With the Civil War amendments, they aimed to begin again. They understood that the three-fifths clause and the fugitive-slave clause had tilted the balance of power to the slaveholding states that the Constitution did not live up to the Declaration of Independence’s promise of equality that the actions of the states and the courts consolidated a view of Black people that mandated their inferior place in American society. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.” Stevens and his colleagues went back to where we started. “Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. “Not everything is lost,” Baldwin wrote after the collapse of the civil-rights movement. On one level, what Stevens and others did was exactly what James Baldwin called on us to do a century later. Almost immediately, forces sought to undermine the promise of the second founding, but the point here is that Stevens and others sought to radically transform the country’s understanding of itself as they grappled with questions of equality, the right to vote, and the role of government in protecting the rights of all citizens. With expanded federal power, the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1866, and the Civil War amendments-the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth-Congress, led in many respects by the House Ways and Means Committee chairman and radical abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, put forward an idea of citizenship untethered to the issue of race. Reconstruction led to the formation of the modern U.S.
Instead, we should set out to imagine the country in the full light of its diversity and with an honest recognition of our sins.Īfter the Civil War, the fabric of America was woven anew after fraying almost beyond its ability to hold. We need an America where “becoming white” is no longer the price of the ticket.
What we need now is a third American founding. The second was the Black-freedom struggle of the mid-20th century. The first was during the Civil War and Reconstruction, which constituted a second founding for the country.
The United States has confronted two crucial moments of moral reckoning where we faced the daunting challenge of beginning again both times we failed.
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