The thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendments

¶ … Constitution were the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments ratified in 1865-70, which abolished slavery and granted equal citizenship and voting rights to blacks for the first time in U.S. history. All of these passed Congress as compromise measures between the Radical and moderate Republican factions in Congress, and were resisted intensely by Democrats in the North and South as violations of the rights of states and a tyrannical exercise of power by the central government. Then as now, of course, these were often code words for the fact that many whites simply did not favor black equality and voting rights. In the South, the Ku Klux Klan used violence and terror to prevent these amendments from being fully implemented, and after 1876-77, they succeeded in making them dead letters -- rights that existed only on paper but never enforced in reality. So it remained until the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.

Essentially, several factors contributed to the change in American attitudes towards slavery. Westward expansion and the idea of new slave or free states continued to polarize the nation, as well as the religious views denouncing slavery in some denominations and upholding it in others during the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, much of the rhetoric against slavery dealt with power and economics: the southern states believed in their right to uphold a 200-year-old institution. The northern states, where the large portion of the manufacturing was located, used the ethical and moral stance that slavery was evil to control U.S. fiscal policy and to attempt to wean the South away from Great Britain. The idea of slavery, though, was just part of the factors that led to southern secession -- and a new southern nation, the Confederate States of America, was unacceptable to most northern politicians. However, the famous Emancipation Proclamation not only contributed to the resolution of the war, but forever changed the way humanity viewed the instituion of slavery. However, the conflicts during the war, the religious and political situation, and international pressure resulted in the 13th Amendment to the Constituition. This abolished slavery (1864) and changed forever the social and cultural face of the United States (Slavery and the Making of America). Because of the new philosophical mandates arising from not only Europe but from the newly created United States, rationalist thinkers used the Enlightenment to reassess man's place in the universe and in congruency with his fellow man. Of course this led to outright questioning of the slave trade, and the movement of abolitionism became a unique cause in the Americas, and even in Eastern Europe and Russia. This movement gained momentum in the United States after the British outlawed slavery in the 1830s, and seemed to culminate with the ultimate abolitionist -- a duly elected President of the United States.