To counter this threat Southerners took advantage of a loophole in the new amendment, which prohibited involuntary servitude except for criminal conviction. Providing Congress with enforcement power “sparked considerable alarm in the South,” he writes, because henceforth the national government, not state governments, could determine the meaning of freedom.
The withdrawal of the seceding states’ delegations from Congress-and the fortunes of war-would make passing these amendments much easier than it would normally have been.į oner argues that the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery, struck the first, long-needed blow against federalism, at least as he understands it and as Southern leaders at that time understood it. Although the coming of the Civil War showed that the Constitution “had palpably failed” and “ought to be replaced,” it could not be discarded due to Americans’ “Constitution-worship.” Hence in Foner’s telling the Reconstruction Republicans shrewdly cast off the first founding by using the amendment process to inscribe their revolutionary second founding into the Constitution. The pillars of Foner’s “second founding” are the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, which he sees as remedying the defects of the first founding: no definition of citizenship, pervasive inequality in rights, restricted suffrage, pernicious federalism, and slavery. It strips down the narrative, incorporates new scholarship, and provides a concise account of what went right and what went wrong during Reconstruction. His new book focuses on the federal government’s attempt to define, extend, and enforce equal citizenship after the Civil War.
Now Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia, has written The Second Founding to clarify his answer to this question. Why did he deem Reconstruction a revolution, albeit an unfinished one? Amid its maze of details, however, one can easily lose sight of Foner’s argument. Comprehensive and dense, the book still stands as the best starting point for any inquiry into the period. T hirty years ago Eric Foner se cured his reputation as one of America’s foremost historians with the publication of Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877.
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