The Reconstruction Amendments

For anything related to American legal and constitutional history, keep an eye on the documents published on the Web in Yale University’s “Avalon Project”:

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/
avalon/avalon.htm

For more documents on Thaddeus Stevens, go to this excellent annotated select edition:

The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, Beverly Wilson Palmer and Holly Byers Ochoa, eds., 2 vols. (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997).

Students may wish to pursue the story of the adoption of the Amendments further with the extracts from the Congressional Globe and the Congressional Record in this helpful compendium:

The Reconstruction Amendments’ Debates: the Legislative History and Contemporary Debates in Congress on the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments (Richmond: Commission on Constitutional Government, 1963).

Two helpful books on the adoption and ratification of the Amendments are:

Maltz, Earl M. Civil Rights, the Constitution, and Congress, 1863-1869 (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1990).

Richards, David A. Conscience and the Constitution: History, Theory, and Law of the Reconstruction Amendments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

For images of manuscript copies of the Amendments, transcripts of their texts, and brief background information, see the National Archives “Our Documents” site:

http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=40 [Thirteenth Amendment]

http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=43 [Fourteenth Amendment]

http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=44 [Fifteenth Amendment]