BORN EQUAL: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840-1920, by Akhil Reed Amar
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,” 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.
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