3.1 The Reconstruction Amendments

Reconstruction (1865–1877) was the period after the Civil War when the federal government brought the former Confederate states back into the Union. It was also an attempt to secure the rights of African Americans, both those freed by the war and those already free: citizenship, equal rights and a voice in government. The three Reconstruction Amendments wrote those goals into the Constitution.

The Fourteenth Amendment's first section says that all persons 'born or naturalized in the United States' are citizens, and that no state may 'deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws'. That reversed the Dred Scott ruling (2.7), which had said Black people could never be citizens, and it undercut the Black Codes that Southern states had just passed (3.3). Its other required sections barred many former Confederate officials from office and refused to pay Confederate war debts or compensate enslavers for emancipation.

The Fifteenth Amendment protected Black men's right to vote across the nation. It didn't include women of any race, which split the women's suffrage movement.

Black political participation was one of Reconstruction's most striking features. Black men in the former Confederate states first voted in 1867, under laws Congress passed to rebuild Southern governments, and the Fifteenth Amendment then wrote that right into the Constitution. Many of the new voters and officeholders had been enslaved only a few years before. Black men voted in large numbers and helped write new state constitutions that created the South's first public school systems. Nearly 2,000 African Americans served in public office, from sheriffs and school board members to state legislators and members of Congress.

The required engraving from the early 1880s shows five Black members of Congress from the Reconstruction era:

• Hiram R. Revels (Mississippi): in 1870, the first African American to serve in either house of Congress.
• Blanche K. Bruce (Mississippi): born enslaved; the first African American elected to serve a full Senate term.
• Joseph H. Rainey (South Carolina): born enslaved; the first African American in the House of Representatives.
• John R. Lynch (Mississippi): born enslaved; Speaker of the Mississippi House before serving in Congress.
• James T. Rapier (Alabama): a congressman who founded Alabama's first Black-owned newspaper.

Many of these gains were rolled back after Reconstruction ended (3.4, 3.5). African Americans would have to fight again in the 1950s and 1960s to reclaim rights they had already won on paper in the 1860s and 1870s, and the Civil Rights movement relied heavily on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to do it.