The Second Founding: How The Civil War And Reconstruction Remade The Constitution, by Eric Foner

This book is a classic example of why someone cannot trust the reputation of contemporary historians when they seek to write history with an eye towards politics in the present-day. Indeed, the author, perhaps unintentionally, points out why the Reconstruction was such a problem. In seeking justice for blacks, the radical Republicans that the author idolizes (and wishes to emulate in contemporary society) forgot to do justice to southern whites, and once those southern whites were able to regain their appropriate involvement (and even control) of the politics of their political communities, the results were predictable if lamentable with regards to the justice of blacks. For some reason in the United States, it has never seemed possible–never even been attempted–to provide justice for blacks in a way that has not committed injustice against whites. That this book consistently trumpets for uplift for blacks and shows a high degree of hostility for southern whites as well as northern populations that sought to reconstruct southern society in a way that did not force themselves to deal with the same degree of substantial cultural change (and a substantial degree of blindness about the relationship between the elites and the black problem).

Indeed, this book is troublesome on multiple levels. For one, the author himself eschews responsible constitutionalism, seeking the sort of progressive constitutionalism that uses amendments to argue for whatever is the “current thing” among his leftist coterie of idealistic Dudley Think-rights. Thus the author praises the corruption and expansion of the fourteenth amendment into all kinds of areas where it does not belong and unintentionally provides plenty of reasons why these amendments should be pared back in future Supreme Court judgments–or perhaps even future constitutional amendments. Similarly, the author shows the danger that comes when the American republic becomes unbalanced and when those who think themselves to be moral superiors armed with righteousness seek to run roughshod over the rest of the country and seek to concentrate power in their own hands and that of their cronies. The author seems to have little concern for the importance of the consent of the governed in providing for the boundaries of political action, but seeks for government to be animated by a partisan and utopian zeal for justice that cannot but create massive violence and turmoil within society. The author is right, though, that many of the problems of contemporary society spring from the injustices and evils of the reconstruction period, evils which are felt most tightly by those who suffered them on all sides.

This book, altogether, is between 150 and 200 pages of content. The book begins with a list of illustrations and the (generally short) text of the three reconstruction Amendments (the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution). This is followed by a preface. The introduction to the book discusses the origins of the so-called Second Founding in the moment when the majority of southern whites were, by and large, temporarily disenfranchised after the Civil War. The author then writes a chapter about each of the three Reconstruction Amendments. His chapter on the 13th Amendment discusses the thorny question of the nature of freedom, the relevance of the exception to the Amendment’s prohibition on slavery to prison labor, and the curious fact that this Amendment has largely been felt to be a past deed without relevance in contemporary jurisprudence. The contentious discussion of the 14th Amendment discusses the thorny issue of equality and what it means, and what the job of the federal government is to try to ensure it, contrary to the consent of people involved themselves. The chapter on the 15th Amendment discusses the right to vote and the way that people may be deprived of a right to vote without the need to do so in a racist fashion, because of genuine differences in the qualifications of people to engage in the political community, and also deals with the question of feminism and black suffrage and how there were tensions in the late 19th century version of intersectionality, though the author does not phrase it so. The author then discusses issues of supposed justice and jurisprudence in how judges have seen the amendments throughout history. An epilogue, with an eye towards the author’s view of justice, is then followed by acknowledgments, notes, and an index to close this book.