AP® United States History · Unit 5 · Topic 5.10
The Reconstruction Amendments
The 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments abolished slavery, made formerly enslaved people citizens with equal protection under the law, and barred states from denying the vote based on race, each tackling a separate legal problem Reconstruction had to solve.
Slavery, citizenship, and voting were three different legal questions, so it took three different amendments. The 13th Amendment (1865) abolished slavery and involuntary servitude everywhere in the United States, closing the door the Emancipation Proclamation had only opened for Confederate territory. The 14th Amendment (1868) answered a question the 13th never touched: who counts as a citizen, and what do they get? It granted citizenship to anyone born or naturalized in the United States, including the formerly enslaved, and required every state to give all persons equal protection of the laws and due process. That clause was new in a specific way: before it, the Bill of Rights restrained only the federal government. The 14th Amendment reached directly into state law and state courts, binding them to the same standard. The 15th Amendment (1870) finished the sequence by declaring that the right to vote could not be denied based on race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
None of this guaranteed the vote in practice. The 15th Amendment banned race as a stated reason to deny a ballot, but it said nothing about poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, or outright violence and intimidation. Southern states used these race-neutral tools through the 1870s and beyond to suppress Black voter turnout for nearly a century, technically obeying the amendment's letter while gutting its purpose.
These three amendments sat mostly dormant as enforceable law for decades, overridden in practice by Jim Crow and by Supreme Court decisions narrowing their reach. But the text never disappeared. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s rebuilt its legal strategy on this exact foundation, using the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause to challenge segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the 15th Amendment's promise to justify the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Key terms
- Equal protection clause
- The 14th Amendment provision requiring states to apply the law equally to all persons within their jurisdiction.
- Due process clause
- The 14th Amendment guarantee that states cannot deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without fair legal procedures.
- Poll tax
- A fee required to vote, used after Reconstruction to disenfranchise poor Black voters without mentioning race.
- Grandfather clause
- A law exempting voters from literacy tests or poll taxes if their grandfather had voted, which excluded most Black citizens.
Watch it explained
- How it worksWalk me through what the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments each add to the Constitution.
- How it worksHow does the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause reach into state law for the first time?
- Common mistakeWhy isn't the 15th Amendment a guarantee that Black men could actually vote?
- Ties togetherHow do these three amendments become the legal foundation of the civil rights movement a century later?
Check yourself
End of topic.