Cover photo: U.S Capitol Building (Credit – Matt Meduri)
The American Civil War was undoubtedly the most tumultuous time in our nation’s history, second only to the Revolution. The decades-long debated issue of slavery reached a fever pitch when the South seceded to form the Confederate States of America, resulting in the bloodiest war in U.S. history. The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments were produced as a result of the Confederacy’s defeat and paved the way for further civil rights thereafter.
The Thirteenth Amendment
Section 1 states, “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.”
Section 2 gives Congress the power to enforce Section 1 through “appropriate legislation.”
President Abraham Lincoln’s (R-IL) Emancipation Proclamation became effective on January 1, 1863, declaring that the enslaved in Confederate-controlled areas were free. State action was used to abolish slavery at this point, with Texas becoming the last Confederate state to declare enforcement of the proclamation on June 19, 1865 – the basis for the federal holiday Juneteenth. Some exceptions in Delaware, Kentucky, and New Jersey persisted until December 1865.
Lincoln’s proclamation, however, would have been relatively toothless without constitutional basis. On April 8, 1864, the U.S. Senate passed an amendment to abolish slavery. After just one unsuccessful vote, the House followed on January 31, 1865. The Union – northern free states – swiftly ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, along with some border states until Lincoln’s assassination. Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson (D-TN) shepherded the full ratification among former Confederate states, which resulted in its full adoption by the end of 1865.
Only two Democratic Senators – Benjamin Harding and James Nesmith of Oregon – voted to approve the amendment in a 38-6 vote. The failed House was along party lines. As slavery became politically toxic, more Democratic lawmakers and machines endorsed an abolition amendment, including New York’s powerful political machine Tammany Hall. Some Democrats, however, argued that such an amendment would be unconstitutional on the grounds of preserving states’ rights and the concept of federalism.
A second House vote was called, the outcome being uncertain on both sides of the aisle. All Republicans (84), Independent Republicans (2), and Unconditional Unionists (16) supported the measure, along with fourteen lame-duck Democrats. The result was a final passage of 119-56, narrowly eclipsing the required two-thirds vote of Congress.
The scene on the House floor in the immediate wake of the vote is claimed to have been extremely celebratory, with some members of the floor openly weeping, and black spectators cheering from the galleries.
The amendment was proposed to the states for ratification on February 1, 1865; twenty-seven of the thirty-six states at the time were required for ratification. Eighteen had done so by the end of the month, including from Virginia and Louisiana, whose postbellum state governments were controlled at least in-part by Reconstruction Republicans. The final states to ratify were Alabama, North Carolina, and Georgia in December 1865.
Although the ratification of a Constitutional amendment does not require a presidential signature, the Thirteenth Amendment became the first to don a president’s signature. The Twenty-Sixth Amendment – signed by Richard Nixon (R-CA) in 1971 – is the only other ratified amendment to be signed by a president.
The Thirteenth Amendment not only freed slaves, but nullified multiple pieces of legislation, including the Fugitive Slave Act, which stated that slaves who escaped into Union territory were not granted freedom. It also reorganized treaties with Native American reservations where slavery took place.
The largest reaction, however, was more negative. The Solid South eventually retook power after Reconstruction ended, ushering forms of discrimination, poll taxes, segregation, as well as crimes and other forms of intimidation.
The Fourteenth Amendment
Section 1 states that “all persons born or naturalized” in the U.S. are citizens of the U.S.
“No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
Section 1 includes the Citizenship Clause, the Privileges or Immunities Clause, the Due Process Clause, and the Equal Protection Clause, while also broadly defining citizenship. The amendment also superseded Dred Scott V. Sanford (1857), a landmark Supreme Court case that found that Americans descended from African slaves could not be U.S. citizens.
Section 1 is often hotly contested, as some of the clauses therein have been found to subject to states’ jurisdictions, namely the application of the Equal Protection Clause to non-citizens.
Section 2 stipulates suffrage extended to white males, the only part of the Constitution to have ever explicitly discriminated on the basis of sex. Suffragette leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony condemned the amendment, ultimately mounting their liberation platform that culminated with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, allowing women the right to vote. The Fourteenth Amendment is said to have separated the separate civil rights movements for black citizens and women for decades.
Section 2 and the Thirteenth Amendment nullified the Three-Fifths Compromise, a section of law that discounted the number of representation for slave states by counting each slave as “three-fifths” of one vote. The move was done to compromise with the South out of fear of secession and war – which later occurred – but to dilute the South’s overall political power. That fear was resurrected with the new amendments. The original solution was to reduce a state’s House representation that used “race or color” as a basis to deny suffrage. This was opposed by the Radical Republicans, who poised that states could use criteria that, at face value, would be race-neutral, but still affect aspects of society like education and property ownership. The amendment was then changed to penalize any state in which suffrage was denied to any male over the age of twenty-one for any reason other than participation in a crime.
Section 3 states that no person shall serve in elected capacity after having engaged in “insurrection or rebellion” against or “given aid or comfort” to enemies of the U.S. The handicap can be reversed by Congress in a two-thirds vote of each chamber.
Section 3 was used by the State of Colorado to bar Donald Trump (R-FL) from seeking office, saying that the January 6, 2021, Capitol Riot fits the constitutional definition of “insurrection.” However, the U.S. Supreme Court decided unanimously that one state does not have the authority to determine eligibility, a power conferred exclusively to the federal government. The courts can only enforce Section 3 in this way with explicit permission from Congress.
Section 4 states that the U.S., nor any state, shall “assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion” against the U.S, as well as claims for loss or emancipation of slaves.
Unlike the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth has been subject to fierce legal debate over the years, but has also been credited with establishing precedent for landmark civil rights cases over the next century-and-a-half, such as Brown V. Board of Education (1954) – racial segregation, particularly in schools – Loving V. Virginia (1967) – interracial marriage – Roe V. Wade (1973) – abortion, overturned in 2022 – Bush V. Gore (2000) – the 2000 presidential election – and Obergefell V. Hodges (2015) – same-sex marriage.
The sections were largely debated in Congress before being adopted in June 1866, with many black Republicans expressing disappointment that the amendment did not go so far as to guarantee political rights for blacks, an issue that would be addressed by the Fifteenth Amendment.
Most states ratified the amendment within the several years after its passage in Congress, with some states not formally ratifying it until much later, such as California and Maryland in 1959 and Kentucky in 1976.
Fifteenth 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,” reads Section 1.
When President Ulysses Grant (R-OH), became president in 1868, the Republican Party understood that protection of the franchise of black Americans became paramount to their political success. After other measures that included sweeping reforms were rejected, Republicans’ compromise amendment banned franchise restrictions on the basis of race, color, or previous servitude. The amendment was opposed by Democrats, but fully ratified on March 30, 1870. In the House, 144 Republicans supported it with no Democrats in favor. In the Senate, thirty-three Republicans backed it with no Democrats joining them. The amendment allowed for states to create their own equal voter qualifications for all races.
The amendment’s true scope would be debated for decades after its passage, as Democrats retook control of Southern state governments, in some cases by fraud, to implement discriminatory practices, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and forms of suppression and intimidation. Grandfather clauses were extended to poor whites, allowing them to preserve their suffrage, but the post-Reconstruction policies affected many poor whites.
Debate came to a head after the 1876 election, in which Democrats allowed Rutherford B. Hayes (R-OH) the White House on the condition that the Union Republicans end their effective occupation of the South. Hayes did not enforce federal civil rights statutes in the South during his presidency.
