Enforceable Voting Rights Are the Test of American Democracy

Sean Wilentz places voting rights at the center of American democracy rather than at its periphery. The country’s democratic tradition rests on popular sovereignty, but that principle fails when citizens can formally possess the vote while states or other institutions make its exercise impossible. In his account, the struggle against slavery and the struggle for democratic self-government have repeatedly met at this point: who belongs to the political community, who can participate in choosing its government, and whether federal power will protect that participation.

The historical record, as Wilentz presents it, is not one of uninterrupted exclusion or steady progress. He rejects the idea that the United States has done nothing to confront slavery or Jim Crow; the Reconstruction Amendments, the civil-rights movement, and federal voting-rights enforcement changed the country substantially. But those gains have repeatedly required institutional force, and they have repeatedly been narrowed or evaded when that force receded.

That is why he treats current attacks on voting-rights protections as more than a technical legal dispute. In the question period, Wilentz called the Supreme Court’s recent treatment of the Voting Rights Act a “real setback” and said that without securing the vote for all American citizens, “American democracy will not stand.” His concern follows directly from the history he traces: constitutional language alone did not prevent disenfranchisement after Reconstruction, and neither did the Fifteenth Amendment without enforceable federal action.

The most dramatic twentieth-century illustration came after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The law was, in Wilentz’s description, a purposeful extension of the Fifteenth Amendment, particularly through its requirement that jurisdictions with entrenched Black disenfranchisement obtain federal approval before changing voting laws and procedures. The result was not abstract. In Mississippi, Black voter registration rose sharply in four years.

Wilentz calls this a second Reconstruction achieved without full-scale military occupation: federal resolve, made politically possible by the organizing and sacrifice of citizens in places such as Selma. The lesson is not simply that voting is important. It is that democratic rights need institutions prepared to defend them against determined resistance.

Wilentz’s organizing claim is that the United States was shaped by two revolutions rather than one: a revolution against monarchy and for popular sovereignty, and a revolution against chattel slavery. They were distinct, sometimes mutually reinforcing and sometimes in direct conflict. But the revolution against slavery depended on a language of equality and consent developed in resistance to arbitrary monarchy. Conversely, a democratic revolution that tolerated human bondage remained incomplete.

He locates both currents before 1776. The English Revolution of 1642–60 and the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89 helped discredit divine-right monarchy and shaped the political vocabulary that later informed the American Revolution. John Locke was a major influence on American revolutionary thought. At the radical edge of the English upheaval, Wilentz finds early expressions of an antislavery politics connected to antimonarchical argument.

In 1644, the Parliamentarian Henry Parker called chattel slavery unnatural because of its “violent, noxious, and voluntary inequality.” Members of the millenarian Fifth Monarchy movement accused Oliver Cromwell of seeking dominion over bodies and making merchandise of people in the Caribbean and mainland colonies. Morgan Godwyn, writing from experience in Virginia and Barbados, connected absolutism toward free people with contempt for enslaved people’s rights. Plantation regimes supported by monarchy, he wrote, were overseen by people who knew “no other God but money, nor religion but profit.”

Wilentz does not present these arguments as the origin of all resistance to slavery. Opposition to slavery was ancient, and enslaved people had rebelled in the New World long before this period. His claim is more specific: the English revolutionary challenge to arbitrary sovereignty supplied a consequential political connection between resistance to monarchy and resistance to slavery. Quakers, heirs to one of the era’s radical religious movements, would become prominent antislavery organizers in British North America.

The Declaration of Independence gave that connection an enduring American formulation. Its assertion that human beings are created equal, endowed with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and entitled to governments based on consent became a resource for movements seeking both democracy and abolition.

Wilentz insists that Thomas Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal” should not be read as confined to white or free men. He points to Jefferson’s original draft indictment of the Crown for imposing and sustaining slavery and the slave trade—language removed from the Declaration at South Carolina’s insistence. In that passage, Jefferson referred to markets “where MEN should be bought or sold,” capitalizing and italicizing “MEN.” Wilentz notes that the draft used comparable emphasis only for “United States of America.” The implication, for him, is that enslaved people fell within the Declaration’s stated human equality even though Jefferson himself held slaves and the Declaration did not abolish slavery.

