[This book argues the fight for true equality begun 150 years ago
continues and draws clear connections between the limitations and
loopholes written into these 19th century amendments and the most
intractable debates dividing 21st century America.]
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"RECONSTRUCTION NEVER ENDED": A REVIEW OF ERIC FONER'S SECOND
FOUNDING  
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Thomas Simpson
May 11, 2020
Facing Today
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_ This book argues the fight for true equality begun 150 years ago
continues and draws clear connections between the limitations and
loopholes written into these 19th century amendments and the most
intractable debates dividing 21st century America. _

Eric Foner, Wikimedia

 

[MODERATOR: FOR AN ILLUMINATING DISCUSSION WITH ERIC FONER ON HIS BOOK
CLICK HERE
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TO READ/LISTEN TO A SEPTEMBER 2019 EPISODE OF FRESH AIR WITH TERRY
GROSS (PBS)]

If you were asked to name the defining moment of American history in
the 19th century, more likely than not, your answer would be “The
American Civil War.” This is an understandable response. The Civil
War is ubiquitous in media depictions of that century and generations
of students have learned to recognize the significance of Fort Sumter,
Gettysburg, and Appomattox. Wars are dramatic events—deadly ruptures
that invariably bring changes to political and social orders—and
therefore attract a lot of scholarly and amateur interest. Yet for all
the attention paid to the war itself, the Reconstruction Era is almost
treated as an afterthought. For historian Eric Foner, the
Reconstruction Era was nothing less than a second founding of the U.S.
marked by the greatest expansion of constitutional rights since the
document’s ratification. But this second founding has also left a
complicated legacy littered with devastating reversals of justice that
demand our continued attention today.

The lack of focus on the Reconstruction Era is one result of over a
hundred years of students of American history being taught to scorn
the “excesses” of its policies. The dominant narrative of
the Dunning School
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group of scholars who critiqued the project of Reconstruction—was
central to the idea of the South’s “Lost Cause
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and laid the rhetorical foundation for decades of Jim Crow laws.
Central to this interpretation was the racist insistence that the
enfranchisement of African Americans led to corruption and
misgovernment throughout the former Confederate states. Even though
dissenting scholars have discredited this bigoted school of thought,
it has continued to thoroughly dominate popular discourse in the past
century (from _Birth of a Nation_ and President John F. Kennedy's
book_ Profiles in Courage_ to comments made by Donald Trump and
Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign). This is where
Eric Foner’s recently published book, _The Second Founding: How the
Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution,_ can help
reorient our understanding of the period.

_The Second Founding _is exactly the right book to inspire a move
towards a new appreciation of the Reconstruction Era as Foner wrote it
with a mass audience in mind. Foner focuses his attention on the
debates behind and significance of the passage of the three
Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th. Respectively,
these three amendments are responsible for the abolition of slavery,
the guarantee of birthright citizenship and due process of the law,
and the prohibition of denying the right to vote based on race. 

Readers, especially those less familiar with the Reconstruction Era,
might be surprised to learn that these achievements were not driven by
the altruistic spirit of the victorious Union. Foner shows that these
three titanic, if flawed, achievements were products of the political
calculus inherent in any legislative process. Therefore, the book
doesn’t attempt to lionize the lawmakers of the late 1860s or create
a new pantheon of “Founding Fathers” to venerate. Many of those in
Congress who ultimately favored the passage of these amendments were
not doing so because they believed in the equality of all people.
Foner draws our attention to precisely how Congress drafted these
three amendments to simultaneously extend rights to enslaved black men
in the former Confederate states, while also preventing free blacks in
the North from gaining _too many rights_. Even more striking were the
ways in which lawmakers wrote them to prevent rights from being
extended to other marginalized groups of the time, notably women,
Native Americans, and Chinese immigrants in the Pacific states. 

In addition to these three sections, Foner has a fourth chapter on the
torturous judicial history that left these amendments stripped of
their power to alleviate injustices for another century. Because of
this, Foner’s telling of the history of Reconstruction is one of a
brief triumph overshadowed by compromise and a political system that
lost the desire to enforce the amendments in a way that might remedy
racial discrimination. While the Civil Rights Movement did much to
counteract this reluctance to enforce the Reconstruction amendments,
it would be a mistake to say the struggle to create a truly
interracial democracy is simply “in the past.” 

This book’s sense of purpose comes from how clearly it argues that
the fight for true equality begun over 150 years ago continues. Foner
draws clear connections between the limitations and loopholes written
into these 19th-century amendments and the most intractable debates
dividing 21st-century America. The 13th Amendment abolished slavery,
but by allowing for involuntary servitude to continue as punishment
for a duly convicted crime, it has helped perpetuate vast inequities
in the American criminal justice system. Vast systems of penal labor
exploited this exception, entrapping black people in conditions that
have been described as even worse than slavery. The 15th Amendment
banned race-based discrimination at the polling place, but its narrow
phrasing left loopholes for a number of other legalistic tricks to
disenfranchise African Americans and other marginalized groups: poll
taxes, grandfather clauses, literacy tests. Some might believe that
this is a part of history Americans have left well behind—others
would argue that strict “Voter ID” laws are merely a version of
this phenomenon revamped for the 21st century. 

The 14th Amendment has had the most complex history of the three,
transitioning from an original intent to protect formerly enslaved
African Americans into one that has been utilized by some interests
and denounced by others. By the end of the 19th century, the U.S.
Supreme Court placed the focus of the amendment largely on its
commerce clause to protect corporate interests. Yet throughout the
20th century, the fight for greater women’s rights and an end to
sex-based discrimination found legal standing thanks to the 14th
Amendment. More recently, the 14th Amendment’s Due Process Clause
also became the basis for the federal legalization of same-sex
marriage around the same time that a contingent of Americans worried
that its guarantee of birthright citizenship created an epidemic of
so-called “birth tourism” and “anchor babies.” The questions
raised by these amendments still resonate more than 150 years later. 

Foner confidently asserts at the beginning of the book that “we are
still trying to work out the consequences of the abolition of American
slavery. In that sense, Reconstruction never ended.” Foner wants us
to acknowledge that the Reconstruction Era is responsible for the
constitutional rights that are most fiercely contested in the 21st
century. This should encourage us all to teach Reconstruction and not
just because it’s important to understand how history informs the
present. We should teach Reconstruction because it empowers students
to confront the legacies of slavery that persist into the present. 

As we observe the 150th anniversary of the ratification of the 15th
Amendment this year, now is the perfect time to deepen your knowledge
of Reconstruction—or begin exploring it for the very first time. In
addition to Foner’s masterful book, we invite middle and high school
educators to use our seminal case study, _The Reconstruction Era and
the Fragility of Democracy_
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rich array of accompanying lessons, videos, and primary sources.

_THOMAS SIMPSON is a Digital Marketing Specialist at Facing History
and Ourselves. Thomas holds a master's degree in Global,
International, and Comparative History from Georgetown University._

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