Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America

by Garrett Epps

Book Overview

A riveting narrative of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment, an act which revolutionized the U.S. constitution and shaped the nation's destiny in the wake of the Civil War Though the end of the Civil War and Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation inspired optimism for a new, happier reality for blacks, in truth the battle for equal rights was just beginning. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's successor, argued that the federal government could not abolish...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080507130X
• ISBN13: 9780805071306
• Release Date: August 2006
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Company
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 9.5"

Customer Reviews

Indispensible reading for all who revere "the Founding Fathers"

This book is a graceful, engaging exposition (of quite moderate length!) of the 14th Amendment's genesis and importance, both topics that are unjustifiably ignored in our early 21st-century political lexicon. Epps is a law professor and legal historian with an excellent academic pedigree, so he can manage the research and analysis quite well. What sets his writing somewhat apart is the evident storytelling skill that I assume he carried over from his former life as a newspaper reporter and novelist. The book undertakes to explain the 14th Amendment as the second Founding of our country, and it does so by a method familiar from the many many books about the Revolutionary and Constitution-drafting period: by examining the urgent social and political concerns of the moment through the individuals most directly involved. In the familiar 18th-century narratives we all know, this means stories of Franklin and Washington, Adams and Jefferson, Madison and Hamilton; the sweltering room in Philadelphia; the ramifications in America of the ongoing conflict between the French and British; the Federalists and anti-Federalists, etc. In this (true) story we get a quite new cast of characters, and we join them in the hotly dramatic moment just after the curtain has fallen on the Civil War Story that many of us learned as kids (wherein the North has won, Lincoln is tragically killed, the noble Lee retires to the mountains, and the country somehow quickly fast-forwards to Teddy Roosevelt or World War I or something else a few decades down the road). Most central to this story is Thaddeus Stevens, the great long-serving Congressman from Pennsylvania -- acerbic, witty, feared in debate, thwarted in his highest personal ambitions, radically liberal (for the time) in his attitudes about race, and ruthless in his political opposition to the South. John Bingham, who tried the Lincoln Assassins and led the Johnson impeachment, and drafted of the most important section of the Amendment (and went to his grave perhaps retaining secrets about the conspiracy surrounding Lincoln's murder). But others star as well: Charles Sumner and William Pitt Fessenden, renowned New England senators of often-aligned interests but quite differing temperaments. Vainglorious Andrew Johnson, whom I would say is portrayed as too much of a George W. Bush figure except that the facts bear out the comparison. At least half a dozen more, and with the exception of Frederick Douglass, they were all relatively new characters to me, brought quite alive on the page. If Epps has a goal besides just telling the story, it is to specifically remind us today of things we've forgotten about that time -- and the foremost thing is the formidable strength of the "Slave Power" (basically the South's national political muscle as organized around the Southern whites' social and economic dominance, through racial oppression, of their region). It was every bit as dominant and influential as any comparable

Unrealized attempt for justice (4.25*s)

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 r

Excellent work. Part legislative history, part biography.

Epps has written an outstanding work of biographical history centered around the villainy and political incompetence of Andrew Johnson and the colorful legislators and reformers who came together in the wake of the Civil War to fundamentally alter the US Constitution before the defeated South would have the chance to undo the North's military victory. Epps' book really does read like a novel and is easily accessible to readers unfamiliar with the general historical background.

DEMOCRACY REBORN

DEMOCRACY REBORN is insightful, vivid, startling in its argument for the importance of the Fourteenth Amendment, and absolutely convincing. Epps has used his skill as a novelist to make his narrative, his characterizations of historical figures, and his analysis fascinating and persuasive. He demonstrates how near the South came to reversing its defeat in the Civil War by means of political machinations that would have left it dominating the Congress and presumably the Presidency. DEMOCRACY REBORN also shows how equal rights for ex-slaves (and black people generally) and for women were at first linked and then were set against each other, delaying the success of the women's rights movement for almost a century. It's almost an insult to tell an historian that his book is as good as a novel. Epps's is better. Novelists tell made-up stories about imagined people; so do historians. As an historian Epps must probe especially deeply because historical facts -- no quotation marks around that word -- impose their constraints. Allusions enrich his writing; so do the parallels he points to, parallels with events and people in our day. The word rhetorical is often taken as a criticism. Epps's writing rises at appropriate times to be rhetorical in the classic sense. The best may be the book's last two paragraphs. The finest of rhetoric, they are moving and true.

Great Book

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.