After the war, formerly enslaved people briefly voted and held office — then those rights were stripped away for generations. Reconstruction is the story of a promise of equality raised, then deliberately undone.
A second founding — and its retreat
After the Civil War, Reconstruction (1865–1877) sought to reunite the nation and define the rights of four million newly freed people. Three amendments transformed the Constitution: the 13th abolished slavery, the 14th guaranteed equal protection and citizenship, and the 15th protected Black men's right to vote.
After federal troops withdrew in 1877, Southern states imposed Jim Crow laws and disenfranchisement. The 14th and 15th Amendments' promises went largely unenforced for nearly a century, until the Civil Rights Movement.
The 14th Amendment's equal-protection clause, gutted in practice after 1877, later became the constitutional basis for Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
Click the events from earliest to latest.
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Order the key milestones from emancipation through the Civil Rights era.
- Note that the 15th Amendment protected Black men's vote in 1870.
- Recall the disenfranchisement that followed 1877.
- Explain the gap between the amendment's text and lived reality.
What you should see: The right existed on paper, but poll taxes, literacy tests, and violence suppressed it — a gap between constitutional promise and enforcement that persisted until the 1960s.