26 February 2007

Democracy Reborn

Garrett Epps has put together a full-length account of The Fourteenth Amendment and the Fight for Equal Rights in Post-Civil War America.

From Publishers Weekly
In December 1865, the 39th Congress had urgent business, says Epps in this passionate account of Reconstruction politics. If the former Confederate states were readmitted to the Union, ex-slaves would swell those states' congressional power, but without congressional protection, the freedmen would never be allowed to vote, and the Southern white elite would have disproportionate influence in the federal government. Epps follows every twist of Congress's response to this problem, and his energetic prose transforms potentially tedious congressional debates into riveting reading.

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