The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments

Congress and the states added three amendments to the Constitution during and after the Civil War that together are sometimes called the Reconstruction Amendments. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified in December 1865, formally abolished slavery and involuntary servitude throughout the entire United States -- finally closing the gap the Emancipation Proclamation had deliberately left open -- though it kept one significant exception, allowing forced labor "as a punishment for crime," a clause that would later be used to justify harsh forced-labor practices against convicted Black Americans in the decades that followed.

The Fourteenth Amendment (1868) directly overturned the Dred Scott decision by declaring that all persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens, and guaranteed every citizen "equal protection of the laws" and due process -- language courts still use constantly today. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) declared that the right to vote could not be denied based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude, though it notably did not extend voting rights to women of any race, and southern states soon found workarounds -- poll taxes, literacy tests, and other barriers -- that undermined the amendment's promise for Black voters for nearly a century afterward. Read together, the three amendments legally transformed formerly enslaved people into citizens with rights on paper, even though, as next week's lesson shows, enforcing those rights in practice proved to be a much longer and harder fight.