Between 1865 and 1870, in the wake of the Civil War, America took a powerful stride toward the ideal of a more perfect union. The passage of the Reconstruction Amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution—transformed the nation’s legal and moral history. Having successfully repelled the ethical repugnancy of enslavement on the battlefield, these refinements to the “law of the land” sought to inexorably embed into the law the lofty, yet heretofore unrealized goal that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.
More than legal additions, these amendments (U.S. Constitution: Amendments XIII, XIV, and XV) were moral declarations—rebukes to centuries of racial injustice; perhaps underappreciated at the time of their passage was the moral courage that would be required to achieve their enforcement against powerful tides of racism and repression.
Reconstruction and Lincoln’s Evolution
The Civil War, fought from 1861 to 1865, resulted in the death of over 600,000 Americans and the destruction of the Southern economy that depended upon enslavement. President Abraham Lincoln initially framed the war as a means of preserving the Union, and, while opposed to enslavement on moral grounds, looked to its containment as the last best hope for preserving the Union.
The first Emancipation Proclamation issued in 1862, following a Union victory at Antietam, threatened the emancipation of enslaved people in Confederate states unless the South surrendered within a hundred days. While easy to proclaim a position of virtue, the fact is that Emancipation was as much a military strategy as a human rights undertaking. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 did not free all enslaved people but only those in areas where the federal government had no control, the southern states that had seceded from the Union.
Even so, it helped achieve the military objective as by the war’s end some 200,000 Black men served in the Union Army and Navy, securing victory and paving the way for the abolition of enslavement by the enactment of the Thirteenth Amendment. The Reconstruction period following the Civil War (1865–1877) was marked by an ambitious effort to rebuild the South and integrate formerly enslaved people into the political and social fabric of the nation. The Reconstruction Amendments formed the cornerstone of that effort (Foner 1988).
The Thirteenth Amendment (1865): Abolishing Enslavement
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
—the Thirteenth Amendment, ratified on December 6, 1865
It was the first explicit constitutional prohibition of enslavement, fundamentally altering the Constitution and repudiating the infamous Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857), which held that Black people could not be citizens and that Congress had no authority to ban enslavement from a federal territory. Despite the Union victory, the abolition of enslavement was far from a fait accompli.
Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment would require enormous amounts of President Lincoln’s political capital and no small measure of moral courage from the voices for freedom.
Knowing that a lame-duck Congress would be more amenable to ratification, he personally lobbied legislators, making moral and political arguments for equality. His assassination in April 1865 cut short his vision for a compassionate Reconstruction, but his courage and commitment to racial equality helped enshrine the Thirteenth Amendment in law.
Thaddeus Stevens, a Radical Republican congressman from Pennsylvania, was a fierce advocate of racial equality. Stevens used his powerful position in Congress to help draft and push for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment. Despite facing death threats and social ostracism, Stevens did not flinch. In a famous speech before the House, he declared that “the foundation of free government . . . must be laid on the equality of all men.”
The Fourteenth Amendment (1868):
Citizenship and Equal Protection
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, spoke to the pressing need to define American citizenship and protect the rights of the newly freed population. Its key clauses include:
- Citizenship Clause: All persons born or naturalized in the United States are citizens.
- Privileges and Immunities Clause: No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges and immunities of citizens of the United States.
- Due Process Clause: No state may deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.
- Equal Protection Clause: No state shall deny to any person the equal protection of the laws.
These clauses conferred citizenship on formerly enslaved people and laid the groundwork for civil rights protections for all Americans. The Fourteenth Amendment has become the most litigated part of the Constitution and the basis for landmark decisions on racial justice, abortion, same-sex marriage, and more. Put in the context of national citizenship, The Fourteenth Amendment codified the principle that the fundamental rights established in the Bill of Rights extended to the States and clarified that neither the State nor Federal governments could act to deprive their citizens of basic constitutional liberties.
While much of the litigation springing from the Fourteenth Amendment has centered on the concepts of due process and equal protection, even now, the basic principle of birthright citizenship is under scrutiny, crystallizing the historical fact that progress on the civil rights front is never linear and bulkheads once established must constantly be defended and shored up.
Moral Courage in Action. The enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment required much more than action from the federal and state legislative bodies. While the South could grudgingly accept the abolition of enslavement, reordering the social and political culture was another thing entirely. Progress on this front required tremendous moral courage on the part of the judges and ordinary citizens.
