as a punishment for crime,” they largely did not foresee, according to Foner, that many states would use this exception as a “loophole” to justify the effective reenslavement of many black Americans (50). For instance, when congressmen drafted the Thirteenth Amendment’s qualifying clause allowing “involuntary servitude. His narrative highlights paths taken and not taken, as well as unintended consequences.
Throughout The Second Founding, Foner emphasizes historical contingency. According to Foner, the courts generally offered a more “narrow reading of the amendments” than the Republican-majority Congress had envisioned (xxvi). The fourth chapter examines federal court decisions handed down between roughly 18-a wider temporal span than that of his earlier book-that interpreted these new laws and shaped developing understandings of the federal government’s new protective role.
He devotes one chapter to each amendment’s conception. The first three examine, in more detail than his 1988 book, the congressional debates during the late 1860s that produced the final text of each amendment. After the Civil War, the federal government assumed this role.įoner recounts the refounding period in four chapters. Before the Civil War, the states had borne primary responsibility for determining the range of individual rights protected under law. According to Foner, these laws effectively refounded the United States by inverting the relationship between the federal and state governments. In basic terms, the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed citizens equal legal rights, and the Fifteenth Amendment prohibited states from using “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” to deny suffrage.
The Second Founding focuses entirely on the momentous Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. If the earlier book stresses the theme of limits, or what was left unfinished, the new book stresses the theme of possibilities, or what can still be done. In 2019, he returned to this period and published a book with a different emphasis: The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. In 1988, Eric Foner published one of the most important scholarly works on the post–Civil War era: Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877.
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