Following the Civil War, President Lincoln and his administration secured passage of a series of Amendments to the U.S. Constitution— the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth — that scholars have described as the nation’s “Second Founding.” These Amendments gave the United States what President Abraham Lincoln promised at Gettysburg — “a new birth of freedom.”
The Second Founding amendments transformed the nation’s charter from an aggressively pro-slavery document to one that prohibited chattel slavery. While the Constitution was silent on the Declaration of Independence’s call for equality, Amendment 14 granted equal citizenship to everyone born on American soil and guaranteed equality to all persons. While the Constitution stood aside while states abused individual rights such as free speech, Amendment 14 protected these rights against state abuses. And while the Constitution permitted states to restrict voting rights on the basis of race or servitude, Amendment 15 prohibited the same and empowered Congress to pass laws to protect voting rights.
Considerable push back to the Second Founding followed the Reconstruction of the defeated South following the Civil War. Efforts by Republican presidents Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant to create a more racially inclusive democracy came to an abrupt end after the disputed presidential election of 1876, which had eerily familiar claims of election fraud and a willingness to use violence to attain political ends.
Historian Jeremi Suri’s book, Civil War by Other Means: America’s Long and Unfinished Fight for Democracy, explains how the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol is rooted in the U.S. Civil War of the nineteenth century. President Andrew Johnson’s 1868 declaration of amnesty for Confederates foreshadows the rhetoric of today’s politics and the divisions deeply engrained the American electorate.
14th Amendment
Section 3. No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.