Reconstruction: Rights Won and Rights Retreated

After the Civil War, Congress tried to give legal meaning to freedom. The Civil Rights Act of 1866 declared formerly enslaved people citizens, and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) wrote birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection into the Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment (1870) prohibited denying the vote on account of race. During Reconstruction, Black men voted in large numbers, and hundreds served in state legislatures and some in Congress, including Hiram Revels, the first Black US senator, in 1870.

But white supremacist violence, Supreme Court rulings that narrowed the amendments, and Northern loss of interest undermined these gains. After the Compromise of 1877, federal troops withdrew from the South, and states used poll taxes, literacy tests and intimidation to strip most Black citizens of the vote. The story shows that rights written into law can be hollowed out without enforcement, and that the amendments later became tools for the civil rights movement.