Our Forgotten Founders: Reconstruction, Public Education, and Constitutional Heroism

Abstract

This Article examines a set of constitutional stories that has not been the subject of focused study by legal scholars — the stories we tell our schoolchildren about the Founding and Reconstruction. These stories offer new clues about the background assumptions that elite lawyers, political leaders, and the wider public bring to bear when they consider the meaning of the Constitution. Since the early twentieth century, our leading high school textbooks have tended to praise the Founding generation and canonize certain Founding Fathers, while, at the same time, largely ignoring Reconstruction’s key players and underemphasizing the constitutional revolution these “Forgotten Founders” envisioned (and began to wage). As a result, generations of students have been left with a relatively pristine view of the Founding, while receiving (at best) a “warts-and-all” account of Reconstruction. These disparate accounts (presented for decades in our classrooms) have helped to construct a constitutional culture that reveres the Founding generation, but gives short shrift to their Reconstruction counterparts.

Keywords: popular constitutionalism, constitutional law, civic education, education law, Reconstruction, Founders