 Greetings from the National Archives. I'm David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual book talk with Michael Bulel, author of Inventing Equality, Reconstructing the Constitution in the Aftermath of the Civil War. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Wednesday, January 27th at noon, you can hear Deborah Willis discuss the Black Civil War soldier, a visual history of conflict and citizenship, a kaleidoscopic yet intimate portrait of the African-American experience from the beginning of the Civil War to 1900. The book shows how photography helped construct a national vision of blackness, war, and bondage, while unearthing the hidden histories of those black Civil War soldiers. And on Friday, January 29th at noon, Benjamin R. Justison will discuss his book, Forgotten Legacy, William McKinley, George Henry White, and the Struggle for Black Equality. Historians have long overlooked President William McKinley's cooperation with prominent African-American leaders, including George Henry White, the nation's only black congressman between 1897 and 1901. Because of McKinley's dedication to the advancement of African-Americans and the safeguarding of their rights as U.S. citizens, he might be considered the first civil rights president. The rotunda of the National Archives building enshrines the Constitution of the United States, but the four pages exhibited there are the beginning of this guiding document of our national government. Shortly after its ratification in 1788, the 10 amendments we know as the Bill of Rights were passed, and over the next 200 years, we have appended 17 more amendments. In inventing equality, Michael Builiel looks closely at three of those amendments, the 13th, 14th, and 15th, passed after the Civil War to extend freedom and rights of citizenship, to formerly enslaved persons. As the records of our nation show, ratification of these amendments was not the end of our debate. Our voluminous court records preserved cases brought before the United States courts, even up to the Supreme Court seeking equal treatment under the law. Using these records, Builiel brings us an examination of the evolution of the battle of true equality in America. Michael Builiel is the author of numerous books including Revolutionary Outlaws, Arming America, 1877 America's Year of Living Violently, and the People's History of the US Military. He's taught at every educational level in the United States, Germany, Italy, and United Kingdom. Awarded the Bancroft Award in 2001, he is the only person to ever win both of the Article of the Year awards from the Organization of American Historians. As the founding director of the Interdisciplinary Violence Studies Program at Emory University, Builiel worked with community organizations and public agencies to study and respond to the numerous effects of violence in modern life. He's also organized special educational programs to aid veterans of the Vietnam War and served as educational director of the Veterans Institute of New England. Now let's hear from Michael Builiel. Thank you for joining us today. Good day. I am honored by this invitation to speak at the National Archives about the core principle of human equality and this day after the inauguration of our second Catholic president and first woman vice president. We as a nation pride ourselves as living in a land of equality and opportunity, the two being intricately and inexorably linked. It is also obvious that the United States has a long history of struggling to make the ideal a reality. Given the political language of this country which tends to promote the concept of equality, we must ask why are we still fighting to ensure, for instance, that black lives matter? So let's go back to the start. The two American founding documents each made clear the core problem for the United States. Declaration of Independence of 1776, you surely know these words. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and a pursuit of happiness. Thomas Jefferson provided a perfect expression of human equality. But what did Jefferson mean by self-evident? Was equality self-evident, not requiring any evidence? Sadly, not even Jefferson accepted equality. One of the most bitter and instructive ironies in American history is the fact that the same man wrote these eloquent words for claiming equality and just four years later, the first book Justifying Slavery on Racial Grounds, notes on the state of Virginia in 1780. Jefferson can never get his head fully around what he meant by equality, struggling with the concept for the remainder of his long life. He also is responsible for the one perfect metaphor of racial attitudes in the United States, his relationship with Sally Hemings, the half-sister of his wife Martha. Over the 75 years after Jefferson wrote the Declaration, you will be hard put to find a single document supportive of equality. What you will find instead is a steadily increasing number of books, articles, speeches, and sermons supportive of inequality, which nearly every political, intellectual, and religious leader insisted was natural. They would deliver stirring July 4th orations, praising the United States as the land of equality and then turn around and find all sorts of exceptions. But let us go back for a moment to that other founding document, the Constitution of 1787. When I was young, we had to memorize the preamble, we, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity to ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Again, the wording seems so clear. Our Constitution is proclaimed in the name