Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

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Two-thirds majorities in both houses of Congress are needed to propose amendments, and approval by three-fourths of the states is needed to ratify them. When Congress proposed the Fifteenth Amendment, it followed the procedures used for all previous amendments, sending the amendment to state legislatures rather than to state conventions (as it would later do in the case of the Twenty-first Amendment, repealing national Prohibition on alcohol) for ratification. Some opponents of the amendment in Congress had sought to send the amendment to special state conventions.

The first version of the Fifteenth Amendment, which Republican Representative George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts authored in the House of Representatives, ended up being close to the final version. Ohio representatives Samuel Shellabarger and John A. Bingham, who was largely responsible for the wording of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment, proposed more extensive amendments in the House. The initial version that the Senate considered, which was also broader than the one that Congress actually adopted, was largely the work of Henry Wilson, a Massachusetts Republican who would later serve as vice president under Ulysses S. Grant.

Ultimately, a congressional conference committee of six men proposed the existing Fifteenth Amendment. The committee focused not only on ironing out the differences between the House and Senate versions of the amendment but also on proposing language that was likely to gain the support of the necessary three-fourths of state legislatures.