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"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.
- Sales Rank: #438986 in Books
- Published on: 2007-09-04
- Released on: 2007-09-04
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x .80" w x 6.00" l, 1.09 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 352 pages
From Publishers Weekly
In December 1865, the 39th Congress had urgent business, says Epps in this passionate account of Reconstruction politics. If the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union, ex-slaves would swell those states' congressional power, but without congressional protection, the freedmen would never be allowed to vote, and the Southern white elite would have disproportionate influence in the federal government. Epps follows every twist of Congress's response to this problem, and his energetic prose transforms potentially tedious congressional debates into riveting reading. He illuminates the fine points, such as the distinction in the 19th century between civil rights—relating to property and employment, which many thought blacks should have—and political rights, which some thought only educated men of wealth should have. Congressmen were not the only people energized by the conundrums of electoral representation. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton petitioned for women's suffrage on the same grounds as blacks. While Congress hammered out the 14th and 15th Amendments, white Southerners were putting in place the Jim Crow codes that would subvert those amendments until the 1960s. As constitutional scholar and novelist Epps (The Shad Treatment) notes in a rousing afterword, there are many corners in which they are not fully realized today. 7 pages of b&w illus. (Sept. 1)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“The Civil War amendments redeemed the Constitution from the slavery concessions that had betrayed its preamble and perpetuated human bondage both North and South. Garrett Epps' new book is indispensable reading for Americans to know how our constitutional history has affected us all. A combination of the finest scholarship with unsurpassed insight.” ―William Van Alstyne, Perkins Professor of Law emeritus, Duke University; Lee Professor of Constitutional Law, College of William and Mary
“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
“It is best to be blunt. This is a thrilling book. Garrett Epps has woven together the tragic strands of America's effort to deal with the issue of race in the Constitution. Law, politics and statecraft clash in a great drama.” ―Anthony Lewis, author of Gideon's Trumpet
“Garrett Epps is one of the most fluid and accessible writers in the legal academy. Not surprisingly, he has written a marvelous overview of immediate post-Civil War politics that gave us the Fourteenth Amendment and, as importantly, a new understanding of the American experiment.” ―Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School, author of Our Undemocratic Constitution: How the Constitution Goes Wrong (and How We the People Can Correct It)
About the Author
Garrett Epps is the author of The Shad Treatment and The Floating Island: A Tale of Washington. He is Orlando John and Marian H. Hollis Professor at the University of Oregon School of Law where he teaches constitutional law and a special course in creative writing for law students. Epps writes fiction and poetry as well as nonfiction, and has translated or adapted literature into English from both Spanish and Italian. He has two children, Daniel and Maggie.
Most helpful customer reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Unrealized attempt for justice (4.25*s)
By J. Grattan
This book primary focuses on the legislative efforts of the Congressional Republicans in the year of 1866, within the 39th Congress, to counter the lenient policies of President Johnson towards the vanquished Southern states. By far their most important legislative act was the formulation of the Fourteenth Amendment in June, 1866, which clarified and expanded the meaning and scope of the Bill of Rights. That amendment along with the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted US citizenship to all born in the US and the "same right ... to full and equal benefit of all laws and proceedings for the security of person and property, as is enjoyed by white citizens," was truly transformative of the Constitutional landscape of the US, especially to the new freedmen.
Johnson had been an ardent pro-Unionist during the War, having been selected the military governor of occupied Tennessee in 1862. Upon assuming the presidency in April, 1865, after Lincoln's assassination, he vowed to "punish and impoverish" the Southern traitors. However, in an extraordinary about face, he quickly granted amnesty, restoring full citizenship and confiscated property, to all except the most prominent Confederates, and they had only to declare loyalty to the Union and apply for a pardon. He basically enabled Southern oligarchs to resume the domination of freedmen - or in other words re-establish de facto slavery. Clearly, his anti-black sentiments outweighed his earlier class-based anger at the aristocratic, planter secessionists. Johnson is the major figure throughout the book and is portrayed in highly unflattering terms. His drunken speech at his inauguration was only a small window into a rigid, impulsive, belligerent, vindictive, and self-important personality. He absolutely could not accept or grasp that the Civil War had shifted the ground beneath his states' rights, Jacksonian principles of a Union consisting only of white men.
The Republicans were not all of one stripe; a moderate faction was desirous of reconciliation with the South. But Johnson's swift accommodation of Southern interests was alarming to the entire Republican Party. His allowance of Southern state elections under their old constitutions in 1865 of Congressman was about to give the Democrats the votes to block Reconstruction legislation. Furthermore, the freedmen, though still disenfranchised, would count as full persons in allocating representation adding to Southern power after the 1870 census. Equally disturbing was the passage of so-called Black Codes throughout the South that disallowed idleness and forced freedmen to work under year-long labor contracts, barred freedmen from living in cities, restricted their occupations, required passes to move freely, allowed harsh punishments for minor infractions, took children from families to apprenticed to former masters, and the like. Those Codes were enforced by vigilantes, thus establishing a reign of terror in parts of the South. The newly elected representatives were not seated through creative technical maneuvers, but the Republicans could only see the old, monolithic Slave Power and its control at both the local and national level firmly on the road to restoration. The formal freedom guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment was proving to be a chimera. Even moderates insisted on basic civil rights for freedmen, though suffrage was still viewed as a privilege by many. The author points out that several commentators and observers at the time held that freedom for all residents of the South was conditional. The thinking of the Southern oligarchy so permeated Southern society that any dissent in speech or actions was dealt with suddenly and harshly. That is the atmosphere into which civil rights was to be introduced.
