The effort to transform the United States’ founding document into a vehicle for egalitarian politics.

It’s safe to say that there hasn’t been a time since the Civil War era when the US Constitution—its meanings, rights, and protections, its checks and balances and violations—was more consequential or contested in our political life. Thanks to the Trump administration, hardly a day goes by when a presidential order, a Justice Department prosecution, or a Homeland Security detention and expulsion doesn’t overstep the bounds or outright ignore constitutional norms and practices. And as we all know, even before Trump was sworn in a second time, there were serious questions about his eligibility for the presidency, given his participation in the January 6, 2021, uprising. Who would have thought that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, determining who might be barred from office for engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, would be at the center of a judicial reckoning? Or that birthright citizenship, Section 1 of the 14th Amendment, so foundational to securing and expanding our civil and political rights, would be under concerted attack and now awaiting a Supreme Court ruling demanded by Trump? How the Constitution will be interpreted by a right-wing Supreme Court, and whether its long-accepted rules for the wielding of power remain intact, are questions that now stare us in the face.

Sad to say, given the moment, relatively few Americans know much at all about the Constitution: the framework of governance it sets out, the interpretive conflicts it has spawned, or its lengthy historical arc, amendments and all. At best, they see the Constitution as an important part of the country’s origin story, tethered almost umbilically to the earlier Declaration of Independence, which few Americans know much about either. This may be why the Democrats’ efforts in 2024 to present themselves as the defenders of democracy and the Constitution didn’t work very well, and why, even in 2026, they are still struggling to do either.

One of Akhil Amar’s ambitions in his new book, Born Equal, is to help remedy these deficiencies. A distinguished constitutional scholar and professor at Yale Law School, Amar has been among the most prolific and influential interpreters of the Constitution and its history, writing multiple books as well as law-review articles, many crafted with a broad audience in mind. Even more impressive, he has now embarked on a three-volume “epic saga” of the Constitution that begins with the founding of the United States and will end with the present. Born Equal, which charts the Constitution’s history from 1840 to 1920, is the second of the series.

As one might expect given the subject, Born Equal is a long book, and it offers both more and less than its title suggests. More, because Amar often takes us back to the Constitution’s making and early history and provides a larger political history as well, organized chiefly around the fight over slavery and the coming of the Civil War. Less, because we don’t get to the crucial Reconstruction amendments—the 13th, 14th, and 15th—until we’re 500 pages in, and because he spends remarkably little time on the important period between 1870 and 1920, especially with the making of the 19th Amendment, which established women’s suffrage.

Readers will find a lengthy and somewhat loopy narrative presented in a conversational style, apparently designed to keep the interest of nonspecialists, and a pretty familiar cast of characters whose surnames are quickly dropped: Elizabeth (for Elizabeth Cady Stanton), Frederick (for Frederick Douglass), Harriet (for Harriet Beecher Stowe), and so on, all the way to Abe (for Abraham Lincoln—a nickname that Lincoln hated for the same reason that the other figures would likely find this cringeworthy, as a sign of public disrespect). But through the book’s more than 700 pages—Amar says it would have been even longer if not for the opposition of his editor—there is an important and compellingly developed idea, one that has been at the heart, in shorter and longer versions, of his work: the idea of a “liberal originalism.” Unlike the more commonly invoked notion of originalism that many conservatives embrace, which focuses on the original text of the Constitution and the apparent intent of the founders, Amar sees an originalism based on “equality,” one connected to the Declaration of Independence and expressing the deepest aspirations of the founding generation. In Amar’s view, this liberal originalism shaped constitutional rhetoric across the Northern states between 1776 and 1860, with Lincoln eventually emerging as its true embodiment, not just because of his powerful and enduring words at Gettysburg in the fall of 1863 but also because, throughout his political life, Lincoln found in the Constitution the basis for antislavery and an egalitarian republic.

The first three-quarters of Born Equal focuses chiefly on the struggles in the Northern states to advance a liberal originalism, especially in campaigns against slavery and in support of women’s rights. Amar therefore begins with the World Antislavery Convention of 1840 in London, when the eight women in the American delegation were excluded from the proceedings. It was a powerful moment on the road to the women’s-rights convention held at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, and to the expanding role of women in the abolitionist movement.

Amar’s narrative here is rich and detailed. The same can’t be said for his treatment of the Southern slave states: He devotes relatively little attention to their internal politics, defense of slavery, economic organization, or the development of secessionist thought. No member of the slaveholding leadership is mentioned often enough to merit first-name treatment (also, perhaps, a sign of Amar’s scorn), and even though many had their own versions of constitutional originalism and the right of revolution, he doesn’t take them very seriously. As a result, Amar pretty much regards the slaveholders’ behavior in the deepening crisis over slavery’s future as “foolish” and “stupid.” The handwriting, he insists, was on the wall: The political balances in the country were coming to favor the Northern states; slave-grown crops like cotton were unlikely to fare well in the contested trans-Mississippi West; and the world was turning against slavery on multiple grounds. “A truly farsighted South” (a stand-in term for a complex region and set of people, white and Black) that recognized the “evil” and “unsustainability” of slavery would have sensibly tried to cut some deals: accepting gradual emancipation, say, on the model of New York, in return for a variety of concessions, including cash and land grants in the West. These states might, that is, have heeded Lincoln’s constitutional views and moral imperatives, along with the economic benefits that such an arrangement may have brought.

In this, Amar offers a version (albeit a more transactional one) of the long-debunked “repressible conflict” interpretation of the coming of the Civil War, which argued that slavery had reached its natural limits and that a negotiated settlement was possible, only to be spurned by self-interested politicians who had forgotten the lessons of the founders. The truth is that the South’s cotton economy was thriving and had made the fortunes of what had become the richest and most powerful landed elite in the world. Slave labor was also exploited very profitably in the production of commodities other than cotton—sugar, rice, tobacco—as well as in mining, building infrastructure, and even some manufacturing. And by the 1850s, the winds of abolition and progressive reform were waning and a new conservatism and nativism was taking hold in the United States. Enslavers or those sympathetic to them still controlled the White House, the Supreme Court, much of Congress, and had strong supporters in both the Whig and Democratic parties. Why shouldn’t the slaveholding leadership have thought that secession and political independence were achievable?

Amar also seems to believe that the gradual emancipation of enslaved people as it unfolded in places like New York, as opposed to disunion or war, was a perfectly reasonable solution to the crisis. Perhaps he forgets that the legislation enacted in New York and in most other states of the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic freed no slaves; instead, it freed the children of enslaved adults, and only when they reached adulthood themselves (21, 25, or 28, depending on the state, and also on the gender of the prospective freedpeople). Eventual “liberation,” moreover, brought with it no civil or political rights in the North; nor would it have done so under similar conditions in the South. Instead, the emancipation process often ended not in freedom but in some form of extended servitude. During the Civil War, Lincoln imagined a 35-year plan of emancipation with the promise of colonization (meaning exile) either in Liberia or some other foreign territory rather than freedom in the United States.