The 15th Amendment
'The First Vote' cartoon from Harper's Weekly, showing the key black Republican supporters - artisans, urbanites, and Union soldiers
February 3rd 1870: Fifteenth Amendment ratified
On this day in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified. This measure came as the third and last of the so-called ‘Reconstruction amendments’, passed after the end of the Civil War by the Radical Republicans in Congress. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery in the country, expanding on President Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 Emancipation Proclamation which freed slaves in the Confederacy. The second Reconstruction Amendment, the Fourteenth, provided citizenship and equal protection for freedmen. The Fifteenth granted African-American men the right to vote. It was passed by Congress in February 1869, and received ratification from the requisite number of states the following year, being formally adopted in March 1870. For many abolitionists, this was the most important measure of the Reconstruction effort. In the words of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, "slavery is not abolished until the black man has the ballot" . Black enfranchisement meant that for the first time in American history, African-Americans were elected to political office. These included first black Senator, Hiram Rhodes Revels, Representative Joseph Rainey, and Governor P.B.S. Pinchback of Louisiana (who until 1990 was the only black state governor in U.S. history). In states such as South Carolina, slaves made up a majority of the population, meaning that once enfranchised they dominated state politics. Despite being enshrined in constitutional law, African-Americans were prevented from voting through discriminatory measures like poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses, as well as by the violent intimidation of the recently formed Ku Klux Klan. The 1965 Voting Rights Act, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson, finally provided for the full registration of black voters in the U.S. This measure came in the larger context of the Civil Rights Movement, which also targetted post-Reconstruction injustices such as Jim Crow segregation.
"The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude"
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