During an extraordinary span between 1840 and 1920, America wrestled mightily with what the country's founders intended when they declared that "all men are created equal."
In his new book, "Born Equal: Remaking America's Constitution, 1840-1920" (Basic Books), Yale constitutional scholar Akhil Reed Amar traces the long and circuitous journey of those years, which brought about the passage of four transformative constitutional amendments. These include the so-called Reconstruction Amendments, adopted in the years immediately following the end of the Civil War: the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery; the 14th Amendment establishing birthright citizenship; and the 15th Amendment declaring equal political rights for Black Americans. Many years later, Americans would further expand the ideal of equality with the passage of the 19th Amendment granting women voting rights.
Amar highlights in particular four extraordinary individuals he deems crucial to broadening the country's vision of equality: Abraham Lincoln, the nation's 16th president; Elizabeth Cady Stanton, an early advocate for women's suffrage; Frederick Douglass, a leader of the movement for Black civil rights; and Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the groundbreaking novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin."
"Born Equal" is a sequel to Amar's 2021 book, "The Words That Made Us: America's Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840," which traced the big constitutional questions Americans confronted during the earliest years of the democracy. During the 80-year period chronicled in the new volume, Americans "continued to talk and write about their Constitution in a fascinating and often inspiring manner," Amar writes. "In myriad ways large and small, this constitutional dialogue anticipated modern-day originalism, revolving as it did around emphatic, reverential, and often empirically testable claims (some true, some false) about the Founding and about what the founding 'fathers' said and did and meant."
Amar, the Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale, teaches constitutional law in both Yale College and Yale Law School. A member of the Yale faculty since 1985, Amar has received both the William Clyde DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching and the Howard R. Lamar Faculty Award for alumni service. He has written widely for national publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic. He also co-hosts a weekly podcast, Amarica's Constitution, with Andy Lipka, president of EverScholar, a nonprofit offering immersive learning programs.
Amar sat down with Yale News to talk about antebellum America's obsession with its founders, how wars shifted the debates around equality, and the importance of reading iconic American primary sources with "fresh eyes." The conversation has been condensed and edited.
The book's introduction opens with the first line of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. This sentence, you say, is at the center of your book. Would you explain?
Akhil Reed Amar: Many Americans have memorized that first sentence, but we miss its full significance. Abraham Lincoln is going all the way back to the founding. Fourscore and seven years before 1863 is 1776. He's making an argument that America is born as an entity in 1776. And that the key principle of that foundation is this proposition in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal." He's got an interpretation of it that's distinctive. It's not the only interpretation of it. One can understand the run-up to the Civil War and therefore to the Battle of Gettysburg and therefore to the Gettysburg Address as an epic debate about the meaning of America in general and the meaning of those words. Those roads to Gettysburg are the first half of the book.
The roads from Gettysburg are the second half of the book. Once the Civil War is done, Americans are going to codify constitutionally Lincoln's vision of what it was all about or what America is about. Not just Lincoln's but eventually that of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The Constitution is going to be amended four different times to codify this idea that we're all created equal, which is going to morph into an idea that Americans are born equal citizens and, eventually, equal voters.
You write that the Declaration also served as the intellectual grounding for the Seneca Falls Convention for women's rights organized by Stanton in 1848. In the book you literally place the wording of the Declaration alongside the wording of a "Declaration of Sentiments" presented by Stanton at the convention to reveal something remarkable. Would you talk about that?
Amar: I'm telling the reader, we need to read iconic, canonical American primary sources with fresh eyes. Stanton is every bit as obsessed by the Declaration of Independence as is Lincoln. And you can see that in her Seneca Falls declaration. When you place the two documents side by side you see that she's used the Declaration of Independence as her template. She's copied it word for word, every so often changing the words, as in the passage, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal." She's a rhetorical genius. She knows how to capture attention in a democratic society. She is clever in a way that the newspapers of the moment pick up on. Even newspapers that disagree with her can't deny her wit, her audacity.
Continuing in this vein, you argue that antebellum America was an "unabashedly originalist land." What do you mean by this phrase, and why is it significant?
Amar: Antebellum America is obsessed by the origins of America, by the founders and the founding. This is evident everywhere. Once you've seen it, you will not be able to unsee it. One illustration that I give is that if you look at the early presidents, overwhelmingly they are, as it were, one degree of Kevin Bacon to the founders. They are literally sons of the founders. John Quincy Adams: his father signed the Declaration. William Henry Harrison: his father signed the Declaration. When John Quincy Adams runs for re-election in 1828, his running mate is a man named Richard Rush, whose father signed the Declaration. Now, not very many people signed the Declaration. What are the odds that three of these founding sons, so to speak, would end up becoming or vying for the presidency or vice presidency? Vanishingly small, unless it's a culture that very much venerates the founders.
