Born Equal

Remaking America's Constitution, 1840–1920

By: Akhil Reed Amar

Narrated by: Keval Shah, John Mulaney

From America’s foremost constitutional scholar, the definitive history of how the ideal of birth equality reshaped the American Constitution, from antebellum debates over slavery and secession, to the Civil War and emancipation, to women’s suffrage

In 1840, millions of Black Americans groaned in the chains of slavery. By 1920, millions of American men and women of every race had won the vote.

In Born Equal, the prizewinning constitutional historian Akhil Reed Amar recounts the dramatic constitutional debates that unfolded across these eight decades, when four glorious amendments abolished slavery, secured Black and female citizenship, and extended suffrage regardless of race or gender. At the heart of this era was the epic and ever-evolving idea that all Americans are created equal. The promise of birth equality sat at the base of the 1776 Declaration of Independence. But in the nineteenth century, remarkable American women and men—especially Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln—elaborated a new vision of what this ideal demanded. Their debates played out from Seneca Falls to the halls of Congress, from Bloody Kansas to Gettysburg, from Ford’s Theater to the White House gates, ultimately transforming the nation and the world.

An ambitious narrative history and a penetrating work of legal and political analysis, Born Equal is a vital new portrait of America’s winding road toward equality.

Critic reviews

“Akhil Reed Amar is one of our most prodigious constitutional scholars, one of our finest teachers, and, as if that were not enough, a writer of stunning grace and power. Born Equal is a masterpiece—and one that could not be better timed, as we struggle yet again to define and deliver the American promise of equality. Essential reading.”—Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of King: A Life

“A deep dive into the words that shaped and sharpened the American nation's fundamental founding principle of equality and equity under law, Born Equal is required reading for anyone seeking to understand, interpret, and apply the United States constitution today.”

—Edward J. Larson, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in History and author of Declaring Independence: Why 1776 Matters

“With deep conviction and engaging narrative flair, Amar weaves a fascinating constitutional history of a nation challenged to fulfill the promise that all were born equal. Amar asks the reader to think with him—perhaps even to argue—about the crucial nineteenth century constitutional struggles over the meaning of America.”

—Mary Sarah Bilder, Bancroft Prize–winning author of Madison's Hand

“This inspired and inspiring book combines in-depth scholarly research and analysis, original insights, and captivating stories to present a compelling view of our Constitution as designed to secure full and equal rights for all Americans. It should galvanize all readers—from Supreme Court Justices to school students—to do whatever we can to turn these founding ideals into present-day realities.”

—Nadine Strossen, New York Law School, former president of the ACLU

“Akhil Reed Amar is the most accomplished scholar of his age cohort in both law and history because he writes superb books like Born Equal, which will change the minds of everyone across the political spectrum from Federalist Society members to Bernie Sanders leftists. The history told in this book goes to the very core of what it means to be an American citizen and to understanding our Constitution. Amar knows, that for all our faults, the United States is, as President Ronald Reagan called it, ‘A Shining City on a Hill.’ This book brilliantly proves that Ronald Reagan was right! Born Equal is one of the most important books ever written.”—Steven Gow Calabresi, Clayton J. & Henry R. Barber Professor, Northwestern Pritzker School of Law

A very good constitutional history badly marred by poor narration

This is an excellent look into 19th Century American history; there is a good chance that any questions you have about unilateral secession, the amendment process, as well as constitutional interpretation are addressed here.

Unfortunately, the narration of this book is halting and sometimes outright mispronounces words. The halting nature reminds me of Captain Kirk from Star Trek. Sentences stop halfway through, only to start up again as if it was a new sentence. That caused me to have rewind the book at several points. As well, 'caning' (as in, The Caning of Charles Sumner) is mispronounced as 'canning' (as in, 'canned goods'), 'gentile' is mispronounced as 'genteel', and Antonin Scalia's last name is pronounced wrong.

Narration sounds like a hard job. I don't think I could do it myself. But the narration in this audiobook doesn't work.

Please rerecord!!

I echo the comments of many others about the narration. It was so slow and halting a listened at 1.5x and didn't miss a beat. But worse was the fact that each time the narrator switched to a quotation, his voice changed dramatically. And went to a higher register for women. The reader for the Words that Made Us was terrific; why argue with success??

Moving toward equality

Born Free is the third of Akhil Reed Amar’s books which I have read. (The Bill of Rights Primer: A Citizen’s Guidebook by Akhil Reed Amar and Les Adams and America’s Constitution: A Biography). Both of those books are long and as he said on Advisory Opinions when he was asked about the length of Born Equal, he said, well it was shorter than some of my previous books.

