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[[image: drawing of bearded man]]
[[caption]] John Mercer Langston, a Negro abolitionist and a Reconstruction leader, who became a Representative from Virginia.[[/caption]]

The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments

The combined effects of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 brought some legal protection to Southern Negroes against former slave-holders and also inflamed the poor whites. The Civil Rights Act, which conferred rights of citizenship on the freedmen, was further bolstered by the Fourteenth Amendment: no state shall “deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law.”

The Reconstruction Act, having placed ten states of the South under military government, put teeth in federal edicts of Army backing. Soldiers and officials of the Freedman’s Bureau attempted to protect the Negro’s right to the ballot, fair working conditions and an education but with no help from former Confederates or the Southern press. When, in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed Negroes the right to vote - and Negroes in large numbers duly exercised this right - that was the last straw. Animosities developed which have festered to this day.

[[image: sketch of African American man with mustache, wearing suit jacket and bow tie]]
[[caption]] Ebenezer D. Bassett, a Reconstruction leader who had studied at Yale, was appointed United States Minister to Haiti.[[/caption]]

[[image: sketch of African American man with beard and mustache, wearing suit jacket and bow tie]]
[[caption]] Jonathan Jasper Wright served in the South Carolina Senate and as an associate justice of the State Supreme Court. [[/caption]]

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Transcription Notes:
Page is noted as 31 in bottom right corner.