The ascendance of the old South is the situation that Congress and the huge Republican majority faced when it convened on Dec 4, 1865. It also faced an enlarged presidency; Lincoln had gathered by necessity more power than any previous president. Congress was not anxious for a confrontation with the President, who had declared, Jackson-like, that he was the sole legitimate authority over the Confederate states. As the author indicates, the Republicans constantly made overtures to Johnson over the next year for him to acknowledge the plight of freedmen, but to no avail. After rejecting the newly elected Southern congressmen, Rep Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican from PA, introduced a concurrent resolution that resulted in the establishment of The Joint Committee on Reconstruction on Dec 13, 1865, consisting of 15 members drawn from both Houses, with the task to "inquire into the condition of ... the so-called Confederate States of America, and report whether they, or any of them, are entitled to be represented in either house of Congress." The Joint Committee's report, issued by chairman Sen. William Pitt Fessenden, a moderate from Maine, in June, 1866, and drawn from testimony solicited from over one hundred Southerners, confirmed what was largely known from numerous journalistic tours of the South, that is, that the South did not have the governmental structures or even a desire on the personal level to protect the civil rights of all persons such that those states should regain their former standing in the national government. In addition to the report, the Committee was also tasked to submit needed legislation to back up their findings. Despite the inclination of several Radical members to consider the Southern states essentially dissolved, thereby becoming territories, and subject to broad Congressional control including wholesale land redistribution, the more moderate but still sweeping Fourteenth Amendment was the result and passed both Houses by June 13, 1866.
The Civil Rights Act of April, 1866, establishing citizenship and equal civil rights, was constructed under the auspices of the Thirteenth Amendment and predated the Fourteenth Amendment. It was passed over Johnson's veto, which was the first Congressional override of a veto in US history. But in the author's estimation, it was the Fourteenth Amendment that fully represented a new, expanded Constitutional vision. It completed what had been left at loose ends by the Founders in terms of rights and their scope and applicability; no longer could states deny the protections of the Bill of Rights to anyone. In addition, states could not selectively define eligibility for citizenship. Interestingly enough, many of the Republican Radicals were not appreciative of the Amendment's revolutionary nature, being fixated on the lack of a specific suffrage section. Section 1: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws," has been one of the more debated and widely used parts of our Constitution ever since its passage. For example, it is the basis of so-called corporate personhood.
The book is largely concerned with the various interactions, with some Constitutional niceties being glanced at, surrounding the Joint Committee's work and Congressional efforts to create and pass the Civil Rights Act and to renew the Freedman's Bureau legislation, the latter of which was vetoed by Johnson and not overridden. The Freedmen's Bureau had a tremendous impact in first year after the War, easing the freedmen's transition to independence by not only providing immediate relief but also by building schools and distributing federally held lands - all of which was contrary to Jacksonian individualism. In addition to background information on the Southern situation, the author does provide succinct mini-profiles of several relevant individuals both within and without Congress. It goes without saying that Stevens is profiled, but he also recognizes Fessenden, Sen. Charles Sumner of Mass, Rep. John Bingham of OH, the principal author of Section 1 herein quoted, Sen. Lyman Trumbull of IL, German-American soldier and diplomat Carl Schurz, and quixotic, utopian reformer Robert Dale Owens, who was instrumental in creating the Freedman's Bureau. He also, less successfully, veers off into the women's suffrage movement and its relegation to secondary status compared to freedmen suffrage and other unnecessary miscellany. The author captures well the emotions of the times: the fears and determination of the Republicans, and the fierce resistance of those who wanted a return to ante-bellum society.
The book is somewhat narrow in its focus. It largely ends with Johnson's disastrous tour of the North in the late summer of 1866 to create a National Union movement opposed to the Fourteenth Amendment and the basis of a new political party with him being the standard bearer in 1868. His responses to various hecklers only added to the evidence of a very disturbed personality. Of course, Johnson little knew that he had the travails of impeachment ahead. While the legislation of 1866 provided a legal basis, so-called Radical Reconstruction involving military control was actually implemented under the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, which regrettably are not a part of the book. The situation for freedmen, which never came close to the legislative promise of 1866, was beginning to rapidly deteriorate by the mid-1870s. Any belief that the entrenched Southern system could straightforwardly be changed had proven to be complete fantasy. The author notes that it had became evident beyond doubt by the turn of the century that freedmen's rights, both civil and political, were under total assault under a regime of "Jim Crow," with both the Supreme Court and Congress abdicating their Constitutional duties of properly judging and enforcing the Fourteenth Amendment. At the same time, the Civil War and Reconstruction were being widely reinterpreted as examples of Northern meddling in Southern agrarian and internal interests. Southerners had supposedly fought the good fight achieving a kind of nobility. Even though "Jim Crow" had formally been disallowed, the author claims that the Fourteenth Amendment remains an incompletely understood and implemented statute. In addition, the men of the 39th Congress have not gotten their proper due.
