The Thirteenth Amendment as a Model for Revolution
Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: To date, the United States has experienced only a handful of successful revolutionary movements. The first was the American Revolution itself. Although the original colonies' war of independence and the resulting creation of a democratic republic was assuredly a revolution, it was incomplete in at least one major respect: It failed to resolve the fundamental conflict between the aspiration of freedom and the reality of slavery. Moreover, the bargains made and compromises struck at the time of the Revolution, and as embodied within the Constitution, neither encouraged nor enabled a course of gradual abolitionism, as the Founders purportedly hoped. Instead, those compromises ensconced slavery at the expense of democracy. This inherent friction eventually reached a tipping point, which fomented the second great American revolution: the abolition of slavery.This article examines the path to abolitionism in the United States as a model for illuminating the circumstances that foster and enable revolutionary change in democratic societies. It concludes that when distortions in the democratic process, either explicit or implicit, systemically favor one group over another, the ability of the empowered group to force (or prevent) legal change results in a divergence between the law and prevailing social norms, often at the expense of disfavored groups. That disparity cannot persist indefinitely, particularly when cultural norms continue to evolve but the law remains ossified. In such settings, the dominant legal regime must either change to more accurately reflect broader communal values or risk a more radical (and often increasingly violent) outcome.
Author: Sandra L. Rierson
Institution: Thomas Jefferson School of Law
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1582415370