Myra Bradwell was born in 1831. In 1855, her husband, James, was admitted to the Chicago Bar and went on to establish a successful law practice in Illinois. Well educated in her own right, Myra apprenticed in her husband’s office, taught herself the law, and founded the publication Chicago Legal News. She was instrumental in drafting the Illinois Married Women’s Property Act of 1861 and strongly supported women’s suffrage rights. In 1869, on the recommendation of a federal judge from the Seventh Circuit, she applied to the Illinois Supreme Court to be admitted to the Illinois Bar. Her application was denied on the basis of her sex. She appealed to the United States Supreme Court, arguing that the refusal to admit her to the Illinois Bar violated her constitutional rights under the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Court rejected her appeal, holding that: “[T]he natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life . . . [T]he paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator.” Bradwell v. Illinois, 83 U.S. 130 (1873). While Myra lost the battle, she helped set the stage for future generations of women to win the war for the unfulfilled promise of gender equality under the Fourteenth Amendment.
One of the most striking twentieth-century examples of judicial courage came from Judge J. Waties Waring of South Carolina. A federal judge appointed by President Roosevelt, Waring initially held segregationist views but underwent a remarkable transformation.
In 1946, Isaac Woodard, a Black soldier, was on his way home to South Carolina after his honorable discharge from the United States Army, following service in World War II. After a dispute with the bus driver, Woodard was taken off the bus by a local police chief, Lynwood Shull, and beaten so mercilessly that he lost his sight in both eyes. When local authorities refused to act, President Harry S. Truman ordered a federal investigation that resulted in federal charges being brought against Shull in Judge Waring’s courtroom.
An all-white jury acquitted Chief Shull of the charges. Judge Waring, incensed by the injustice, experienced an epiphany on the subject of racial inequality and discrimination. He ordered that the custom of segregated seating by race would no longer be tolerated in the Charleston federal courthouse. He then issued rulings that challenged the racial status quo of the Jim Crow South, invoking the Fourteenth Amendment as a legal basis for equality.
In Briggs v. Elliott, 98F. Supp. 529 (EDSC 1951), a case that would later be folded into Brown v. Board of Education, Waring issued a powerful dissent against the rationale of the Supreme Court’s holding in Plessy v. Ferguson, 136 U.S. 537 (1896) that the Fourteenth Amendment permitted segregation of the races under the “separate but equal” doctrine. In his dissent, Waring declared that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional: “Segregation is per se inequality.” His opinion was the first by a federal judge to reject the “separate but equal” doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson.
This stance for racial equality was extremely unpopular in Waring’s hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. As a consequence, Waring faced relentless hostility. He was ostracized from Charleston society, received death threats, and ultimately had to leave the state for his safety. Yet he stood firm in his belief that the Constitution required equal justice for all Americans.
Today, Waring is recognized as a judicial pioneer (Gergel 2019), along with Justice John Marshall Harlan, the lone dissenter in the Plessy case, whose interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment helped lay the legal foundation for the Civil Rights Movement, finally acknowledged by the United States Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 (Kluger 2004).
The Fifteenth Amendment (1870): Voting Rights
The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged . . . on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
—the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870
The design of this amendment was to enfranchise Black men and ensure their full participation in democracy. In the years immediately following its ratification, thousands of Black men registered to vote and were elected to public office across the South—a remarkable, albeit short lived, achievement in American history.
Moral Courage in Action. Enforcement of the Fifteenth Amendment may have been the most dangerous undertaking of all the Reconstruction Amendments. White supremacist violence, especially from groups like the Ku Klux Klan, sought to undermine Black suffrage through terror and intimidation (Tushnet 1994). While the Constitution may have established these rights, the racist mobs set out to make sure they were never exercised.
John R. Lynch, born into enslavement, became one of the first Black members of Congress from Mississippi. In his memoir, The Facts of Reconstruction, Lynch recounted threats against his life and the lives of other Black leaders. Violence and intimidation to suppress the Black vote was widespread and highly effective (Lynch 1913). It was helped along by poll taxes, literacy tests, Grandfather clauses, white primaries, gerrymandering, and voter registration restrictions, all designed to make sure the constitutional promise of voting rights was never realized.
Decades later, the courage of individuals like Fannie Lou Hamer—a sharecropper from Mississippi who became a national voice for voting rights—would reignite the fight. In 1964, she gave a searing speech before the Democratic National Convention, describing the brutality she suffered for attempting to register to vote. Her bravery helped pave the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a modern echo of the Fifteenth Amendment nearly one-hundred years in the making.
The Betrayal of Reconstruction
Despite, or perhaps because of, their transformative potential, the Reconstruction Amendments were betrayed in the decades that followed. With the end of Reconstruction in 1877, Southern states enacted Jim Crow laws that systematically disenfranchised Black voters, segregated public spaces, and institutionalized racial inequality.
