The framers of the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, intended that it would enfranchise most black American males. Actually, African‐Americans had voted in several states in the North for almost a century. After the American Revolution, some free blacks met the property and other restrictive suffrage qualifications. As these requirements were gradually abolished, blacks did not share the widening franchise because whites distrusted blacks and Democratic politicians wanted to prevent blacks from voting for their opponents. So in several northern states blacks lost the right to vote as more whites gained it. For example, in 1846 New York under its new constitution retained property qualifications for blacks while eliminating them for whites.
By the end of the Civil War in 1865 slavery was virtually abolished. The right of blacks to vote became a controversial question. In March 1867, under the First Military Reconstruction Act, the Thirty‐Ninth Congress enfranchised black males in ten southern states as a requirement for readmission of those states. But elsewhere in the former slave states, Democratic state governments blocked Negro enfranchisement. The only exception was Tennessee, which Republicans controlled. In most of the North, especially the lower North where most blacks lived, blacks could not vote and whites rejected any change. Blacks, however, voted in New England (except Connecticut) and in four midwestern states.
The stimulus for the Fifteenth Amendment came from the election returns of 1868. Although Republican presidential candidate Ulysses S. Grant won 73 percent of the electoral vote, he won only 52 percent of the popular vote. Without the southern black voter, Grant would have lost the popular, though not the electoral, vote. In state after state Grant and the Republicans won by precarious margins. Democrats also gained seats in Congress. And in the South during 1868, white Democrats resorted to violence and intimidation in order to prevent black Republicans from voting. Such disfranchisement of blacks in the South, defeats in state referenda on suffrage throughout the North, and close calls in many elections convinced Republicans that something had to be done by the Fortieth Congress before Democrats arrived in force in the new Congress and in the statehouses.
Republican congressmen in early 1869 believed it was necessary to enfranchise adult black males as a counterweight against a resurgent Democratic party. Just as political need impelled Congress to mandate black voting for the South by federal law two years earlier, so now Congress found it expedient to inaugurate African‐American voting in the northern and border states by means of a constitutional amendment. Republicans in Congress also wished to advance the cause of equal rights and impartial justice. The idealistic motive reinforced the pragmatic one. In addition, Republicans had an important secondary objective. They sought an unrepealable amendment to the Constitution to safeguard black voting in the South by banning racial discrimination in the exercise of the franchise. Though Republican congressmen agreed on these goals, they were divided over details in framing the Fifteenth Amendment and anxious about its chances for ratification. They abandoned a guarantee of officeholding by blacks as well as abolition of state literacy, property, and nativity tests for suffrage because they deemed such far‐reaching reform politically impossible. Thus the amendment reflected more the limited pragmatic instincts of moderate Republicans and practical radicals than the idealistic views of some radical Republicans.
The struggle for ratification during 1869 and early 1870 followed party lines: Republicans supported the amendment and Democrats opposed it. The fight for ratification was fiercest in the lower North, where party division was closest and where the press and politicians regarded the potential African‐American voter as the balance of power. Despite Republican control of most state legislatures, the struggle for ratification was intense and the outcome remained uncertain until almost the very end. But national party pressure, congressional and presidential intervention, hard work, and good timing paid off. The amendment was formally ratified on 30 March 1870. Since the Military Reconstruction Act had made the franchise a reality in the South, and because some northern states permitted black voting, the practical effect of the amendment was to open the ballot in seventeen northern and border states.
Republicans regarded the Fifteenth Amendment as the crowning achievement of Reconstruction. Northern blacks retained the franchise permanently. But blacks in the border states during the 1870s and later gradually lost the vote by force and fraud. As retreat from Reconstruction gained momentum throughout the nation during the 1870s and the three decades that followed, most southern blacks also lost the vote. Meanwhile, northern whites became apathetic about the fate of the freedmen in the South. The federal government, necessarily the ultimate guarantor of the Fifteenth Amendment, failed to enforce the right to vote at the ballot box and in the courts. With repression in the South, indifference in the North, and inaction in Washington, the Fifteenth Amendment went unenforced.
The Fifteenth Amendment became much less significant than the Fourteenth Amendment in its constitutional meaning and practical importance. Often federal courts interpreted the Fifteenth Amendment narrowly. The United States Supreme Court put state and local elections off limits to federal election enforcement in United States v. Reese (1876); literacy tests and poll taxes, designed to disenfranchise blacks, were upheld in Williams v. Mississippi (1898). The amendment reached its nadir in James v. Bowman (1903) when the Court emasculated the amendment by denying federal authority under it to prosecute a nonofficial who by bribery prevented some Kentucky blacks from voting in a congressional election. Even later, when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in Nixon v. Herndon (1927) found authority to invalidate a white primary of the Democratic party, he based his decision not on the Fifteenth Amendment but on the Fourteenth.
The Court, however, poured new meaning into the virtually empty vessel of the Fifteenth Amendment in Smith v. Allwright (1944) by reaching the same result as in Nixon, but on the basis of the Fifteenth, not the Fourteenth, Amendment. Although the Fourteenth Amendment continued to be of supreme importance in laying the constitutional foundation of the Second Reconstruction, the Supreme Court no longer treated the Fifteenth Amendment as a historical curiosity and constitutional irrelevancy. When Congress passed the Voting Rights Act in 1965, it revolutionized the politics of the South by spurring enfranchisement of black southerners. Thus, the most durable achievement of the Second Reconstruction owed its constitutional underpinning to the Fifteenth Amendment of the First Reconstruction. After almost a century, the Fifteenth Amendment was once again bearing fruit.
See also Constitutional Amendments; Race and Racism; Reconstruction; Vote, Right to.
Bibliography
- Ward, E. Y. Elliott, The Rise of Guardian Democracy: The Supreme Court's Role in Voting Rights Disputes, 1845–1969 (1974).
- William Gillette, The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (1969).
- William Gillette, Retreat from Reconstruction, 1869–1879 (1979)
— William Gillette
I too mean to be out of politics. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment gives me the boon of equality before the law, terminates my enlistment, and discharges me cured.
