Fifteenth Amendment

The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, adopted in 1869 and ratified in 1870, stated that the right to vote could not be denied to any citizen “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The purpose of the amendment was to extend the franchise to the African American men who had been freed from slavery as a result of the Civil War. At the time, women were not regarded as citizens and were therefore not covered by the measure. The amendment marked a continuation of the program of the Republican Party to provide political rights for black men after the defeat of the Confederacy. The Thirteenth Amendment had ended slavery, and the Fourteenth Amendment had provided civil rights to all citizens born or naturalized in the United States. These amendments, however, had not ensured that black men could vote throughout the United States. To accomplish that end, the Republicans in Congress, in a lame-duck Congress that met in early 1869, decided that ensuring the right to vote would both carry on the moral impetus of Reconstruction (1863–77) and act to offset any political comeback of the antiblack Democratic Party.

A constitutional amendment would have the additional benefit, as the Republicans saw it, of providing a clear legal basis for enforcement of voting rights in the South. In its language, the amendment did not ensure that black citizens could hold public positions nor did it rule out such barriers to voting as literacy tests or property requirements. Nonetheless, it represented a clear forward step for African Americans and offered the promise of greater participation in elections and the operations of government.

The ratification process broke down along the existing party alignments of the Reconstruction era. Republicans favored the measure and Democrats resisted it in the state legislatures that addressed ratification. It required vigorous campaigning, especially in such key states as Ohio, to achieve approval from the requisite number of states by March 1870.

Despite its place in the US Constitution, the Fifteenth Amendment did not prevent Southerners from excluding African Americans from the political process at the end of the nineteenth century. With a political stalemate between Republicans and Democrats in Washington, enforcement of the amendment proved difficult. Federal courts did not encourage a broad interpretation of the amendment. In 1889-1890, the Republicans endeavored to strengthen federal legislation to ensure fair elections in the South, but Democrats defeated their efforts. When the Democrats regained control of the White House and both branches of Congress from 1893 to 1895, they repealed the existing legislation that gave the government authority over elections. As a result, discriminatory practices continued to African Americans from voting in many parts of the South.

In the middle of the twentieth century with the rise of the civil rights movement, efforts resumed to revive the Fifteenth Amendment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 enabled black citizens to enter the political process in large numbers and, in so doing, to redeem the unfulfilled promise that the framers of the Fifteenth Amendment had originally envisioned.

Bibliography

Egerton, Douglas R. Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America's Most Progressive Era. Bloomsbury Press, 2014.

Kendi, Ibram X. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Nation Books, 2016.

Waldman, Michael. The Fight to Vote. Simon & Shuster, 2016.