Born Equal
Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920
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4.5 • 2 Ratings
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- $22.99
Publisher Description
From “one of our most prodigious constitutional scholars” (Jonathan Eig), the definitive history of how the ideal of birth equality reshaped the American Constitution, from antebellum debates over slavery and secession, to the Civil War and emancipation, to women’s suffrage
In 1840, millions of Black Americans groaned in the chains of slavery. By 1920, millions of American men and women of every race had won the vote.
In Born Equal, the prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across these eight decades, when four glorious amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era was the epic and ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal. The promise of birth equality sat at the base of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. But in the nineteenth century, remarkable American women and men—especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln—elaborated a new vision of what this ideal demanded. Their debates played out from Seneca Falls to the halls of Congress, from Bleeding Kansas to Gettysburg, from Ford’s Theater to the White House gates, ultimately transforming the nation and the world.
An ambitious narrative history and a penetrating work of legal and political analysis, Born Equal is a vital new portrait of America’s winding road toward equality.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this sprawling account, legal scholar Amar (The Words That Made Us) tracks the evolution of constitutional rights from the heights of "slavocracy" in the 1840s and '50s through women winning the right to vote in 1920. This 80-year shift, he argues, from mass subjugation to nearly universal enfranchisement (excluding Native Americans, an issue Amar also explores), was propelled partly by key writers, artists, and politicians deeply engaged in debates about constitutional rights—among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln. Amar's focus on individuals allows him to craft a history that is attuned both the social movements and material conditions leading to societal change as well as the powerful influence wielded by committed intellectuals; much of the book traces how pro-equality thinkers were continually advancing their positions into more radical territory by forming their own "originalist" interpretations of the Constitution to battle "slavocrats" like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis. The main goal of Amar's narrative is to reclaim originalism as just as useful and inherent to liberalism as it is to conservatism, which lay readers may find a bit idiosyncratic and wearisome as Amar constantly returns to it. Still, it's an elegantly written and thorough survey of America's second founding.
