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PORTSIDE CULTURE

WHAT ABRAHAM LINCOLN UNDERSTOOD ABOUT THE FOUNDERS  
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Jeff Shesol
September 15, 2025
The New York Times
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_ In “Born Equal,” Akhil Reed Amar paints a sprawling portrait of
19th-century America in thrall to its founding moment. _

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_Born Equal
Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920_
Akhil Reed Amar
Basic Books
ISBN-13: 9781541605190

Among the truths still held, by many Americans, to be self-evident,
“all men are created equal” is the most fundamental. The current
assault on that belief — waged by all three branches of government
— is brazen and cruel, but not without precedent. Much of American
history has been a battle over the ways we give meaning and the force
of law to the idea of equality.

That struggle — to determine and fulfill, and perhaps to exceed, the
founders’ intentions — is the focus of a new book by the legal
scholar Akhil Reed Amar. “Born Equal” is the second volume in his
three-part constitutional history of the United States.

The first, “The Words That Made Us
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opened in 1760 with the accession of King George III. This new
installment picks up the action in 1840, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Lucretia Mott attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London and
are told, Amar observes, to “sit and listen but not speak or
vote.” The story moves through the next 80 years, from Stanton and
Mott’s assertion of women’s rights at Seneca Falls to Dred Scott,
the Civil War and the four constitutional amendments that extended
full and equal citizenship to Black Americans and women. It is an
energetic, if roundabout, tour.

 

Amar, who teaches law at Yale and publishes widely, has always been at
his best in explaining constitutional language and untangling
constitutional arguments. “Born Equal” is mainly a work of
narrative history, but its protagonists are America’s founding
texts: As the book makes clear, the Civil War was at its core “a
clash between two sharply opposed visions” of the national charter.

Amar’s treatment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, among other
episodes, showcases his expertise. Rather than simply recount the back
and forth, he uses it as a prompt to consider 10 interpretations of
“created equal” — from the narrowest, which holds that the
phrase was just misleading rhetoric, to the most expansive, that
government has a duty to provide “a fair chance” to all, as
Lincoln later put it. Amar is similarly effective in showing how the
1848 Seneca Falls declaration responded to the Declaration of
Independence.

“Born Equal” is learned and long but never dry; it is, if
anything, strenuously chatty. The historical set pieces have punch,
and Amar imbues figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher
Stowe with humanity and immediacy.

Yet there is a feeling throughout of the lecturer playing to the back
of the hall. The book is awash in asides, anachronisms (the word
“meme” among the most frequent) and first names: The Seneca Falls
statement of principles is “Elizabeth’s Declaration”; the
Emancipation Proclamation is “Abe’s act.” It is also digressive
to a degree that the first volume, an even longer book, was not. The
complexities of 19th-century politics and, it appears, the
capaciousness of Amar’s interests lead him afield from his central
story line.

Still, he is unswerving — and unblushing — in his larger aim:
“to set judges and other legal officials straight about what the
Constitution _really_ means.” This of course is a tall order,
whether the principle at issue is free speech or popular sovereignty
or, as it is here, equality — an ideal whose meaning would seem to
be as fluid and contested as any in the founding documents.

Amar has long led the charge of the so-called liberal originalists,
who, like the far more prominent originalists on the right, believe
the Constitution’s meaning is almost always apparent in the text or
in contemporary sources, such as James Madison’s “Notes of Debates
in the Federal Convention of 1787.” The two sides differ in a
crucial respect: While conservatives maintain that 18th-century
intentions align, invariably, with the agenda of the 21st-century
G.O.P., Amar contends that they often (not always) point toward
progressive results.

“Born Equal” is his latest — and perhaps most assertive —
effort to stake a claim on original intent. Antebellum America, Amar
argues, was “unabashedly _originalist_,” deeply reverential toward
its “founding men and founding texts.”

He builds his case with “a blizzard of data points,” among them
that the election of William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor
in 1848 fit an “originalist pattern” because both men served as
generals, as Washington had; that countless sons and towns and
territories were named after founding fathers; that James Monroe
“managed to die on July 4, 1831,” sanctifying Independence Day
just as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had done in 1826; and that
America’s “first two postage stamps,” he writes, “bore the
likenesses of Washington and Franklin.”

Few readers would question that the founders held the nation in
thrall, even during a civil war over what those founders had wrought.
Not only did North and South “pray to the same God,” as Lincoln
memorably put it, but they invoked the same heroes. In over-stressing
this point, Amar refashions a story of constitutional upheaval as a
parable of consistency, one in which “politicians whose originalist
claims were more faithful” — politicians like Lincoln —
ultimately prevail. This reinforces the allure and false promise of
originalism: the idea that the text, if you squint hard enough,
reveals the answer to almost everything.

 

Three decades ago, in “The Bill of Rights,
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revisionist meditation on those first 10 amendments, Amar warned
against a “curiously selective ancestor worship” that elevates the
revolutionary era above the Second Founding — the “new birth of
freedom” that reshaped the nation in the 1860s and ’70s. He would
have done well here to heed his own warning.

To call Lincoln “his generation’s best originalist” sells short
the radicalism of his achievement — and the distance he and his
battle-weary nation had traveled from its beginning. What Lincoln
understood was that the idea of equality, to be worth its cost in
blood, demanded more than obeisance to words on parchment. It required
reconception. At Gettysburg, he called this our “unfinished work.”
So it remains.

 

Jeff Shesol is the author, most recently, of “Mercury Rising: John
Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War.”

* U.S. Constitution
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* citizenship
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* U.S. history
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* Nineteenth Century U.S. history
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