Fifteenth Amendment
The 15th Amendment to the Constitution granted African American men the right to vote by declaring that the "right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

Although ratified on February 3, 1870, the promise of the 15th Amendment would not be fully realized for almost a century.

Through the use of poll taxes, literacy tests and other means, Southern states were able to effectively disenfranchise African Americans.

It would take the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 before the majority of African Americans in the South were registered to vote

Thirteenth Amendment
The language of the amendment was mostly borrowed from the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and various subsequent statutes regulating slavery in newly acquired territories.

While the Thirteenth Amendment clearly condemned traditional forms of unfree labor—chattel slavery itself, debt peonage, and so on—the antebellum experience had also dramatized a variety of other, less obviously economic forms of degradation, dehumanization, and unfreedom.

While slave men had been worked against their will in the fields, paradigmatic slavery for women and children had taken other forms above and beyond field work—sexual exploitation and child abuse.

By banning all form of “slavery and involuntary servitude,” the Thirteenth Amendment cast a wide net not merely over the nation’s economy but also over its social structure and its domestic institutions.

Despite its seemingly traditional language, the Thirteenth Amendment thus marked a radical break with the antebellum federal Constitution.

That prewar document had imposed few limits on what a state could do to its own inhabitants, whereas the Thirteenth pulverized bedrock legal principles and practices in more than one-third of the states and imposed new affirmative federal obligations on every state.

The old Constitution had insulated property-holders from uncompensated takings, but the new one ratified and extended the largest redistribution of property in American history.

Slaves were worth more than any other capital asset in the nation except land.

In 1860, human chattel represented about three times as much wealth as the entire nation’s manufacturing and railroad stock, yet the Thirteenth made no provision for compensation, even of loyal masters in true-blue states.

In light of its plain text, the Thirteenth Amendment has generally been interpreted to bar legal challenges to unpaid or minimally paid prison labor.