On The Second Founding

Eric Foner argues that the United States was founded twice, and that the second founding mattered as much as the first. The Second Founding, published in 2019, is his study of the three constitutional amendments passed after the Civil War, the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth, which abolished slavery, guaranteed equal protection and due process, and barred racial barriers to voting. Foner's case is that these amendments did not merely adjust the original Constitution but remade it, rewriting the relationship between the citizen, the states, and the federal government so thoroughly that the country that emerged was a different one.

The original Constitution, Foner reminds us, was a document that accommodated slavery, counting the enslaved as fractions of persons for representation while denying them every right, and leaving the question of rights largely to the states. The Reconstruction amendments inverted that arrangement. They established, for the first time, a national citizenship that the states could not override, and they made the federal government the guarantor of rights against state violation. This was a constitutional revolution, and Foner traces how it was conceived, fought over, and written.

But his deeper subject is how that revolution was then narrowed almost to nothing. Within a few decades, hostile courts had read the amendments so restrictively that their promise was hollowed out, the equal protection clause turned against the very people it was written to protect, the privileges and immunities of national citizenship reduced to a shadow. The amendments survived on the page while their force was drained away, and it took the better part of a century before the civil-rights era began to revive them and read them closer to their authors' intent.

This is why the book belongs in a library of the republic. It shows that a constitution is not only what is written but what the courts and the country make of what is written, and that the same text can be a charter of freedom or a dead letter depending on the will to enforce it. The dormant promise of the Reconstruction amendments, waiting nearly a hundred years to be honored, is the central drama of American constitutional history after the founding.

The Second Founding sits directly alongside Foner's Reconstruction, also on these shelves, the constitutional companion to that political and social history. It is in copyright and widely available in print and digital editions. Read it to understand that the Constitution you live under was written in two great acts, and that the second one is still being argued over.