Reconstruction Dbq Essay

After the Civil War, the entire United States, especially the southern states that had supported the Confederacy, were in poor condition. The country needed to rebuild itself and therefore entered a period of Reconstruction. One of the primary aspects of the Reconstruction Era was extending rights to the millions of slaves emancipated by the thirteenth amendment that were in desperate need of help. To accomplish these intentions, Congress proposed the fourteenth and fifteenth constitutional amendments aimed at giving former slaves more rights and a fair chance at being successful. These amendments were then ratified by the states, officially putting them into effect. Although the Reconstruction Amendments did accomplish some of their intended

The amendment, passed by Congress on February 26, 1869 and ratified on February 3, 1870, was designed to give freedmen the same voting rights as whites and made it unlawful to deprive a citizen of their right to vote based on race. For example, the poll tax required people to pay an annual fee in order to vote (Document K). Freedmen owned nothing upon their emancipation, causing nearly all of them to be unable to afford the tax. Of the ones that could afford it, most of them would be unwilling to pay the tax since they needed the money to pay for the basic necessities that they already had a difficult time paying for. Additionally, in order to vote, citizens were required to pass a literacy test that supposedly proved whether or not said citizen was able to read and write (Document M). These tests were often made more difficult for African Americans than whites by containing more difficult questions or questions that had multiple answers. Many blacks who were literate still failed the test. Although some may say that poll taxes and literacy tests were not discriminatory as they were imposed upon all races, I maintain that they were still intended to and very successful at limiting the voting rights of former slaves. Most whites could afford the poll tax unlike African Americans and were often given

The amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, attempted to guarantee African Americans full citizenship rights and equal protection of the laws. For instance, Thomas Nast’s political cartoon titled “Worse than Slavery” depicts the Ku Klux Klan joining forces with another white supremacist group called “White League” to terrorize blacks and keep them in conditions not much better than slavery (Document N). Performing their work at night when it would be harder to get caught, terrorist organizations attacked African Americans and sometimes even deprived them of their right to live by murdering them. Due to the fear of the people, many KKK members were not convicted and were allowed to perform their mischief freely, thus violating the equal protection of the laws promised by the amendment by favoring them over blacks in the law aspect. In addition, one of the Jim Crow laws passed in Tennessee in 1873 decreed that “White and colored persons shall not be taught in the same school, but in separate schools” (Document H). African Americans were forced to be segregated in schools that were often of inferior quality than those provided for whites, which denied their right to equal protection of the laws. To worsen the situation, the Jim Crow laws did not just affect schools, as they