Born equal Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920

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. (Sept.)

Tracing the idea of equality, enshrined in documents that are central to American identity. In this sprawling history ("For what it's worth, this book is shorter than my last one"), constitutional scholar and Yale law professor Amar begins with a close reading of Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and its assertion that the U.S. was a nation "conceived in liberty." Granted, slavery existed in the breakaway Confederacy, and even in a few border states, but, as Amar points out, well before Lincoln made his speech, more than three-quarters of the states had developed constitutions that closely tracked with the Jeffersonian assertion that "all men are created equal"; others that did not assert equality, such as California's 1849 constitution, held that "all men are, by nature, free and independent." Jefferson held slaves and thus worked from a hypocritical position, but, Amar writes, his fellow Virginian George Washington "seemed open to long-term reforms extinguishing slavery," endorsing a law that simplified the process of manumission. States such as South Carolina "did not concede, as did many Virginia planters, that slavery was wrong and should ideally end, sometime, somehow." Slavery did end, of course, even if a different inequality came on its heels: "Amendments designed to smash slavocrats were twisted like pretzels into political and judicial doctrines designed to protect plutocrats," Amar writes, a process of corruption that continues today. Moreover, as the author rightly emphasizes, after the liberation of formerly enslaved Black people, the acquisition of civil and political rights did not extend to any women or Indigenous people, the former of whom did not attain the right to vote until 1920 because--unlike the male Black vote, which was needed to shore up Republicanism--"woman suffrage would not solve any immediate problem faced by these men." A pointed, closely argued study of the long historical arc leading to civil equality for all. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.