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful.
Great Book
By S. Riccardi
This book tells the story of the constitutional transformation wrought by the Civil War, culminating in the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. The focus of the book is on the time after Lincoln's assasination until Congress' passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to be ratified by the States. Although this time period, and the story told in the book, has been the focus of many scholarly articles and books, this appears to be the first treatment of the topic for a popular audience.
Garrett Epps is a skilled writer and Democracy Reborn is very readable. He ably captures the excitement of the time. The book is also a fairly complete recounting of the roles of most of the major players in the drama. All in all it is a very enjoyable and educational.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
My favorite Amendement
By M. A Newman
Few documents are cited as frequently as the US Constitution by people who have never bothered to read it. Buried in the middle of the short document is the source of modern liberty, the 14th Amendment, this book shows how freedom and liberty was imposed from high minded elites against the will of a violently racist society.
Most people imagine that democracy in America was something that came with the Revolutionary War. In reality, the founding fathers were deeply suspicious of the common people to make decisions regarding their political future. It would be a stretch to imagine that they foresaw the attack ad ridden political culture of today, but there is some merit in this thought. In the election of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, a mere 2% of the voters of the state of New York were permitted to vote. In 1828, only 7% of the population took part in the election of Andrew Jackson. Popular voting for president occurred in South Carolina only after the Civil War. Changes came about only as migration to west made some of the property requirements irrelevant, but up until Reconstruction, White Male America might enjoy political rights (the franchise) and civil rights (the right to marry, make contracts) although not everyone had those rights (and would not until the repeal of the poll tax in the 1960s! African Americans were prevented from registering to vote until the mid-1960s, and there are still election year purges of the voting rolls in doubtful states in election years) .
The status of slaves evolved rapidly from 1858-1865, when Dred Scott asserted that slaves were not citizens, but chattel and enjoyed no more rights than cattle to the idea that newly freed Africans Americans would have both political and civil rights. Like numerous controversies that would follow and would grow out of the 14 Amendment, the idea of black enfranchisement was no more popular with the majority of the population than gay marriage is today in some circles. The notion that former slaves might exercise the franchise was an abomination in many circles North and South. As usual, it took the work of a band of elites to insert into the constitution the notion that all people were equal in their relationship to the state, not a platitude, but a real controversial issue of the day.
It took men like Thaddeus Stevens, whose views of racial equality have largely become accepted at least in most quarters was regarded as a radical by the standards of his day. To understand just how out of step Stevens was with the attitudes of his day and up until the end of WWII, one need only look at his subsequent portrayals. Stevens inherently reasonable and farsighted position led to him being caricatured by subsequent historians and even D.W. in his racist epic, Birth of a Nation.
The villain of the book is the 17th president of the United States, Andrew Johnson, the alcoholic racist president, determined in the name of equality to keep former slaves in a new form of bondage. The author thinks it was a pity he was not impeached and I am inclined to agree with them. It would have been different for the people who would spin the history of Reconstruction in later generations to make Johnson into a hero had he been removed from office. The political ineptitude of Johnson should be celebrated, even if his ideas of making the United States a country fit only for white people are repugnant to all right thinking people. Had he not proven to be such a failure as a political leader the 14th Amendment would never have been passed. He solidified the ranks of the Republican Party better than any leader could have done and pushed them to greater progressive thought than would have been possible had he compromised. A lesson is here for politicians of both parties.
Getting the 14th Amendment passed involved a variety of political shenanigans by the radicals. Elections were declared invalid, southern representatives, who had opposed the United States only a year before, were not seated in congress and rebellious states were not allowed to be readmitted. Garratt Epps demonstrates the various parries and thrusts by Stevens and his allies, all to put forth the idea that all men were created equal and make it more than a slogan, but a genuine rebirth of freedom.
The authors of the 14th Amendment were flawed in the sense that they did not go far enough. Women were excluded and this served to drive a wedge between the two camps of the former abolitionist movement. Those who sought an equal roll just for the former slaves became divorced from their female emancipation allies.
Once the 14th Amendment was passed and even before people were horrified at the idea that people would be regarded as equal under the law and steps were taken to undermine its impact. As the memories of the Civil War retreated, people wanted to forget, they wanted sectional unity more than they wanted freedom. It really took the end of another war, WWII and a gradual discrediting of racist views for the Amendment to assume a larger role. Yep, this is what all those "liberal judges" cite when new freedoms are found in court cases and this is the amendment that gives all those people who are outraged by these decisions promoting equality under the law fits. May it long continue to do so.
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