The 14th established birthright citizenship for any person born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” along with requiring the states to provide “due process” and “equal protection” to all “persons within their jurisdiction.” The 15th prohibited the states from denying the right to vote to any person on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The effect of these amendments and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was to attempt to put into practice the ideal of equality expressed in the Declaration of Independence. The legal scaffolding for reorganizing the country took the form of three transformative amendments to the Constitution: the 13th, 14th, and 15th. Ironically, the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had “freed” only those slaves still under the control of the rebel armies, leaving slaves in the northern and border states in a legal no-man’s-land concerning servitude. But even though the North had won the war, there was no immediate legal basis for eliminating slavery or for protecting the newly freed slaves from the depredations or their former masters. For example, many of the states continued to have established religions even though the first Amendment forbade the national government from establishing any single religion.įoner argues convincingly that the Civil War was fought over the southern states’ efforts to preserve the institution of slavery. But those constraints did not apply to individual states.

Though the original authors of these documents (often hallowed as “the Founders”) wanted a national government more formidable than the one established by the feckless Articles of Confederation, they sought to limit the power it could exercise over its citizens. The principal purpose of the original ten amendments to the Constitution, the Bill Of Rights, was to protect individuals from the power of the new central government. The title of his latest book, The Second Founding, encapsulates his thesis that the changes to American society effected during Reconstruction were so profound they amounted to a new beginning, indeed, a second founding, of the nation. Civil War, known as Reconstruction, during which the North tried to build an egalitarian society. Pulitzer Prize winner Eric Foner is recognized as America’s leading expert on the history of the period immediately after the U.S.

The second founding review