The Reconstruction amendments are the Thirteenth Amendment, the Fourteenth Amendment and the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. They were adopted between 1865 and 1870, the five years immediately following the Civil War. The Amendments were intended to restructure the United States from a country that was (in Abraham Lincoln’s words) “half slave and half free” to one in which the constitutionally guaranteed “blessings of liberty” would be extended to the entire male populace, including the former slaves and their descendants.