Antislavery organization emerged alongside independence. Five days before Lexington and Concord, a Philadelphia group founded the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage. Wilentz identifies it as the first antislavery society in Western history and, as far as he can tell, in world history. It later became the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, headed by Benjamin Franklin until Franklin’s death in 1790.

The interaction of revolutionary politics and antislavery organizing produced Pennsylvania’s Gradual Abolition Law of 1780, which Wilentz calls the first abolition legislation of its kind anywhere. Laws and court rulings followed, abolishing slavery immediately or gradually across the North. By 1804, every state north of Delaware had either abolished slavery or put it on a path to abolition.

That early achievement did not settle the national contradiction. The Constitution preserved slavery’s power, yet Wilentz treats the constitutional order as a contested settlement rather than a straightforward national endorsement of bondage. The lower South, especially South Carolina and Georgia, secured formidable protections at the 1787 convention, most notoriously the three-fifths clause, which amplified slaveholding states’ influence in Congress and presidential elections.

But southern delegates did not secure everything they wanted. They failed to prevent the federal government from regulating the transatlantic slave trade. Congress could not prohibit the trade for 20 years, but the Constitution authorized eventual abolition. Wilentz calls this the first national-government blow against the commerce in human beings. Antislavery delegates also prevented the Constitution from affirming slavery, or “property in man,” as a national legal institution. Slavery remained protected under state law; it was not expressly established as a national right.

That distinction mattered later. It left room for antislavery forces to argue for federal action against slavery. The Constitution was neither a clean emancipation document nor, in Wilentz’s telling, a final proslavery settlement. It was a framework whose compromises strengthened the slaveholding order while leaving constitutional openings that its opponents would use.

The constitutional conflict became irrepressible after the cotton economy made slavery more powerful, not less. Many Americans at the end of the eighteenth century had expected democratic forces to bring slavery to an early end. The cotton gin and the cotton revolution overturned those expectations. By 1850, Wilentz says, the American South had become the world’s largest and wealthiest slave society, perhaps the largest and wealthiest slave society in history.

The politics of slavery consequently became a politics of federal power. During the Missouri crisis, the admission of Missouri as a slave state was paired with a restriction on slavery in federal territories above a specified latitude. For the most ardent defenders of slavery, particularly in South Carolina, such restrictions confirmed a broader fear: any expansion of federal authority might become a vehicle for emancipation.

That fear lay behind South Carolina’s nullification of a federal tariff in 1832. The tariff was the immediate issue, but Wilentz presents slavery as the underlying concern. John C. Calhoun and other South Carolinians believed that concessions to federal authority could lead eventually to federal action against slavery. They threatened secession if nullification was resisted.

Andrew Jackson was hostile to abolitionists, but he also regarded nullification and secession as threats to the Union and to democracy itself. He threatened military force and issued a proclamation repudiating the legitimacy of secession. At the same time, the American Anti-Slavery Society formed in 1833 as an interracial, national movement demanding immediate emancipation. Wilentz treats it as a decisive expansion of antislavery politics: a mass organization across the North rather than a small circle of reformers.

These movements drove the crisis toward its central question. Could a slaveholding elite reject a constitutional election when it lost? When Abraham Lincoln won the presidency, secessionists answered yes. Lincoln’s response, most compactly expressed at Gettysburg, joined the two revolutions in a single account of the Civil War.

The Confederacy depicted secession as resistance to tyranny. Wilentz’s reading of Lincoln is that secession instead rejected the result of a democratic and constitutional election. A government that would not accept the people’s lawful choice had repudiated popular sovereignty. The Confederate government deepened that repudiation by organizing itself around a slaveholding oligarchy.

