Thirteenth, Fourteenth & Fifteenth Amendments — Print · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Three amendments, each closing the last one's gap

The Thirteenth ended the institution. It was necessary because the Emancipation Proclamation was a war measure that had never reached the loyal slave states and might not survive the peace. Its exception for punishment after conviction of a crime was barely debated and became, within five years, the legal foundation of convict leasing, in which states rented prisoners to private companies under conditions that killed a great many of them.

The Fourteenth answered the Black Codes. Section 1 is the one that matters most: everyone born here is a citizen of the United States and of the state they live in, and no state may abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens, deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process, or deny any person the equal protection of the laws. It says person rather than citizen in the second half, which is why it reaches non-citizens too.

It also contained a punishment nobody ever used. Section 2 provides that a state denying the vote to adult male citizens shall have its representation in Congress cut in proportion. Southern states denied the vote wholesale for seventy years and no Congress ever reduced a single seat.

The Fifteenth answered the fact that the Fourteenth had not actually required Black suffrage. Republicans had reasons both principled and practical: Black votes were the basis of their southern support. The amendment passed in a form narrow enough to pass, which is to say narrow enough to be evaded.

Part 2 · How a state kept the vote without mentioning race

Mississippi went first, with a new constitution in 1890, and the others copied it over the following fifteen years. The devices were a poll tax payable months before the election and in cash, a literacy test in which an official decided whether an applicant could read and interpret a clause of the state constitution, and a property or residency requirement.

None of them names race, and all of them were administered by a white registrar with complete discretion. A Black schoolteacher could be failed on an interpretation question; a white man who could not read could be passed. Where even that was thought insufficient, a grandfather clause exempted anyone whose grandfather had been entitled to vote before 1867, which no Black applicant's had been.

The Supreme Court let it stand. In Williams v. Mississippi in 1898 it held that the state's provisions did not on their face discriminate by race, and that proving discriminatory administration was the challenger's burden. The grandfather clause was finally struck down in 1915, by which time the registration rolls had already been cleared and the other devices remained.

This is the single most transferable idea in the unit. A rule can be written in perfectly neutral words, applied by officials with discretion, and produce an almost perfectly racial result -- and then be defended on the ground that the words are neutral. Learning to ask what a rule does rather than only what it says is most of what historical and civic literacy consists of.

Part 3 · Reading the collapse

The figures in the diagram are the state of Louisiana's own. In 1896, 130,344 Black men were registered. In 1900, two years after the new constitution, 5,320. In 1904, 1,342. The Black share of the electorate fell from about 44 per cent to under one per cent while the Black share of the adult male population barely moved.

A fall like that cannot be explained by people losing interest. The population was there, the registration requirement had changed, and the figures move in the year the requirement changed. Historians look for exactly this shape: a sharp break timed to a known cause, with the underlying population flat.

Compare that with the change the same figures would show for white registration, which fell too -- the poll tax caught poor white men as well -- but by a fraction as much, and many of those were restored by the grandfather clause. The two curves together are the argument: a rule that was neutral on its face fell on one group roughly a hundred times harder.

What followed lasted until the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which worked by attacking the administration rather than the wording, requiring states with this history to get federal approval before changing voting rules at all. That is nearly a century between the Fifteenth Amendment and the law that made it operate, which is the measure of how much a well-drafted evasion can be worth.

Part 4 · What the amendments did do

It would be a mistake to finish this unit concluding that the amendments were worthless. They abolished slavery outright and permanently, which is not a small thing, and they wrote birthright citizenship into the Constitution, which remains the law and remains contested.

The Fourteenth Amendment in particular became the main instrument of American constitutional law in the twentieth century, long after Reconstruction ended. Equal protection is the clause behind Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; due process is the clause through which most of the Bill of Rights was applied against the states at all.

So the accurate summary is that the amendments were written to be enforced and were then not enforced for roughly ninety years, and that when enforcement finally came it came using their text, unchanged. The words were adequate; the political will was not, and the gap between the two is where the period's history actually lives.

That also means the century after 1870 is not a story of a law failing but of a country declining to use one. It is a distinction worth holding on to, because the two produce completely different conclusions about what to do next.

One last caution about the sources. The registration figures in this lesson come from the states that were doing the excluding, which is unusual and useful: an institution reporting a number that damns it is about as reliable as evidence gets, because it had every reason to report otherwise. When you meet a statistic in a textbook, the question to ask first is not whether it is large but who counted it and what they stood to gain by the count coming out differently.