Eric Foner Thesis
DBQ Essay Did you know the 13th amendment gave African Americans their freedom from slavery. Then the 14th amendment gave them their citizenship. Finally, the 15th amendment was passed so that they had the right to vote. These amendments were passed during reconstruction. Even with these amendments, freedmen’s lives didn’t change much socially, economically, and politically throughout reconstruction.
After the Civil War, the U.S.A. had to reconstruct itself which means that it basically had to rebuild itself so it could go back into its normal form. While the U.S.A. was going into reconstruction they made many Amendments. But, the most important Amendment did not accomplish its goals. I am talking about the 15th Amendment that was created with purpose to let African Americans vote. But, thankfully one of the Amendments greatly succeeded and that is the 13th Amendment, which greatly succeeded.
The questions at hand were complex, and involved citizenship and government aid, and had to take the public’s varied opinions into account, as well as the political makeup of Congress. The 13th Amendment freed the slaves, but gave the slaves nothing except their freedom. The 14th amendment defined citizenship, then not only made discriminatory legislation (such as black codes) illegal, but provided consequences for states that did not comply. The Reconstruction Acts, although too broad and expensive to be applied in their entirety, required that the former Confederate States ratify the 13th and 14th amendments, as well as submit redrafted state Constitutions in order to be readmitted to the Union. The 15th Amendment made it possible for people to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude”, making it a radical, although certainly not selfless, act that granted African-Americans political power
The 14th amendment to the US Constitution was ratified on July 9, 1868 in order to protect the civil rights of freed slaves after the civil war. With that being said, The Dred v. Scott case in 1857 held that African Americans were not U.S. citizens, even if they were free. The Fourteenth Amendment addresses many aspects of citizenship and the rights of citizens. The 14th amendment states that" that all persons born or naturalized in the United States including African Americans are citizens of the country.
This amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” which included former slaves recently freed by the Thirteenth Amendment. In addition to granting citizenship, it forbids states from denying anyone "life, liberty or property, without due process of law" or to "deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” no matter who they were. The 14th Amendment expanded the protection of civil rights tremendously to all Americans no matter color or race and is cited in more litigations than any other amendment of the United States today. On June 22, 1866, precisely fourteen days after the senate passed the Fourteenth Amendment, President Andrew Johnson issued a message to Congress announcing that the Fourteenth Amendment had been sent to the states for ratification. Johnson voiced his negative opinion of the amendment by stating that his actions should "be considered as purely ministerial, and in no sense whatever committing the Executive to an approval or a recommendation of the amendment to the State legislatures or to the
Abraham Flexner Historians revere and are reviled by Abraham Flexner. He advocated educational reform to keep pace with European models, but he also clearly believed that any kind of medicine other than allopathic was inferior. Being revered by forward thinking educators made him the ideal front man for the moneyed chemical cartel in America. Historian Joseph Goulden describes the process this way: “Flexner had the ideas, Rockefeller and Carnegie had the money, and their marriage was spectacular. The Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and the General Education Board showered money on tolerably respectable schools and on professors who expressed an interest in research.”
Nevertheless, after the civil war this amendment was to provide blacks citizenship into the United States. To make them feel a part of their country, to provide life and liberty. This was to provide social justice for African Americans. Economically, former slaves no longer had to work
1.what is history I believe that the author Eric foner would respond to the stated questions that history isn 't the past but the present and how we interact with objects as well as each other. " 'History ' writes James Baldwin, an unusually astute observer of twentieth century American life 'does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past, on the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all we do '". What the author means by this is that everything we do and what others have done and will do, shapes history, that the actions we do affect others and so-on. In physics there 's a theory called the butterfly effect that states that the butterfly effect "is the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state.
Initially freed unofficially by Lincoln’s famous Emancipation Proclamation and more formally through the 13th amendment, black men were opened up to an entirely new world. But the government wasn’t finished yet. They passed the 14th amendment which guaranteed to protect the rights of former slaves and granting them the right to vote. For so long had African Americans fought for these freedoms and the federal government granted this well well deserved privilege. Acting on the behalf of all moral people the government was able to turn away from the evil institution of slavery, and by doing so carried out the people’s will.
The fourteenth amendment was about Civil Rights. This amendment was broken up into 5 different section all detailing what a citizen of the United Sates consist of. The fifteenth amendment was about black suffrage. This was another two section part where one of the section gives Congress power to enforce the amendment, and the other section was the right of Citizens of the US vote shall not be denied because of race, color, or previous conditions of servitude. The sixteenth amendment was about Income taxes; Congress had the power to lay and collect taxes on income.
The Fourteenth Amendment (Amendment XIV) The amendments were put into place to protect the rights and civil liberties of all American citizens from the federal government. However, prior to the fourteenth amendment, there was no certainty with the constitution. The constitution did not state in a clear enough way who was protected under it and exactly what rights you had as an American Citizen. The 14th amendment was in response to the just passed thirteenth amendment, which ended slavery in all of the southern states.
Once Johnson was no longer in charge congress put into place the Civil Rights Act, an act that declared everyone who was born in the United states to be granted a citizen no matter their race or previous conditions. This meant all former slaves could become true legal citizens. Similarly, the 14th amendment made it so that each state was to give equal protection of the laws to everyone because it too declared all citizens were equal. This amendment also would not allow for confederate political leaders to hold positions and it would not forgive any debts of the confederacy. Following the civil rights act and the 14th amendment the 15th amendment and then another civil rights act were also put into effect.
Imagine a world in which The Civil War and the events after never happened. Southern states still hold slaves, there are no laws on immigration or who can become a citizen. The Civil War freed the slaves and allowed laws that dealt with citizenship and immigration to be ratified. This was what led to the creation of the three Reconstruction Amendments, which includes the Fourteenth Amendment. The Fourteenth Amendment has rich history, various meanings and applications, and can be used to shape our nation for the better today.
One of reasons the confederacy failed was because the U.S. Congress, with Lincoln’s support, proposed the 13th amendment which would abolish slavery in America. Although the confederate peace delegation was unwilling to accept a future without slavery, the radical and moderate Republicans designed a way to takeover the reconstruction program. The Radical Republicans wanted full citizenship rights for African Americans and wanted to implement harsh reconstruction policies toward the south. The radical republican views made up the majority of the Congress and helped to pass the 14th amendment which guaranteed equality under the law for all citizens, and protected freedmen from presidential vetoes, southern state legislatures, and federal court decisions. In 1869, Congress passed the fifteenth amendment stating that no citizen can be denied the right to vote because of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Post Civil War, African Americans started to gain rights to gain rights, and soon gain rights equal to whites. While there were some people/things standing in their way (KKK, Black Codes), in the end they got what they needed; Equality. Many acts and laws were passed to aid the new rights now held by African Americans, as well as the numerous people willing to help. New Amendments were added to give African Americans rights after the war, all giving them some equal rights to whites. The first of the three added was the Thirteenth Amendment, it gave African Americans freedom from slave owners, and stated that no one could be kept as a slave in the U.S..
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