For Lincoln, slavery itself embodied the principle of mastery that democratic government rejected. In an 1858 note, he wrote: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” He had long compared proslavery reasoning to defenses of the divine right of kings. The Gettysburg Address supplied the most economical statement of that connection: the survival of government “of the people, by the people, for the people” required a “new birth of freedom.”

The war began as an effort to defeat secession and preserve the Union. By the middle of 1862, Wilentz says, preserving democratic government required emancipation as far as the Union could then achieve it. Appomattox settled the military contest, but it did not establish the political and legal order needed to sustain emancipation.

That work became Reconstruction. Wilentz describes the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments as a rewriting of the Constitution—a second founding. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth addressed the status of people who had been enslaved and the efforts of former Confederate states to recreate a labor and social system close to slavery. It guaranteed equal protection to all persons, not simply citizens; established birthright citizenship for all persons born in the United States; and barred certain former oath-taking officials who had engaged in rebellion from holding office unless Congress removed the disability by a two-thirds vote in each house.

The Fifteenth Amendment responded to the attempt to deny formerly enslaved men political power through state control over elections. It prohibited denying male citizens the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

Wilentz emphasizes both the specificity and reach of these amendments. They were race-conscious measures, written to answer the urgent injustice facing formerly enslaved people. Yet they were not race-specific in their language. The Fourteenth Amendment protected “persons,” and the Fifteenth safeguarded male citizens regardless of race. In his formulation, Reconstruction used a race-conscious remedy to create a constitutional regime of universal rights.

This universalism connected Reconstruction back to the Declaration’s repudiation of arbitrary power. John A. Bingham, the chief drafter of the Fourteenth Amendment’s first section, stated the principle in terms Wilentz traces to the Declaration: every human being had the right not to be deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.

Reconstruction did not protect itself. Its constitutional achievements and supporting legislation proved unable to halt the violent overthrow of Reconstruction and the establishment of Jim Crow. Wilentz singles out 1896, rather than 1877 alone, as a year that crystallized retreat from the amendments’ universal promise.

The year brought the collapse of the Populist movement and the Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson. Both mattered because each bore on the possibility of building a political coalition capable of challenging entrenched economic and racial power.

In the 1880s and 1890s, small farmers—especially in the South—organized against falling crop prices, debt, high interest rates, railroads, banks, monopolies, and allied political elites. They called their adversary the “Money Power” and sought to restore authority to the “producing classes,” including farmers and industrial workers. Their program included a graduated income tax.

In many places, white Populists sought Black political support. The coalition had serious limits, but Wilentz calls it the most important interracial political movement in the South between Reconstruction and the modern civil-rights movement. At its 1892 peak, James B. Weaver, the People’s Party presidential candidate, won more than 1 million votes. The party also won 10 congressional seats, several governorships, hundreds of state legislative seats, and thousands of local offices.

Its fusion with William Jennings Bryan’s Democratic Party in 1896 blunted the movement, which then suffered a decisive defeat. That same year, Plessy established the constitutional acceptability of “separate but equal” in a case arising from a New Orleans streetcar dispute. Wilentz calls it the national government’s official imprimatur on Jim Crow. Justice John Marshall Harlan’s dissent—that separate was not equal and could never be equal—stood as a lonely counterstatement that a later Court would take up in Brown v. Board of Education.

The New Deal altered the federal government’s relationship to citizens but did not resolve this racial contradiction. Wilentz calls it a revolution in its own right: a sustained experiment in using national power to confront the Great Depression and mitigate economic hardship. Social Security best represented the changed premise that the federal government could be a necessary instrument against persistent inequality rather than merely a monarchical or aristocratic parasite.

He also rejects the notion that federal administration began with Franklin Roosevelt or the Progressive era. Lincoln’s administration had created the Department of Agriculture in 1862, an independent agency intended to protect farmers, conduct scientific agricultural research, and secure the nation’s food supply. The New Deal enlarged such federal capacity for an industrial economy in crisis.

