13th Amendment

While America's founding documents, such as the Declaration of Independence

and the Constitution, emphasized the importance of liberty and equality, they
omitted to mention slavery, which was legal in all 13 colonies in 1776. More than
4 million people (nearly all of them of African descent) were enslaved in 15
southern and border states when the Civil War broke out in 1861. Though
Abraham Lincoln despised slavery as a moral evil, he was conflicted about how
to deal with it throughout his career. By 1862, however, he had come to believe
that freeing enslaved people in the South would aid the Union in crushing the
Confederate rebellion and winning the Civil War. All enslaved people held in
states “then in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward,
and forever free,” according to Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, which went
into effect in 1863. However, the Emancipation Proclamation did not abolish
slavery in the United States because it only applied to the 11 Confederate states
that were at the time at war with the Union, and only to the parts of those states
that were not already under Union control. A constitutional amendment
abolishing the institution of slavery would be required to make emancipation
permanent.

The proposed amendment was passed by the House of Representatives on

January 31, 1865, with a vote of 119-56, just over the required two-thirds
majority. The next day, Lincoln signed a joint resolution of Congress
recommending ratification by state legislatures. But he would not see final
ratification: Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865, and the 13th
Amendment was not ratified by the required number of states until December 6,
1865. While Section 1 of the 13th Amendment made chattel slavery and
involuntary servitude illegal, Section 2 empowered the United States Congress to
"enforce this article by appropriate legislation."The 13th Amendment, along with
the 14th and 15th Amendments, was ratified during the Reconstruction era to
ensure black Americans' equality. Despite these efforts, the fight for full equality
and the protection of all Americans' civil rights has continued well into the
twenty-first century.

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14th Amendment
Following President Abraham Lincoln's assassination in April 1865, his
successor, President Andrew Johnson, was tasked with overseeing the difficult
process of reuniting former Confederate states with the Union and establishing
former enslaved people as free and equal citizens. Johnson, a Democrat from
Tennessee, supported emancipation, but he disagreed with the
Republican-controlled Congress on how Reconstruction should proceed. As the
former Confederate states were reintroduced into the Union, Johnson was
relatively forgiving. Many northerners, on the other hand, were outraged when
newly elected southern state legislatures enacted black codes, which were
repressive laws that strictly regulated the behavior of Black citizens and
effectively kept them dependent on white planters.

Representative Thaddeus Stevens introduced a plan in late April that combined

several different legislative proposals into a single constitutional amendment. The
amendment was sent to the states for ratification after both the House and
Senate voted on it by June 1866. As the 14th Amendment was being ratified,
President Johnson made it clear that he opposed it, but Republican
Congressional elections in late 1866 gave them veto-proof majorities in both the
House and Senate. Southern states resisted as well, but Congress required them
to ratify the 13th and 14th Amendments in order to regain congressional
representation, and the Union Army's continued presence in the former
Confederate states ensured compliance. Louisiana and South Carolina ratified
the 14th Amendment on July 9, 1868, completing the required three-fourths
majority.

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15th Amendment
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged
by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous
condition of servitude," the 15th Amendment states. Despite the passage of the
amendment, by the late 1870s, discriminatory practices were being used to
prevent Black citizens, particularly in the South, from exercising their right to
vote. Legal barriers at the state and local levels were not outlawed until the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 if they denied African Americans their right to vote
under the 15th Amendment." Following the American Civil War and the abolition
of slavery, the Republican-controlled United States Congress passed the First
Reconstruction Act over President Andrew Johnson's veto in 1867. The act
divided the South into five military districts and outlined the process for
establishing new governments based on universal manhood suffrage. With the
passing of the 15th Amendment in 1870, a politically mobilized African American
community teamed up with white allies in Southern states to elect the Republican
Party to power, introducing radical changes throughout the South.

By late 1870, all of the former Confederate states had been readmitted to the
Union, and thanks to the support of Black voters, the Republican Party had taken
control of the majority of them.With the end of Reconstruction in the late 1870s,
the Southern Republican Party vanished, and Southern state governments
effectively nullified both the 14th Amendment (which guaranteed citizenship and
all its privileges to African Americans) and the 15th Amendment, which denied
Black citizens in the South the right to vote. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed
the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law on August 6, 1965, with the goal of
removing all legal barriers at the state and local levels that denied African
Americans their right to vote under the 15th Amendment. The act prohibited the
use of literacy tests, established federal oversight of voter registration in areas
with less than 50% non-white population, and authorized the US attorney general
to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections.

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