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1865–1877
A Short-Lived Political Revolution
the overwhelmingly Republican U.S. Congress proposed the Fifteenth Amendment in 343
1869, and it was ratified the next year. It declared, “The right of citizens of the United
States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on
account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments — the Reconstruction
Amendments — constituted what might be called, according to contemporary histo-
rian Eric Foner, a “second founding” of the United States: a revitalization of the late
eighteenth-century creation of the nation, the “first founding.” Reconstruction as well
as these constitutional amendments signified a powerful though tragically flawed his-
torical moment dedicated to both advancing the ongoing African American freedom
struggle and helping the United States realize its better self. The deeply inspiring egali-
tarian and democratic idealism of this “second founding” has influenced world history
as well as U.S. history, from that time to today. The Republican, journalist, and politi-
cian Carl Schurz, who fought for the Union in the Civil War, labeled Reconstruction a
“constitutional revolution” that gave new and enduring meaning to the rights of Amer-
31
ican citizens, particularly African Americans, freed and free. Indeed, that extraordi-
nary yet insufficiently recognized “constitutional revolution,” this “second founding,”
has been the seedbed of the modern African American freedom struggle.
With the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchising African American men,
many — including the prominent white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison — believed
that the federal government’s constitutional incorporation of blacks into the Union was
complete and its formal responsibility to the former slaves fulfilled. Enforcement of
the amendment was a separate issue, however, and to help clarify what equality meant,
Senator Charles Sumner introduced one more civil rights bill. When passed after his
death and partly in his memory, the Civil Rights Act of 1875 required equal treatment
in public accommodations and on public conveyances regardless of race: in effect a
“public rights” guarantee. (See Appendix: Civil Rights Act of 1875 for the text of this
federal law.)
By this time, however, most white Americans thought the freedpeople should
be on their own and feared that further government efforts on their behalf would
only undermine their self-reliance and make them wards of the state. Blacks have
always believed that they are primarily responsible for their own future. Yet during
Reconstruction especially, they knew all too well that the persistence of antiblack prej-
udice and discrimination, as well as the enduring legacy of slavery, required federal
action. Only the federal government could ensure their freedom and their rights in the
face of widespread and hostile white opposition.

The Defeat of Reconstruction
While northern whites thought that the Fifteenth Amendment completed
Reconstruction, southern whites found black political involvement intolerable; they
were shocked and outraged that their world had been turned upside down. For them,

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