At the end of each Supreme Court term, around Independence Day, Justice Clarence Thomas takes his clerks to tour the battlefield at Gettysburg. By then, long hours of intense, closely researched debate, along with the almost parental care that the justice and his wife, Virginia, have lavished upon them, have melded the young lawyers into something like family. They have spent part of the year on Fourteenth Amendment questions, but now it’s time for a closer look at the realities that the amendment addresses. “I thought it would be important for my clerks not just to talk about the Fourteenth Amendment, not just to talk about the equal protection clause,” explained Thomas in a Heritage Foundation lecture last year, marking his 25th anniversary on the Court, “but to go and feel it—to see the place, to see what this was about. Why did people die? To go where Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, where he implores us, the living, to make it worthwhile, this experiment to which these people had given the last full measure.” Because, he concludes, “this ideal, that’s all we have left: the perfectibility of this great republic.”
That ideal of republican perfectibility—the full realization of Jefferson’s proposition that all men are created equal—lies at the heart of Thomas’s career on the nation’s highest court. Lincoln had urged his Gettysburg audience to rededicate themselves to that ideal to spark a new birth of freedom, which would have occurred, had not some failed actor felt called to blow out the noblest brain of the age five days after the South’s surrender. If Lincoln had lived, Reconstruction would have invested black Southerners permanently with all the civil rights of American citizenship, as the heroic president intended. That’s why biographer Richard Brookhiser calls Lincoln, in his book’s title, the Founders’ Son: the Great Emancipator understood the Founding Fathers’ vision of liberty and equality before the law with a seer’s acuity and aimed to bring it about more completely than circumstances had allowed the Founders themselves to do.
But Southern segregationists derailed his plan soon after his assassination and prolonged racial oppression for nearly another century, distorting race relations in the nation to this day. It’s in this sense, as Thomas works to fulfill Lincoln’s task of extending the unalienable rights of the Declaration of Independence to all Americans, that it’s not fanciful to think of the justice as the Founders’ grandson.
How Thomas could become so historically consequential is a story that really begins with his actual grandfather, Myers Anderson.
