Akhil Reed Amar, teaching Yale's America's Written Constitution course, argues that the Reconstruction Amendments did not fulfill the founders' design but emerged from a South that gambled and lost. He opens with the arithmetic Lincoln faced, under 40 percent of the popular vote and no majority in either house, and asks why the South did not simply outwait him rather than fire on Fort Sumter. Amar traces Lincoln's shift from restoring the Union to emancipation, driven by fears of British recognition of the Confederacy and the value of roughly 180,000 Black soldiers. He walks sentence by sentence through why emancipation turned the three-fifths clause into a crisis, making the Fourteenth Amendment's birthright citizenship and privileges-or-immunities clauses necessary, and explains how Section 2's penalties produced the Fifteenth Amendment. The lecture closes on the 1865 cartoon 'Shall I Trust These Men?' as emblem of the era's unresolved anxieties.