CIVIL WAR, SLAVERY AND THE 13^th, 14^th AND 15^TH AMENDMENTS (D)

SECESSION

Abraham Lincoln (R) won the Presidential Election of 1860. States in the southern U.S. believed that the states’ rights would be greatly diminished. A chain reaction of secession began to divide the Union. By 1861, eleven southern states left the Union and created a government known as the Confederate States of America. The eleven states were South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Virginia, Arkansas, North Carolina, and Tennessee. The Confederate States chose a former U.S. senator from Mississippi, Jefferson Davis, as their president.

EMANICIPATION PROCLAMATION

President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring forever free the slaves in those Confederate states still in rebellion. But it could not and did not free any slaves in the Confederate States. It was a proclamation without emancipation.

Southern states in the newly created Confederacy wanted self-determination on the issue of slavery. Union, or Northern states, opposed slavery and secession by the southern states. Four border slave states, Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware remained in the Union. The Civil War, also known as the War Between the States, ended in 1865.

Northern or Union victory over the Confederacy ended the Civil War in 1865. President Lincoln was assassinated in the same year. Andrew Johnson became President, succeeding Lincoln.

13^th, 14^th and 15^th AMENDMENTS

President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation foreshadowed the legal ending of slavery in all states. This was legally achieved by the individual states’ ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution.

After the Civil War, former Confederate states in the South created laws to regulate the affairs of former slaves who became free. By states’ ratification, the Republicans from northern states and carpetbaggers (northern Republicans living in the South) legally gave African-Americans the privileges of American citizenship as part of the Fourteenth Amendment. However, it did not include voting rights for former slaves. It does contain the principles of the Civil Rights Bill that President Andrew Johnson vetoed in 1866.

Radical Republicans, still worried that resistant Southern states, once readmitted to the Union, would amend their state constitutions to deny former slaves the right to vote. To guarantee their right to vote, Congress passed and individual states ratified the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. It prohibited the denial of the vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.