Title: Fixing the Framers’ Failure: The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and America’s New Birth of Freedom

Author: Robert J McWhirter

Genre: Non-Fiction / History

 

The revolutionary document began, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” However, the spirit of the Declaration of Independence would be watered down to appease the slaveholding states needed in order to help ratify the Constitution. The consequences of this early compromise would be borne out with the fractious Civil War fought between the North (Union) and South (Confederacy) primarily over the issue of Slavery between 1861-1865.

In the aftermath of the destructive bloodshed and Union victory, three Constitutional amendments would be passed: the 13th Amendment abolished slavery, the 14th Amendment afforded the right of Due Process, and the 15th Amendment prohibited federal & state governments from denying voting rights based on race or color. These laws were meant to address a grievous wrong, yet the strength would lie with their enforcement.

Author Robert J. McWhirter has written a thoroughly researched and engrossing book detailing how the foundation of American Government rested on shaky ground from its inception. The first accommodation, made to ensure the Constitution’s passing, led to African Americans remaining in bondage and being considered three-fifths of a citizen in slaveholding states for another 70+ years. McWhirter deftly illustrates how the issue of freedom and civil rights for African Americans evolved with both progress and the occasional setback over the 200 years since the establishment of the United States, providing a wealth of examples from reformist legislation to judicial rulings. McWhirter’s grounding in the law is often apparent in his well-expressed interpretation of the cases he cites.

Equality is the key theme of this significant historical work, and McWhirter empathetically relates how the slaves contended with inequality with their first steps on American soil, often providing grim, but necessary, details of the indignities suffered. Their involuntary servitude didn’t allow for opportunities, their labor only enriching their masters, while their presence only counted fractionally in population counts. However, the polarity didn’t confine itself to the slaveholding states, as African Americans in the North may have been free, yet they lived with constrained rights.

The debate over liberty and rights for African Americans would gain traction during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. McWhirter dispassionately discusses how Lincoln’s opinion evolved from preserving the Union to emancipating the enslaved and how the 13th Amendment began with Lincoln and how the mantle was taken by the Radical Republicans in Congress after Lincoln’s assassination. His evaluation of the 16th president is unvarnished. Despite the Civil War’s conclusion, the tension remains palpable as Lincoln’s successor nearly derailed the progress with vetoes over legislation granting rights to African Americans (the Civil Rights Act of 1866).

One of the poignant aspects of the narrative is the ideology espoused by those in power, who reinforced the imbalanced status quo. The endurance of Slavery was enabled by greed and feelings of racial superiority, but was reinforced by judicial rulings, often by biased jurists such as Chief Justice Taney, as seen in the Dred Scott decision of 1857. McWhirter articulately explains how the impact of the 13th-15th Amendments would themselves be dulled by the Jim Crow laws in the South and the reign of terror spread by the Ku Klux Klan, brilliantly correlating how the South fought freedom with repression. The refusal to view African Americans as equal would persist in the South for a century further and left the country stuck in an ideological rift.

The road to progress was fraught with divisive and impassioned rhetoric as meticulously highlighted in Robert J McWhirter’s scholarly and pithy book. The book reflects on a significant topic over a period of two centuries, but it may benefit from an extra chapter exploring how modern-day rulings (e.g. Shelby County v. Holder, 2013) aid or temper previous progress in equality.

Fixing the Framers’ Failure is an astute and solid work exploring how compromise led the country down a path that nearly destroyed it. McWhirter provides probing insight into his study on how lawmakers sought to evolve the original founding of the country.

 

 

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