“The Second Founding” follows three decades after Foner’s seminal work, “Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution,” a comprehensive study in analytical history of Reconstruction discussing the participation and contribution of the Black freedmen and freedwomen to the transformation of Southern Society in line with W.E.B. “The Second Founding” provides the historical account of the three Reconstruction amendments: Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution – “the most tangible legacies,” according to Foner, of the Reconstruction era, or that brief but monumental “moment in the sun.” It was, Foner says, “ first attempt, flawed but truly remarkable for its time, to build an egalitarian society on the ashes of slavery.” It is a poetic claim, although ‘smoldering embers’ might be a more accurate status descriptor for slavery. Du Bois wrote of post-Civil War Reconstruction: “the slave went free stood a brief moment in the sun then moved back again toward slavery.”
A reckoning so profound and exact, in creating and fulfilling the antithetical to what is dismantled, that it can offer redemption along with emancipation.Įric Foner’s “The Second Founding” is the account of this nation’s post-Civil War constitutional reckoning – the beauty of redemption in its egalitarian promise, and the tragedy in its unfulfillment. Radical members of the first legislature after the war, South Carolina.Ībolition is a reckoning.
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