Its racial record was deeply compromised. Roosevelt did not dismantle segregation in the federal government, did not support antilynching legislation, and presided over a Federal Housing Administration that adopted redlining. The Democratic coalition depended on the white Jim Crow South, whose congressional seniority blocked more sweeping change.

Yet New Deal programs also brought direct federal assistance to millions of Black Americans who could not expect meaningful support from southern state governments. The administration recruited Black advisers into what became known as the “Negro Cabinet.” The National Youth Administration, Works Progress Administration, and Public Works Administration had latitude to pursue fairer practices in hiring and aid. Harold Ickes, who led the PWA and had long supported the NAACP, insisted that federally financed housing and construction projects hire Black workers. Mary McLeod Bethune, an educator and reformer, became an influential adviser, particularly through the National Youth Administration.

Wilentz’s judgment is qualified: the New Deal’s failures were substantial, but its programs improved social conditions for Black Americans in ways that helped make the modern civil-rights movement possible.

That movement returned the right to vote to the center of democratic legitimacy. Wilentz reads Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech as the strongest restatement of the two revolutions’ convergence since Gettysburg. King quoted Jefferson and located his appeal in the American dream, understood as democracy and popular sovereignty rather than complacent colorblindness. His invocation of “five score years ago” echoed Lincoln and presented the Emancipation Proclamation as a second Declaration of Independence. The nation had abolished slavery, but it had not lived up to the full meaning of its creed.

Selma made the gap between constitutional guarantee and political reality impossible to ignore. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not initially include voting protections because Lyndon B. Johnson regarded them as politically too risky. The organizing, courage, and bloodshed of Selma’s citizens, including young organizers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, created the conditions for the Voting Rights Act the next year.

For Wilentz, this sequence is a recurring pattern rather than an isolated civil-rights chapter. Rights advance through constitutional principles, political mobilization, and federal enforcement together. They retreat when one or more of those elements gives way.

Wilentz chose not to conclude his sequence with January 6, 2021, although he had considered it. Instead, he made the present—July 30, 2026—his tenth installment. The reason was not optimism for its own sake. He wanted the audience to measure current conditions against the democratic and antislavery revolutions that, in his view, define American history.

He distinguishes that exercise from presentism. Historians should not judge the past by the standards of the present. But citizens can judge the present by standards developed through the past: equality, consent of the governed, citizenship, voting rights, and constitutional limits on arbitrary power.

His proposed starting point is unusually literal. Read the Declaration of Independence, including the grievances after its famous opening. Wilentz pointed to Jefferson’s objections that the Crown had transported colonists overseas to be tried for “pretended offenses,” and that it had quartered armed troops among the population while protecting them through “mock trial” from punishment for murders against inhabitants. Read the Constitution as well, especially the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The point is not that everyone will draw the same political conclusion; Wilentz explicitly expects disagreement. It is that disagreement should proceed from serious attention to first principles rather than civic amnesia.

The other present-day question he foregrounded in discussion was executive power. Wilentz described the Supreme Court as a long-running and especially consequential force in contemporary politics. He said the Court’s agenda has converged with that of the Trump administration, including on voting rights and the administrative state. His own judgment of Trump v. United States, the presidential-immunity decision, was emphatic: he called it the Court’s worst decision since Dred Scott, argued that it was badly reasoned, and said it puts the president above the law.

That is a current political judgment, not a proposition established by the historical survey alone. But it follows the concern that runs through Wilentz’s account: democracy requires that officeholders remain accountable to law and to a political community capable of exercising its rights. A constitutional order in which presidents stand above the law, or in which citizens cannot effectively vote, departs from the two revolutions he sees as America’s defining inheritance.

Wilentz’s practical prescription is civic education joined to focused political action. Citizens should understand the founding documents as living commitments, he says, and should press officials with direct responsibility for election administration to prepare for threats to it. Broad demonstrations may have value, but he urged more specific political demands directed at the people and institutions with the power to act.