1865's 14TH AMENDMENT - CIRCA 2006.

Byline: Susan Palmer The Register-Guard

It's a perilous time for the country: a president with a "bunker mentality" usurping power and ignoring Congress, the future of individual rights at stake and battle lines clearly drawn.

It's not 2006 but 1865. The Civil War is over, but a southerner sits in the White House, and while former slaves may be free, they lack the protections of due process most of us take for granted today.

That's the focus of "Democracy Reborn," a new book by University of Oregon law professor Garrett Epps.

"Democracy Reborn" brings to life the post-Civil War political battle that gave birth to the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

That amendment bars states from passing laws abridging the privileges of individual citizens and guarantees Americans equal protection under the laws of the land.

Epps - who has degrees in both creative writing and the law, and who has written novels as well as nonfiction - knows perfectly well that eyes tend to glaze over when the subject of the Constitution comes up, a kind of castor oil of the mind, good for you but hard to swallow.

So he's written a history that focuses on the crucial period from December 1865 to June 1866 as a tale of suspense. And, at the time, that's what it was.

Southern Congressmen, having lost the war, were determined to win back the peace. They sought a way to retain cheap labor and to block political power and rights sought by black Americans.

Northern politicians were determined to right the wrongs of the original Constitution, crafted in the summer of 1787, which protected slave states and counted each black, for purposes of political representation, as just three-fifths of a person.

President Andrew Johnson - most notable for being drunk when he was sworn in as Lincoln's vice president, surrounded himself with "yes-men" and had no skill for working with Congress.

Reviewers have applauded Epps' effort.

"His energetic prose transforms potentially tedious congressional debates into riveting reading," Publishers Weekly wrote. And a Washington Post review praised Epps for crisp writing about a period few people really understand.

He argues that the 14th Amendment is such a crucial part of our national heritage that its authors should be considered "second framers."

Most of us venerate the original framers of the Constitution, the men who labored to craft a document that would knit together the fragile 13 states. In the newly minted union, the states already were squabbling among themselves and were under threat from European nations seeking to block the United States' westward expansion and even split off some states.

We revere them today as the Founding Fathers, but the men of the Constitutional Convention were complex, flawed individuals, working in a hot stuffy room against a deadline, who believed future politicians would refine their work.

Epps said one delegate complained toward the end of the process, as they dotted I's and crossed T's. "He said, 'This is good enough. It's not going to last 25 years.' '

The Constitution held up longer than expected and warded off the Europeans, but it also carried within it the seeds that would lead to the Civil War, Epps said.

When the fighting ended, with hundreds of thousands dead, cities decimated and President Lincoln assassinated, Congress faced a political war, with northern states members battling Southerners to avoid the creation of a class of people who had fewer rights than others.

"It was a desperate struggle day by day," Epps said.

It echoes in the present day as Congress debates immigration reform and states try to craft ordinances aimed at keeping illegal immigrants out of the country.

Just as the southern states relied on slave labor to make a profit from cotton and tobacco, today's national economy depends on access to easily controlled, cheap labor by such immigrants, Epps said.

In Oregon, the Republican Party recently backed a move to deny U.S. citizenship to children who are born to illegal immigrants.

The debates would have sounded familiar in the 1860s, Epps said. At the time, there were Chinese, Gypsies, Germans and Irish immigrants who drew the ire of established white Americans because they were different. Politicians fretted about Gypsies, who they said contributed nothing to the social good, and Chinese, who came from such a populous nation, and might try to annex California.

But a handful of politicians had a vision, and they prevailed.

"They intended to change the nation," Epps said. "They perceived a multiracial, multicultural democracy, the first in the world."

Writing "Democracy Reborn" has been a dream since Epps was a law student. He says the 14th Amendment is poorly understood today, even by U.S. Supreme Court justices.

"The notion that states are sovereign, that they have rights was pretty much buried," Epps said. "Now, 130 years later, we still have justices arguing for states' rights.

`It's as if the Civil War never happened and the 14th Amendment never existed."

`DEMOCRACY REBORN'

UO law professor Garrett Epps' new book on the 14th Amendment Available: At the University of Oregon Bookstore and at Borders Books Lecture: By Epps on Oct. 12 at 7:30 p.m. at the University of Oregon Knight Law Center

14TH AMENDMENT

Key sections

Section 1: All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of 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.

Section 2: Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.