The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery.

The Fourteenth Amendment established birthright citizenship and equal protection — but explicitly excluded “Indians not taxed” from the citizenship it created.

The Fifteenth Amendment prohibited denial of the right to vote on the basis of race, color, or previous condition of servitude — but Native Americans who were not citizens could not vote regardless.

This pattern reflected something important about how the war’s resolution was understood by its architects.

The primary driver of the constitutional amendments was the situation of formerly enslaved African Americans — the people whose condition had been the central moral issue of the conflict and whose incorporation into the political community was the imperative that Reconstruction was trying to address.