of the people, not of the states or just white Protestant property-owning men, but we're the people. The Constitution does not say, never bothering to define citizenship. Congress was supposed to decide, but the first Congress left it up to the states, which generally just sort of went with those born or naturalized within their borders as citizens with, again, many exceptions. Immediately, we get all sorts of contradictions. What happens when a state refuses to acknowledge that members of a specific religious or ethnic group are not worthy of citizenship? And what of that half the population, which is not male? The Constitution may say people, but every state read that as men. Why? Whenever a court bothered to address the issue, they usually dismissed the concept of women being equal in the eyes of the law as a ridiculous violation of reality. For in their view, women did not have the physical or mental capacities necessary for participation in public life. Such a proposal also violated the traditional legal concept of Coverture. The American understanding of the legal status of women came from that renowned British legal scholar, William Blackstone, who defined Coverture in 1765, to quote, by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law. That is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated to that of the husband under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything. This lack of legal identity was most obvious in her loss of her name upon marriage. Women did not have rights, but duties. A female was to be obedient first to her father and then to her husband. A woman without a man was a relic. That was the legal phrase. A leftover, with few exceptions, women could not own nor acquire property, write a will or enter a contract. They had no legal identity, but were utterly dependent on a male. There was clearly no self-evident truth of equality when it came to women. Not even all men were included among those eligible for the legal equality of citizenship, but different times and places, various religious and ethnic groups have been excluded from the equal protection of the law. One of these exclusions brought on the most violent event in American history, the Civil War. Obviously, I'm speaking of slavery and its supportive ideology of white supremacy. Slave holders from Thomas Jefferson to Jefferson Davis did not hesitate to label the United States the land of freedom while insisting on the inferiority of those they felt justified in enslaving. The big problem for the United States was that ever more states rejected slavery. And though still guilty of racist policies, these states insisted on freedom for their citizens of African heritage. So what happens when a black citizen of a free state travels to a slave state or a slave finds his way into a free state? It is important to note that racism warped every aspect of American law, politics, society, culture, and language. For instance, given the tendency of white slave owners to rape their female slaves leading to lighter skinned children, it often became difficult to define blackness. And what happened when black sailors for the United States Navy was integrated stepped ashore in a slave state. In 1822, South Carolina declared that they would be sold into slavery. The Supreme Court declared their law in constitutional South Carolina did not care. Southern states opened mail checking for anti-slavery sentiments and terminated all First Amendment rights. There was no education for blacks or for most whites for that matter because there was no public education. Through the 1850s, these contradictions began to tear the country apart. As those living outside the slave states became more dissatisfied with the efforts of the slave owners to nationalize their institutions. Occasionally, one of the Southern leaders like John C. Calhoun would make a claim for the supremacy of states rights over national rights. But even he wanted the federal government to expand its powers in order to hunt and recapture runaway slaves. As divisions intensified Chief Justice Roger Taney that he could solve the contradictions by terminating the concept of equality. In 1857, the Supreme Court issued the Dred Scott decision stating that a black person could never be a citizen since the Constitution was written by and for white men alone and that black people were property by birth. Instantly, most people in free states saw the problem. There would soon be no free states as slavery would be nationalized. As Illinois Senate candidate Abraham Lincoln best summarized the situation and I quote, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become lawful in all the states north as well as south end quote. Lincoln captured well the fear that the Dred Scott decision would lead directly to the creation of a slain republic. That certainty led to Lincoln's victory in the 1860 election, the secession of 11 slave states and the Civil War. Now a strange thing happened in the Civil War. There was little doubt that most white Americans were racists in 1860 in the sense that at the very least they were white supremacists. This was true of Lincoln as well who repeatedly stayed that he felt white men superior to blacks. However, Lincoln turned back to Jefferson's understanding of equality to reframe the issue. He argued that Jefferson had put forth a simple understanding of equality that entitled everyone to the natural rights of life, liberty and a pursuit of happiness. Lincoln thought it reasonable and right to let black Americans decide for themselves how to live. But the declaration had put