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After the Civil War
(1865-1870)

The Fourteenth Amendment

The Fourteenth Amendment
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   high interest, readability grades 5 to 6
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   4.73

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    housing, illegal, kentucky, ratify, citizenship, rejoin, presented, gain, jobs, equal, during, vote, goal, however, fact, longer
     content words:    Civil War, Thirteenth Amendment, Black Codes, Fourteenth Amendment, United States, Reconstruction Amendments, South Carolina, Dred Scott, African Americans, African American

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The Fourteenth Amendment
By Cathy Pearl 		  
1     The South had lost the Civil War. Because of this, people could no longer own slaves. The Thirteenth Amendment made it illegal in the country. The South still thought of other ways to try to fight back.
 
2     They made rules that said where and when blacks could work and where they could live. These new laws made it very hard for blacks to gain many rights. These rules were called Black Codes.
 
3     These rules made people in the North angry. They thought the South was trying to get around the fact that they had lost the war. The people in Congress knew that more new laws would have to be made to protect blacks in the country.
 
4     Congress came up with the Fourteenth Amendment. This would give citizenship to all people born in the United States. It also made it illegal to treat people unfairly because of the color of their skin. It gave everyone equal protection under the law.

Paragraphs 5 to 14:
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