Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920

In this sprawling account, legal scholar Amar (The Words That Made Us) tracks the evolution of constitutional rights from the heights of “slavocracy” in the 1840s and ’50s through women winning the right to vote in 1920. This 80-year shift, he argues, from mass subjugation to nearly universal enfranchisement (excluding Native Americans, an issue Amar also explores), was propelled partly by key writers, artists, and politicians deeply engaged in debates about constitutional rights—among them Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln. Amar’s focus on individuals allows him to craft a history that is attuned both the social movements and material conditions leading to societal change as well as the powerful influence wielded by committed intellectuals; much of the book traces how pro-equality thinkers were continually advancing their positions into more radical territory by forming their own “originalist” interpretations of the Constitution to battle “slavocrats” like John C. Calhoun and Jefferson Davis. The main goal of Amar’s narrative is to reclaim originalism as just as useful and inherent to liberalism as it is to conservatism, which lay readers may find a bit idiosyncratic and wearisome as Amar constantly returns to it. Still, it’s an elegantly written and thorough survey of America’s second founding. (Sept.)