The Reconstruction Amendments Rewrite Freedom
Three amendments abolish slavery, guarantee citizenship, and protect the vote
Quick facts
- 13th Amendment
- 1865, abolished slavery
- 14th Amendment
- 1868, citizenship and equal protection
- 15th Amendment
- 1870, voting rights regardless of race
- Collective name
- The Reconstruction Amendments
What happened
In the five years after the Civil War, the Constitution was amended three times to remake the legal status of Black Americans. The Thirteenth Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, abolished slavery, declaring that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime, shall exist within the United States. The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified July 9, 1868, made all persons born or naturalized in the United States citizens and guaranteed them the equal protection of the laws, overturning the Dred Scott decision that had denied Black people citizenship. The Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, barred denying the vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Together these are known as the Reconstruction Amendments.
Why it matters
The Reconstruction Amendments are the constitutional foundation of civil rights in the United States, the legal basis on which nearly every later expansion of equality has been argued. The Fourteenth Amendment's equal protection and citizenship clauses in particular became the tool used to challenge segregation and win the great civil rights cases of the twentieth century. The promise they wrote into the Constitution, though, would be gutted in practice within a decade.
How we know
The three amendments and their ratification dates are recorded in the National Archives and the constitutional record, and their texts are the operative law of the United States.
Sources
- National Archives. 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: Abolition of Slavery (1865) · Primary source (author-declared)archives.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- National Park Service, African American Heritage. Reconstruction: A State Divided · Primary source (author-declared)nps.gov · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
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Part of a timelineHistory of the United States32 events · A hundred English colonists on a swampy island, a constitution argued out over one Philadelphia summer, a country that doubled its size for four cents an acre and fought a civil war over who counted as free, and the superpower that came out the other sideView all →