The "Unfinished Revolution"

"Recall where the Constitution stood 150 years ago today—before this Second Founding. It didn't mention the word 'slavery.' And, worse, various provisions—including the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause—had increased the political power of the slave states throughout the pre-Civil War period. The Constitution was silent on the Declaration’s promise of equality and on the issue of African American voting rights. States could violate key Bill of Rights protections like free speech with impunity—and many Southern states did throughout the pre-Civil War period, banning abolitionist speech, with at least one state punishing such advocacy with death. And citizenship rights were left to the states and the courts—with Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney infamously concluding in Dred Scott that African Americans could not be citizens and that they had 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect.'
"While the American people rightly revere George Washington, James Madison, and their fellow Framers, it took the heroic efforts of Lincoln, Stevens, Frederick Douglass, John Bingham (the framer of the Fourteenth Amendment), and many others to create the 'more perfect Union' built on winning a bloody Civil War and ratifying a series of amendments that ended slavery, protected fundamental rights from state abuses, guaranteed equality for all, and expanded the right to vote. While the 1787 Framers succeeded in creating the most durable form of government in history, it's only after the Second Founding that the Constitution fully protected the liberty and equality promised in the Declaration of Independence."

In The Atlantic, Jeffrey Rosen and Tom Donnelly announce a five-year initiative to commemorate America's Second Founding.