In the United States, we are all familiar with the names of the founding fathers such as George Washington, James Madison, and Thomas Jefferson. Their role in forming our country's government is well known, and they are widely celebrated, despite the fact that they founded a country that depended on slavery. By contrast, the members of the Reconstruction Congress amended the Constitution to end slavery. They improved our Constitution by establishing the nationally enforceable individual rights to liberty and equality that we celebrate today. However, their names are relatively unknown to most Americans. Fortunately, Gerard Magliocca has made a major contribution to remedying this oversight. His book, American Founding Son, is a biography of John Bingham, one of the leaders of the Reconstruction Congress. This book is a fitting tribute to the man whom Justice Hugo Black once called the “James Madison of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment.”

American Founding Son is a thoroughly researched, comprehensive account of John Bingham's life and his contributions to our constitutional history. Despite generally dwelling in obscurity, John Bingham is well known to historians and constitutional scholars because of his role in drafting the Fourteenth Amendment. During the middle of the twentieth century, the United States Supreme Court struggled with the question of whether the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Bill of Rights against the states. Proponents of incorporation cited Bingham's speeches, which appear to support full incorporation. Opponents of incorporation criticized Bingham as a confused outlier who did not speak for his colleagues.

Given Bingham's central role in the incorporation debate, American Founding Son is long overdue. Scholars and lawyers who are interested in the incorporation debate eagerly have awaited this book. They will not be disappointed. However, Magliocca does not take a position on the incorporation controversy, or any other constitutional debate. The book is descriptive, but not normative, and Magliocca carefully steers away from claims of constitutional meaning. Nonetheless, those seeking to understand the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment will find a wealth of information in the pages of American Founding Son.

Born in 1815, Bingham represented eastern Ohio in the United States House of Representatives from 1855 to 1862 and from 1865 to 1872. Magliocca sheds light on the genesis of Bingham's antislavery ideology in Ohio, which was a hotbed of abolitionist activity when he was a young man. According to Magliocca, those abolitionists set forth the basic framework of rights that Bingham would later articulate as the foundation of the Fourteenth Amendment.

John Bingham entered Congress in the midst of the controversy over the Kansas–Nebraska Act, as a member of the newly formed Republican Party. Bingham was a protégé of radical abolitionist Joshua Giddings, and in his early years in Congress, he shared Giddings’ radical views. After he lost his re-election bid in 1862, Bingham became less radical. During Reconstruction, Bingham served as a moderate who negotiated between recalcitrant President Andrew Johnson and radicals such as Thaddeus Stevens and Benjamin Butler.

Bingham, an eloquent speaker, was well known for articulating his theory of constitutional rights in speeches opposing slavery and supporting the rights of free blacks. Prior to the war, Bingham was best known for his theory of the national rights of citizenship. In 1866, Bingham was appointed a member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, where he drafted the original version of Section One of the Fourteenth Amendment. Bingham once again set forth his theory of national rights of citizenship, this time “calling for a constitutional amendment rather than a different interpretation” (112). Bingham claimed that the Privileges or Immunities of Citizenship Clause included the Bill of Rights. If so, that clause incorporated the Bill of Rights against state governments.

Bingham also played a central role in other constitutional battles during the Reconstruction era. In 1865, after Lincoln's assassination, Bingham prosecuted John Wilkes Booth and his coconspirators in military rather than civilian courts. Bingham engaged in the congressional debate over how to manage the rebel states during the effort to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. In the face of President Andrew Johnson's resistance to Congress’ Reconstruction efforts, Bingham was chosen as Johnson's prosecutor during his impeachment trial.

After he left Congress, Bingham was appointed as United States ambassador to Japan. He retreated from politics and, unfortunately, rarely spoke about court rulings interpreting the Fourteenth Amendment even though the rulings appear to be inconsistent with his vision. Bingham died in 1900 at the age of 85.

Those searching for the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment will find this book to be useful and informative about what Bingham believed to be the meaning of that provision. However, Magliocca tells us little about what Bingham's colleagues thought about his views. How did his congressional colleagues respond to Bingham's claims? How many of them agreed with his constitutional theories? Magliocca clearly opted in favor of a conventional biography rather than an intellectual history of the Reconstruction debates. Nonetheless, he has written an excellent biography about a man who has received too little attention and understanding. For remedying this oversight so well, Magliocca deserves to be commended.