Let's shift away from the Declaration and the founders and talk about Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her 1852 anti-slavery novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," was a blockbuster for its time. But you argue that the book was also notable for its portrayal of women, both Black and white, and because it was written by a woman. How so?
Amar: Harriet Beecher Stowe does, in effect, help to end slavery. She's America's first leading lady. Everyone is talking about her in a way that they once talked about Alexander Hamilton and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. She sells more copies of her novel than any other novelist of that century. She sells more than anything that Twain wrote, anything that Emerson wrote, anything that Melville wrote. She writes a book that everyone in America is talking about and it's all about slavery. And she's writing it as a woman. She's not hiding behind a male pseudonym. And she's showing readers that slavery isn't just about male field hands who might be overworked. It's about women who are being raped, are being forced to be breeders against their will, are having their suckling infants ripped, as it were, from their breasts. So, it's a different picture of slavery than most Americans have seen before.
By 1858, you write, Americans had 10 different ways of interpreting the phrase "all men are created equal." That year, Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held their famous debates during their contest for a U.S. Senate seat. How did Lincoln interpret equality then, and did his thinking on it change over time?
Amar: In 1858, Lincoln was building on a speech that he made in Peoria in 1854. He championed a certain interpretation of the Declaration: all men are created equal in their life, liberty, and property. Meaning that no one is born a slave. No one is born a slave master. The initial vision is, we're all equally free and nothing more. At that moment he is not saying that slaves, once freed, should become citizens. In fact, he says that he doesn't favor Black citizenship in Illinois. And he's definitely not saying that he favors equal Black voting rights. If he had, politically he would have been D.O.A.
After [Lincoln's] election as president, by the time he issues the Emancipation Proclamation on New Year's Day 1863, he's added a new idea: Blacks will be able to fight in the Union Army. And now, if they're going to fight alongside whites for the land of their birth, they're birthright Americans. This was a Frederick Douglass idea, and Lincoln embraced it. He moved from "all men are created equal in the world" to "all Americans are born equal and should be equal birthright citizens." By the end of his life, Lincoln had moved even further, to say that all people are created equal in America, not just equal citizens, but equal voters.
Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, Frederick Douglass, you point out, was fiercely critical of Lincoln in print. But after the proclamation, the two men formed something of a bond.
Amar: A very special bond between America's greatest and most powerful white man and its greatest and most prominent Black man. They only met three times face to face. But Douglass, when he finally met Lincoln, saw his greatness and his decency. In three meetings over the course of a couple years, Douglass overcame his prejudices against Lincoln. And Lincoln also grew because he recognized Douglass' greatness. I think he saw Douglass as a kindred spirit in some ways. They were both born "in the dirt." They were born laborers who were just muscle power for other people. And they were resentful of that because they had great minds. So, Lincoln saw something in Douglass that he recognized.
Also, because he was a savvy politician, he understood that Douglass could be useful to him. He needed to win a war, and to do so, he needed Black people in the South to run away from the plantations where their slave labor supported the Confederate economy. And indeed, not just withdraw their labor from the Confederate economy, but join the Union Army. Lincoln needed Douglass' help to get the word out to Southern slaves about the Emancipation Proclamation, to see that it was encouraging them to leave the plantations and join the Union Army.
After Lincoln's death, Mary Lincoln, when she was packing everything up and leaving the White House, found Lincoln's favorite walking stick and sent it to Douglass as a posthumous gift.
Let's end with the 19th Amendment, granting women the right to vote more than 50 years after the three Reconstruction Amendments. What happened to change the mindset of Americans?
Amar: I identify about eight different factors in the book. Here's a dramatic fact about infant mortality: In 1850, 40% of newborns were going to die before their fifth birthday. By 1920, that number had fallen by half. So, women didn't need to have as many children in hopes that some would survive childhood. They were spending less of their lives birthing and nurturing children. And at the same time, their life expectancies were longer. And marriage laws were reformed.
Another big aspect was Western migration. Men went out to the gold mines of California and the silver mines of Nevada in disproportionate numbers. Once they were out there, they yearned for female companionship. They were much more open to the idea of women's suffrage in order to induce women to move West. Women's suffrage was initially approved in places where there were fewer women than men - in California, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming. And then we had what an entrepreneur might call proof of concept - women were voting, and the sky wasn't falling.
Another big factor is the First World War. Women in America aren't on the battlefield, but they're supporting the war effort back home. At the same time, other countries in the world are starting to let their women vote. And if this is a war to make the world safe for democracy, and other democracies across the globe are letting their women vote, it is embarrassing for America if Woodrow Wilson doesn't support letting women vote. Eventually, Wilson comes to pivot and support female suffrage, much as Lincoln did on the issue of Black citizenship during the Civil War.