forth the radical notion that each individual is best able to determine his or her own happiness. Most northern whites seem to have shared that simple and minimal understanding of equality at the start of the Civil War. There was a general feeling that everybody deserved the right to decide for themselves how they would live given what they perceived as natural limitations of age, ability, race and gender. But as the war progressed, white people from the free states began meeting blacks and discovered that they were people too. In fact, admirable people. And I'm gonna give just one example. One of the greatest joys of conducting historical research is prying in reading the private letters and journals of unknown people, gaining access to the mental process of common Americans. For instance, Chauncey Cook, a farm boy from Wisconsin, had never seen a black person in his life until he marched down the Mississippi with the Union Army in 1863. He was delighted with them, writing in his family that they were the most gentle, nicest and polite people he had ever met. They were also deeply grateful to the white soldiers for fighting to free them. Those positive characteristics stood out all the more as, quote, every white man and woman in Mississippi is ready to shoot a poisonous, end quote. The Union troops learned that, quote, the Negroes were our only Southern friends, and let's not forget they were Southerners. And they kept us posted on what the whites were doing and saying, bringing us food along with military intelligence. As he marched through the South, Cook became convinced that slavery had damaged the whites almost as much as the blacks. The elite had deliberately kept poor whites ignorant of the outside world, denying them equality as well. By his count, only one-tenth of the Confederate prisoners could read and write, account matched by most studies. By the time the war ended in 1865, most Northern whites and a great many Southern whites felt that black Americans deserve citizenship. Similarly, black and white women had repeatedly proven themselves brave and committed citizens as thousands came forth to serve the cause of freedom in a number of ways, as nurses and spies, office clerks and guides, support staff and recruiters for the military. In fact, the person praised by Lincoln and Frederick Douglass as the most effective exponent of the Union cause was Anna Dickinson, the first woman to address Congress in a courageous orator who stood down pro-slavery mobs. In the same way, immigrants and Catholics left no doubt that they too willingly risked everything for their country. By the time the war ended in 1865, a consensus had spread through the country that those previously denied the rights of citizenship had proven their worth and deserved full legal equality. The result was a trio of amendments that sought to correct two glaring contradictions in the Constitution. It's unstated support for slavery and its failure to define citizenship. The first issue was resolved by the 13th Amendment, which ended slavery in the United States. Defining citizenship proved a little bit more difficult and contentious, resulting in the 14th Amendment, which became part of the Constitution in 1868. Its opening words appeared to make clear the legal equality of all Americans in eloquent and precise language, and is worth quoting, all citizens, excuse me, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States, nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Nothing can be clearer. A literal reading of the opening paragraph leaves no doubt that all persons are equal in the eyes of the law. However, as is so often the case in American history, the eloquent evocation of rights is soon followed by the qualifiers. The second section of the amendment states that the vote may not be denied to male inhabitants. Women were outraged. Leaders of the women's rights movement had agreed to put ending slavery first with the understanding that their legal equality would then be addressed. But the all white male Congress undermined that understanding. As Elizabeth Cady Stanton said, the insertion of the word male and the first time gender had been inserted into the constitution into the 14th amendment undermined the concept of women's equality and set back the women's suffrage movement by a century. Congress followed up with the 15th amendment which protected the right of black men to vote. Very specific again in the gender. The initial result of these amendments was the period known as reconstruction and the nation's first true, almost democratic elections. The Republican Party swept elections around the country including in the South where alliances between former slaves and poor whites led to dramatic changes such as the first public schools, infrastructure, projects, and the creation of a free press. Former Confederates hated it all and they counterattacked often quite literally through violence and intimidation that Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups determined to force inequality in the nation and it worked. They found a powerful ally in the Supreme Court which slowly whittled away the meaning of the reconstruction amendments. When the brilliant Myra Colby Bradwell applied for the Illinois bar, she was rejected because women could not be lawyers. Bradwell appealed to the Supreme Court citing the 14th amendment as establishing equal rights. In 1873, the Supreme Court dismissed her suit on the basis of nature and divine ordinance. Nature had made women timid and delicate and thus unfit for civil life to quote the decision. God