Garrett Epps, Democracy Reborn: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post–Civil War America, New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2006. Pp. 352. $27.95 (ISBN 0-8050-7130-X).

Abstract

Democracy Reborn is a narrative history with an emphasis on the individuals who democratized the American Constitution. The book tells of Radical Republicans' attempts to establish equality before the law, President Andrew Johnson's decision to placate the South, Democratic resistance, and moderate Republicans' compromises to achieve modest civil and political change. Garrett Epps has a novelist's eye for elegantly written vignettes about leading politicians, orators, and lobbyists of Reconstruction. Democracy Reborn understands the Fourteenth Amendment to be the source of individual rights. After a brief synopsis of the Revolutionary Period, at the very beginning of the book, Epps discusses many of the major developments between Appomattox in 1865 and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment. He carefully scrutinizes the Thirteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the men who tried to make the aspirations of constitutional and radical abolitionists a reality. The book ends with a capstone of core personalities-including Thaddeus Stevens, Frederick Douglass, and Charles Sumner-and how their lives ended before they had accomplished their ambition for a democratic America. While key portions of congressional debates are retold, they are described within the context of individual politicians and advocates for change. Thus, not only does Epps speak of the inquiries, drafts, and decisions of the Joint Committee of Fifteen on Reconstruction but of the men who were a part of it. He carefully explains the political allegiances of Johnson, Sumner, Stevens, John A. Bingham, and William Pitt Fessenden. By explaining the positions they and others took on Reconstruction, Epps gets at the factions of the Reconstruction Congress. Epps's description of the nineteenth-century suffragette movement is told in the context of its central leaders (205-21). By the time of the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840, Garrisonians embraced women's rights. Sara Grimké and Lucretia Mott struggled side-by-side with William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass to end the unequal treatment of blacks and women. Epps draws on the fruitful relationship between Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony to follow the developments in women's rights, from support of the abolitionist movement to their disappointment with the use of "male" in the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Further, Epps gives an introductory overview of the post-bellum ruptures in the Equal Rights Association, the National Woman Suffrage Association, and the American Woman Suffrage Association over whether to place women's rights issues on hold while pursuing blacks' civil and political rights. Yet, the transition back into the proposed Fourteenth Amendment and the violence that followed its announcement (222 ff.) is awkward. It returns to the discussion of the final version of the Fourteenth Amendment without explanation of its connection to the feminist movement. The book closes with a birds-eye view of Fourteenth Amendment ...