a virtual one-eighty in terms of both geographical location and political belief structures since the Civil War. That alone is worth a book.
Another key point, well developed, is how the ideology of Abolition and Feminism were at one point identically aligned but came apart and were competitors in terms of emphasis. (See the timeline for Suffrage for the Nineteenth Amendment compared with the Fifteenth)
"Slave Power," a term denoting the political power of the (mostly but not all) Southern States depicted a very powerful (and enduring) feeling on many of the inequality of black people. The author makes it clear that "States Rights" and the opposition to repubicanism (small r), or the precedence of federal power over the power of the states, is an ongoing factor today. In fact, the "New South," a term used after the Civil War, was not new at all; it was a continuation of the antebellum white Planter Rule enforced by repressive laws and covert violence. Vestiges of that are quite visible today, hidden under terms such as "States Rights."
This is a powerful book and one worth the time to read, and to "get," the complex background of the United States. At times, one wonders if this country will stay together or legally break into the sections clearly different in many ways.
Read
November 1, 2022Most of this book was not specifically about the 14th amendment, but was a socio-historical lead-up and context for it. Also, it had many mini-biographies, most of which seemed unnecessary.
I did not expect one story involving seances and Lincoln's ghost giving advice.
I noticed that many of the attitudes and racist arguments used by the southern (Democrat) politicians of that time are very similar to the arguments used by Republicans today (states rights, tyranny of the federal government, making sure that certain races don't vote by using assorted legal and threatening means, general animosity to non-white people and "miscegenation"). Police then were used to kill black people.
[Iowa mention]
I did not expect one story involving seances and Lincoln's ghost giving advice.
I noticed that many of the attitudes and racist arguments used by the southern (Democrat) politicians of that time are very similar to the arguments used by Republicans today (states rights, tyranny of the federal government, making sure that certain races don't vote by using assorted legal and threatening means, general animosity to non-white people and "miscegenation"). Police then were used to kill black people.
[Iowa mention]
February 28, 2019
This is an engaging retelling of the events leading up to the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment and the subsequent prolonged stunted interpretation and failure to enforce its provisions until the mid-twentieth century, particularly by the Supreme Court -- a trend which continues in some ways to this date.
The story is presented in a novelistic fashion which retains the readers interest rather than in an academic style.
The story is presented in a novelistic fashion which retains the readers interest rather than in an academic style.
May 10, 2021
Garret Epps is one of our best legal historians, and he has produced a fascinating book on the creation and impact of the 14th Amendment. The people who wrote our Constitution were America's original Founders, but the amazing group that produced the 14th Amendment were like our second wave of Founders, helping our nation be reborn into the democracy it is today.
Walter Isaacson, author, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Walter Isaacson, author, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
May 23, 2018
I picked it up off the library shelf on a whim and holy fuck am I glad I did. So good, well-written, insightful, etc with praising synonyms. Just wish there’d been a little more on the more recent history of the 14th amendment.
December 2, 2019
Eh!
There's some interesting stuff in here but it's way too long for a book that isn't offering up any original research. Epps is also a bit of a John Bingham stan which really tested my patience!
There's some interesting stuff in here but it's way too long for a book that isn't offering up any original research. Epps is also a bit of a John Bingham stan which really tested my patience!
February 3, 2013
I read this book to get an overview of the passage of the 14th Amendment and hopefully get an idea of where I want to narrow down my thesis for my American Constitutional History paper.
One of my critiques is based on that premise. I read the book to find out more about the Amendment itself. If you had to list various characters that appeared in this book (non-living items can certainly be characters), the Amendment would not be one of them. Mr. Epps spends relatively little time on the actual amendment.
That being said, I imagine that Mr. Epps thought of this book as a way of setting the stage, explaining why the Amendment took the shape that it did. Thus, he spends a good deal of time exposing the background predominantly through mini-biographies of the various men involved such as Thad Stevens and President Andrew Johnson.
Epps prose is outstanding. He weaves the historical narrative through a rich web of words that absolutely captivates. I found myself compelled to keep reading even though it really was just a bunch of white men talking. (That is also what I thought of the movie Lincoln...absolutely riveting!)
