The Second Founding Quotes

“The amendments’ “plain purpose,” he wrote, was to place under national jurisdiction “the whole subject” of citizens’ rights. But too many rights had been lost as soon as they reached “that grave of liberty, the Supreme Court of the United States.”50”
― Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

“As history shows, progress is not necessarily linear or permanent. But neither is retrogression.”
― Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

“So profound were these changes that the amendments should be seen not simply as an alteration of an existing structure but as a “second founding,” a “constitutional revolution,” in the words of Republican leader Carl Schurz, that created a fundamentally new document with a new definition of both the status of blacks and the rights of all Americans.1”
― Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution

“The Fourteenth Amendment was a crucial step in transforming, in the words of the Republican editor George William Curtis, a government “for white men” into one “for mankind.”34”
― Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution