The Birth of the Reconstruction Amendments

Allison Pruitt, Office of Communications and Public Relations, University of Georgia School of Law

Published in The Advocate, Fall 2005/Winter 2006, Vol. 40, no. 2.

Abstract

Almost a century after American colonists secured their freedom from England, internal conflict surrounding the legitimacy of slavery forced our still-evolving nation to evaluate its core values in a “struggle over the meaning of democracy itself,” according to Akhil Reed Amar, a Yale law professor who delivered the 100th Sibley Lecture in October 2005.