While this book didn't quite serve the purpose for which I read it, I'm quite thankful I had the opportunity to read it. I strongly recommend it to anyone, especially since he so capably explains (by way of history) how the idea of Civil Rights in America really got started.
One of my critiques is based on that premise. I read the book to find out more about the Amendment itself. If you had to list various characters that appeared in this book (non-living items can certainly be characters), the Amendment would not be one of them. Mr. Epps spends relatively little time on the actual amendment.
That being said, I imagine that Mr. Epps thought of this book as a way of setting the stage, explaining why the Amendment took the shape that it did. Thus, he spends a good deal of time exposing the background predominantly through mini-biographies of the various men involved such as Thad Stevens and President Andrew Johnson.
Epps prose is outstanding. He weaves the historical narrative through a rich web of words that absolutely captivates. I found myself compelled to keep reading even though it really was just a bunch of white men talking. (That is also what I thought of the movie Lincoln...absolutely riveting!)
While this book didn't quite serve the purpose for which I read it, I'm quite thankful I had the opportunity to read it. I strongly recommend it to anyone, especially since he so capably explains (by way of history) how the idea of Civil Rights in America really got started.
February 17, 2015
I have set out during my summer nerdcation to read a few books that cover concepts in my American Government course that I feel I am woefully undereducated upon.
I spent a long time this past year trying to find something that covered incorporation in American History as it relates to civil and political rights for minorities.
This is a great start.
Epps is an easy and interesting read, and readily ties constitutional law into this historical overview of the penning of the 14th Amendment. I love how he gives longitude to the concept... looking at Antebellum America and the resistance to civil rights for minorities... through the "Second Founding"... and then seemlessly looks at the actions taken by the court that both further and limit the evolution of civil and political rights.
Moreover, there is a definite constructed vision of how our nation's greatest debate, state vs federal authority, has played out and will continue to play out over time. It's really mindblowing to think about the contemporary struggle in the context of Antebellum, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow South. While there is less fanfare for the disenfrachisement of a wholesale race/religion/gender, the concept of a struggle for civil rights is very much so front in center in America as we discuss civil rights for the LGBT community. There are many similarities and tangents between these movements that bear further witness and consideration in a historical context.
A great read.
I spent a long time this past year trying to find something that covered incorporation in American History as it relates to civil and political rights for minorities.
This is a great start.
Epps is an easy and interesting read, and readily ties constitutional law into this historical overview of the penning of the 14th Amendment. I love how he gives longitude to the concept... looking at Antebellum America and the resistance to civil rights for minorities... through the "Second Founding"... and then seemlessly looks at the actions taken by the court that both further and limit the evolution of civil and political rights.
Moreover, there is a definite constructed vision of how our nation's greatest debate, state vs federal authority, has played out and will continue to play out over time. It's really mindblowing to think about the contemporary struggle in the context of Antebellum, Reconstruction, and the Jim Crow South. While there is less fanfare for the disenfrachisement of a wholesale race/religion/gender, the concept of a struggle for civil rights is very much so front in center in America as we discuss civil rights for the LGBT community. There are many similarities and tangents between these movements that bear further witness and consideration in a historical context.
A great read.
August 13, 2013
Really interesting history of the era immediately after the Civil War and the efforts of the unionists and antislavery Congress to consolidate and protect the gains for blacks won in the War. After the war there was a rush to get the 14th amendment passed to give the federal government the authority to protect voting and other rights of the freed slaves before the Southern states reentered the union. President Johnson, a Tennessean born in NC, was not sympathetic to the cause, and would be considered racist by today's standards. All the great radical Northern politicians had a role in this. We see politics at its most courageous and venal. A very good exciting read. Amazing how the same political divides between North and South continue today and how the mechanics of Congress and the Constitution are still important in the political battles. Also if you're interested in the 14th amendment this is a great place to start.
March 10, 2008
Intelligent, thought-provoking, informative, and--the great plus here--a fabulous narrative.
December 12, 2016
Excellent!
Superb narrative history of the rewriting of the Constitution after the Civil War. Should be read for the history, and for implications for understanding US law.
Superb narrative history of the rewriting of the Constitution after the Civil War. Should be read for the history, and for implications for understanding US law.
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