Born Equal is worth reading even if it is quite long. It is the second of a trilogy about the Constitution. I have not read the first, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760-1840, but I will get to it before the third comes out. I think it should be compared to Mark Noll’s trilogy about the use of the bible in American public life. Noll’s has published two of the three, In the Beginning Was the Word: The Bible in American Public Life, 1492-1783 and America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794-1911. Noll’s book about the roughly same period was about 150 pages longer than Amar’s already long 753 page tome.

Part of why I compare them is that both are trying to contextualize their subject to a modern reader. Noll is trying to show how central the bible was rhetorically to public life. But Noll is also pointing out how much the view and use of the bible was shaped by people molding the bible to fit their point, not allowing scripture to shape them. I do not know if Amar is religious, but he is known for being a progressive originalist. While most legal originalists are ideologically conservative, Amar regularly points out that originalism is not about political conservatism but about paying attention to the words.

The theme that runs through Born Equal was that Abraham Lincoln was the foremost originalist legal theorist of his age and that after the founding generation passed away, and their children passed away, there needed to be a recovery of a legal theory of how to view the American governmental system. Amar contends that Lincoln had an originalist theory that took seriously the words of the constitution as the basis of the meaning and limitations and role of the government.

The second main theme of the book is that the Declaration of Independence should be understood as providing context of the ideals of the constitution, even if the actual early leaders of the United States did not live up to the ideals that were put into the Declaration of Independence. The Dred Scott decision said that the US government was under no obligation to view Black residents of the US, whether slave or free, as citizens. And that view, that many of the people in the US, all women, Black people (many who had been brought to what became the United States against their will but by the mid 1800 many were 4th or 5th generation residents of the United States, and Native Americans all were not allowed many privileges of citizenship. Born Free traces constitutional history from the rumblings of succession and the Dred Scott decision until the passage of the 17th (direct election of senators), the 19th (women’s suffrage) and the 20th (alterations to President’s term of office and other changes) amendments. All three of these amendments (and the 18th) were expressions of an expanding democracy. (Native American’s were officially recognized as citizens between the 19th and 20th amendments.)

I was skeptical of the claim of Lincoln’s being one of the early originalists in the early pages of the book. But I was pretty convinced by the end. In many ways, while I am not convinced by many of the conservative originalist arguments which often would fail to overturn Plessy or that give us current “history and tradition originalism”, Amar’s focusing of originalism on the ideals of America as found in the Declaration of Independence and then fleshed out in the constitution made sense of a type of originalism. It has become almost cliche to talk about the reconstruction amendments as the second founding of America, but Amar is tracing the thread of the reconstruction amendments through the 20th as being ever expanding democracy that was living out the ideals of the Declaration.

I know I didn’t have a great education in history. We studied the revolution and the civil war and then skipped to the gilded age and the depression and didn’t really get much past that. I was taught that reconstruction was a failed experiment as was common. But Amar and Foner and many others of the past forty years have been refocusing on reconstruction as the tipping point toward real democracy. Amar’s originalism doesn’t do what my history education did, abstracting the founding from its real context and ignoring the reality of a fundamental reshaping of the conception of the US with the reconstruction amendments (even if they were not fully realized and there was a significant backlash that gave rise to a 100 years of Jim Crow).

I also think that I am interested in this type of legal history because of my background in biblical hermeneutics. Bringing Noll back into this, part of what Noll gets into more than Amar does (but is an undercurrent of what was going on during this era) was the rise of a split between fundamentalism and a type of ecumenical pluralism. The fundamentalists wanted a cultural uniformity and a flattening of the understanding of scripture. I have heard from many fundamentalist leaning teachers that the bible can only have one meaning of every passage. While the pluralists can have a problem with ever expanding meanings so that anything can be made from anything. I think that Amar is trying to make the argument that originalism can give us some boundaries that doesn’t flatten or remove context from judicial interpretation. And that the same time it doesn’t promote an ever expanding meaning that allows the interpretation to support near limitless expansion of the role of government or rights. There will be conflict. And part of the way forward is not to use the courts to keep changing the meaning of the laws or constitution, but to actually make changes to the law and constitution when it doesn’t accomplish the ideals that were set out in the Declaration of Independence.

This narrator has RUINED this book for me.

I HATE THIS NARRATOR! I have NEVER been more disappointed by a narrator in more than 20 years of listening to and enjoying audio book. This plodding, tone-deaf narration is beyond terrible, and has completely dishonored an excellent writer and leading legal scholar. SHAME ON THE PRODUCER OF THIS AUDIOBOOK that he/she thought this narrator was the appropriate voice for this excellent work of scholarship.

The story like narrative

Read the Book!
What a sequel! Thank you Dr Amar, for telling a story all Americans need to read! And the maps! You weren’t joking how amazing they turned out!
Once again, my friend Akhil has breathed new life into my learning my passion for America and my life, teaching government and American history!
Thank you for the journey into our past and a glimpse of a potential, brighter future!