Mid-Term Exam
The thirteenth amendment of the Unites States abolished slavery, and was passed by congress on January 31, 1865, and then was ratified on December 6, 1865. After the thirteenth amendment was established, there were many southern states that passed individual peonage laws. Peonage is when an individual is working in an unfree labor system. Sharecropping, which is a system of peonage, limited the thirteenth amendment. Many of the prospects for the sharecropping system were poor blacks. Blacks that were former slaves ended up sharecropping on land owned by their old masters. The sharecropping system kept the blacks rented plots of land, and the result thereby being indebted to white landowners.
The fourteenth amendment first intention was to secure the rights of former slaves and was proposed on June 13, 1866 and ratifies on July 9, 1868. The Due Process of law is both in the fifth and fourteenth amendments, and states that the
Government must respect all of the legal rights that are owed to a person according to the law of the land. The principle in this case will avoid then only respecting some or most of the legal rights. Second class citizenship was one of the reasons why the fourteenth amendment was passed. Individuals with second-class citizenship had limited legal rights, opportunities, and civil rights. Second class citizens were mistreated, and not protected by the law, but instead were harassed because of it. Since many blacks didn’t have voting rights at the time, and were limited too many other legal rights, whites were limited to the fourteenth amendment.
The fifteenth amendment of the United States prohibits each government in the U.S. from denying a citizen the right to vote based on the citizen’s race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The fifteenth amendment was ratified on February 3, 1870. In the 1980s, the age of drinking was now 21 years old, but individuals who were legal for drinking before that were still...