had made women to have one job and one job only. Motherhood. For these reasons quote, a woman had no legal existence separate from her husband and could not hold property or enter into contracts and therefore cannot practice law. All human laws, even the Constitution the Supreme Court declared must bend to the law of the creator making any notion of equality between men and women silly and downright dangerous. Two years later, Virginia Minor appeared before the court using the 14th amendment to insist on her right to vote. Again, a unanimous court rejected Minor's argument. Her status as a citizen was irrelevant. Entering into perfectly circular logic, the court reasoned that since women are citizens but cannot vote, that women did not have a right to vote. When Congress attempted to protect the equality of black Americans with a series of civil rights acts, the court overturned them on the basis of congressional overreach in trying to enforce the 14th amendment Congress had violated the 10th extending its reach into private matters. If a Southern state wanted, if Southern state governments wanted to limit the rights of their black citizens, that was their business. The court impatiently noted that 18 years had passed since the Civil War, surely it was time to move on from these issues. The Civil War and Reconstruction taught white supremacists that they had to keep whites and blacks apart or they might come to see one another as equals. The white supremacists Southern state governments therefore began a policy of segregation in the 1880s, the so-called Jim Crow laws named after a common stage stereotype of blacks. They recognized that stereotypes only work if the races do not get to know one another. Inequality also gained powerful intellectual support in 1877 when a new concept appeared in the United States, social Darwinism, perceived as a result of indisputable science, social Darwinism became an obsession among educated Americans. Even ministers who as a group rejected Darwinism celebrated social Darwinism, the idea that the successful deserved their power while any effort to aid the weak undermines natural selection and thus human progress. Social Darwinism also rated the races with the whites conveniently on top. While rather self-serving for the successful and the white, it also cleared the consciences of the majority of white Americans. Social Darwinism was a clarion call for inaction. Thus ended America's brief experiment with equality and it returned to inequality on a national scale. Once more women were to shut up and stay home, blacks were to do what whites told them and immigrants were subject to disdain and control. For instance, in 1882, Congress passed its first national immigration legislation, the Chinese Exclusion Act, barring all future Chinese immigration. This act was not repealed until 1965. In 1893, the Supreme Court issued their decision Plessy versus Ferguson, which rejected the notion that segregation violated the 14th Amendment. They admitted that the amendment sought to enforce the absolute equality of the two races before the law, but in the nature of things, it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based on color. The court could not imagine how anyone thought that a law establishing, quote, merely a legal distinction between the white and colored races could in any way undermine legal equality. A distinction is not discrimination, separate but equal facilities do not imply inferiority. No evidence was required to prove that segregation hurts no one since it simply, quote, is too clear for argument. As Justice John Marshall Harlan pointed out in his stunning dissent, the Supreme Court chose to ignore reality. They ignored the violence, the paralyzing effects of racism on both the victims in American democracy, that separate is never equal and the fact that the Constitution is colored blind. There was a more subtle, yet equally devastating form of inequality, exclusion. Pretending that women, blacks, Chinese, Hispanics, Jews, at all, were never part of American history is a deeply harmful form of inequality. For a century after the Civil War, historians ignored these groups and wrote almost entirely about white men. For instance, 270,000 black troops fought for the union during the Civil War. I just finished a search of dozens of history textbooks published between 1880 and 1950 and cannot find a single one that mentions this essential fact. My own high school textbook, The Growth of the American Republic, written by the prominent historians, Sandro Morrison and Henry Cominger, had a two-page section out of 830 pages on slavery that began, and I am quoting it, as for Sambo, whose wrongs moved the abolitionists to wrath and tears, there was some reason to believe that they suffered less than any other class in the South from its peculiar institution." This absurdity is followed by assurances that the slaves were happy, sang, and danced, and learned a lot from their masters who never used violence. We were supposed to believe that nonsense. You don't have to. What we now see clearly is that, in a single decade of the 1860s, thousands of Americans discovered human equality and invented a clear understanding of legal equality that has formed the foundation for every struggle for positive change since. Progressive forces never stopped fighting for equality, and in the years after World War II, they found the nation once more willing to believe that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens. It's a beautiful concept, and one that still inspires the advocates of equality. Thank you.