This work by New American History is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at newamericanhistory.org.
3.1 The Reconstruction Amendments
Bunk
Bunk is a shared home for the web's most interesting thinking about American history. Take a moment to read about How Bunk Works. You can find the entire article that each excerpt on Bunk is drawn from by looking for the “View on…” button below that excerpt.
In this linked excerpt, award-winning scholar Eric Foner discusses some of the key themes of his 2019 book The Second Founding, which provides a deeply contextualized analysis of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. After reading the excerpt and reviewing the Essential Knowledge elements, write down, discuss, or simply think about answers to the following questions:
- Why were African Americans so adamant in the months and years following the Civil War that the Thirteenth Amendment, while extremely important, was not enough — that it was just as much a starting point as it was an endpoint?
- In what ways were the three amendments designed to be mutually supportive and enabling?
- Foner asserts that Reconstruction was not just a period of time but that it was also -and continues to be - a “historical process.” What does he mean by this and what are the present-day implications of this assertion?
The Buried Promise of the Reconstruction Amendments. The historical context of the amendments passed in the wake of the Civil War, Eric Foner argues, are widely misunderstood. Eric Foner, Isaac Chotiner via The New Yorker on September 9, 2019