This long period of American racial apartheid was embraced and emboldened by the Supreme Court in cases like Plessy v. Ferguson, upholding these discriminatory, segregationist regimes and effectively nullifying much of the Reconstruction legacy. The rise and fall of Jim Crow is the story of strong men and women of color, who in the face of unending terror, achieved the triumph of equality. Black success and the use of political power is what enraged the white supremacists (Simkins 1944).
President Andrew Johnson was not supportive of Black emancipation. The election of Grant provided hope, but federal intervention was not enough. The culture of Jim Crow in the segregated South effectively snuffed out the hope engendered by the Reconstruction Amendments. The quest to realize freedom inspired “Pap” Singleton, the self-styled “Moses of the Colored People,” to lead a group of over twenty thousand formerly enslaved men, women, and children to Kansas to escape the racism of the former Confederacy. These pilgrims became known as the “Exodusters.” This exodus was also motivated by the passage of the Homestead Act of 1862, which provided 160 acres of federal land in the West to anyone who agreed to farm it. But while many Black people left the South, many more remained to fight injustice and press the cause for freedom.
Ida B. Wells, born into enslavement in 1862, was an iconic figure of moral courage (Painter 1976). Her investigative journalism exposed the lynchings used to terrorize Black people. As a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and a Black female activist, she suffered death threats and public disapproval. In 2020, she was posthumously honored with a Pulitzer Prize for “her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African-Americans during the era of lynching” (Pulitzer 2020).
It took almost a century—through the Civil Rights Movement—to begin reclaiming the promises made in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments.
Continued Relevance Today
The Reconstruction Amendments are not relics; they are living parts of our constitutional DNA, continually reinterpreted and reasserted in new contexts.
- Mass Incarceration and the Thirteenth Amendment. The “punishment clause” in the Thirteenth Amendment has been criticized for enabling modern systems of forced prison labor. Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow argues that mass incarceration is a continuation of racial subjugation under a new guise (Alexander 2010). Activists have called for reforms that would close this loophole and realign the criminal justice system with the amendment’s original spirit.
- Equal Protection and LGBTQIA+ Rights. In Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015), the Supreme Court ruled that bans on same-sex marriage violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote, “The fundamental right to marry is guaranteed . . . to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause.”
- Voting Rights in the Twenty-first Century. The Fifteenth Amendment faces new tests today. The Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013) struck down a key part of the Voting Rights Act, leading to a wave of voter suppression laws. States have enacted voter ID laws, reduced polling places, and purged voter rolls—disproportionately affecting minority communities. The battle for voting rights is ongoing, as seen in recent federal efforts to pass the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
The holding in Shelby County that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act requiring certain former southern states to obtain preclearance of legislation that might infringe the rights of certain voters is unconstitutional and violates the states’ rights to regulate elections amply demonstrates the fact that hard-fought gains in voting rights equality cannot be taken for granted. While the moral arc of the universe may bend toward justice, its path is a tortured one.
Conclusion
The Reconstruction Amendments represent a constitutional revolution—an effort to create a more just and inclusive republic after the sin of enslavement. Their passage and enforcement demanded not only legal strategy but immense moral courage from individuals across generations: from Thaddeus Stevens to Myra Bradwell and Fannie Lou Hamer, from John R. Lynch to Judge Waties Waring.
Today, the promises of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments are not yet fully realized. But their presence in our Constitution serves as a moral and legal beacon—a call to conscience and action. They remind us that the work of building a more perfect union is ongoing, and that justice requires both bold law and brave people willing to defend it.
References
Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The New Press, 2010.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. Harper & Row, 1988.
Gergel, Richard. Unexampled Courage, The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring, Sara Chricton Books, 2019
Hamer, Fannie Lou. “Speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention.”
Kluger, Richard. Simple Justice: The History of Brown v. Board of Education and Black America’s Struggle for Equality. Alfred A. Knopf, 1976.
Lynch, John R. The Facts of Reconstruction. The Neale Publishing Company, 1913.
Painter, Nell, Exodus: Black Migration to Kansas After Reconstruction, Knopf, 1976
Simkins, Francis B. Pitchfork Ben Tillman: South Carolinian. Louisiana State University Press, 1944.
Supreme Court Decisions: Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).
Tushnet, Mark. Making Civil Rights Law: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court, 1936–1961. Oxford University Press, 1994.
U.S. Constitution: Amendments XIII, XIV, and XV.
First published in Fieldnotes on Fortitude: Resilience in Resistance, Our Human Family’s latest anthology.
Member discussion