Portside

Among the truths still held, by many Americans, to be self-evident, “all men are created equal” is the most fundamental. The current assault on that belief — waged by all three branches of government — is brazen and cruel, but not without precedent. Much of American history has been a battle over the ways we give meaning and the force of law to the idea of equality.

That struggle — to determine and fulfill, and perhaps to exceed, the founders’ intentions — is the focus of a new book by the legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar. “Born Equal” is the second volume in his three-part constitutional history of the United States.

The first, “The Words That Made Us,” opened in 1760 with the accession of King George III. This new installment picks up the action in 1840, as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott attend the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London and are told, Amar observes, to “sit and listen but not speak or vote.” The story moves through the next 80 years, from Stanton and Mott’s assertion of women’s rights at Seneca Falls to Dred Scott, the Civil War and the four constitutional amendments that extended full and equal citizenship to Black Americans and women. It is an energetic, if roundabout, tour.

Amar’s treatment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, among other episodes, showcases his expertise. Rather than simply recount the back and forth, he uses it as a prompt to consider 10 interpretations of “created equal” — from the narrowest, which holds that the phrase was just misleading rhetoric, to the most expansive, that government has a duty to provide “a fair chance” to all, as Lincoln later put it. Amar is similarly effective in showing how the 1848 Seneca Falls declaration responded to the Declaration of Independence.

“Born Equal” is learned and long but never dry; it is, if anything, strenuously chatty. The historical set pieces have punch, and Amar imbues figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe with humanity and immediacy.

Yet there is a feeling throughout of the lecturer playing to the back of the hall. The book is awash in asides, anachronisms (the word “meme” among the most frequent) and first names: The Seneca Falls statement of principles is “Elizabeth’s Declaration”; the Emancipation Proclamation is “Abe’s act.” It is also digressive to a degree that the first volume, an even longer book, was not. The complexities of 19th-century politics and, it appears, the capaciousness of Amar’s interests lead him afield from his central story line.

Still, he is unswerving — and unblushing — in his larger aim: “to set judges and other legal officials straight about what the Constitution really means.” This of course is a tall order, whether the principle at issue is free speech or popular sovereignty or, as it is here, equality — an ideal whose meaning would seem to be as fluid and contested as any in the founding documents.

Amar has long led the charge of the so-called liberal originalists, who, like the far more prominent originalists on the right, believe the Constitution’s meaning is almost always apparent in the text or in contemporary sources, such as James Madison’s “Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787.” The two sides differ in a crucial respect: While conservatives maintain that 18th-century intentions align, invariably, with the agenda of the 21st-century G.O.P., Amar contends that they often (not always) point toward progressive results.

“Born Equal” is his latest — and perhaps most assertive — effort to stake a claim on original intent. Antebellum America, Amar argues, was “unabashedly originalist,” deeply reverential toward its “founding men and founding texts.”

He builds his case with “a blizzard of data points,” among them that the election of William Henry Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848 fit an “originalist pattern” because both men served as generals, as Washington had; that countless sons and towns and territories were named after founding fathers; that James Monroe “managed to die on July 4, 1831,” sanctifying Independence Day just as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had done in 1826; and that America’s “first two postage stamps,” he writes, “bore the likenesses of Washington and Franklin.”

Few readers would question that the founders held the nation in thrall, even during a civil war over what those founders had wrought. Not only did North and South “pray to the same God,” as Lincoln memorably put it, but they invoked the same heroes. In over-stressing this point, Amar refashions a story of constitutional upheaval as a parable of consistency, one in which “politicians whose originalist claims were more faithful” — politicians like Lincoln — ultimately prevail. This reinforces the allure and false promise of originalism: the idea that the text, if you squint hard enough, reveals the answer to almost everything.

To call Lincoln “his generation’s best originalist” sells short the radicalism of his achievement — and the distance he and his battle-weary nation had traveled from its beginning. What Lincoln understood was that the idea of equality, to be worth its cost in blood, demanded more than obeisance to words on parchment. It required reconception. At Gettysburg, he called this our “unfinished work.” So it remains.

Jeff Shesol is the author, most recently, of “Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War.”