Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

Context

The United States transformed from thirteen separate colonies into thirteen states united and independent from Great Britain. Even though they vested powers in a central government, first under the Articles of Confederation from 1781 to 1789 and then under the Constitution that they created in 1787, the states retained numerous rights. Delegates to the Constitutional Convention, rejecting calls to impose a national property qualification on voters, left voting qualifications to the states, simply specifying in Article I, Section 2, of the Constitution that “the Electors [voters] in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.” Over time, most states eliminated voting qualifications based on church membership and religious belief—a common requirement in the early colonies—or property ownership; because property was more freely available in America than elsewhere, this qualification had rarely disenfranchised large numbers of voters. American history is commonly portrayed as progressively democratic, but in retrospect the movement was not always as forward as some think. Although its supporters claimed that the presidential election of 1828 ushered in a period of Jacksonian democracy, the emphasis continued to be on universal white male suffrage rather than on universal suffrage. Indeed, because the U.S. Constitution apportioned representation in the U.S. House of Representatives not simply according to white population but also according to “three-fifths” of such “other persons [a euphemism for slaves],” southern whites who were otherwise losing population compared with northerners and westerners continued to be overrepresented there.

Over time, southerners who once defended slavery only as a “necessary evil” came to defend it as a positive good. The South justified slavery on theories of human inequality that contradicted the nation's earlier articulation in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal”; leading southerners argued that slavery both lifted what they regarded as the inferior race and provided leisure time for the superior race to cultivate itself. As southern attitudes hardened in justifying slavery, northern attitudes hardened against it. Not all northerners joined abolitionists in favoring immediate emancipation, but an increasing number concluded that the institution was morally wrong and would have to be eliminated.

As slave states continued to lose power vis-à-vis the North, southerners increasingly feared that northern states would eventually strike at their “peculiar institution” of slavery. After the Republican Abraham Lincoln was narrowly elected president in 1860, eleven southern states chose to secede. Lincoln felt duty-bound to preserve the Union, and in 1861 the nation's bloodiest conflict, the Civil War, began. By the end of the war in 1865 Lincoln, who had long regarded slavery as a moral evil, had transformed its objective from that of simply preserving the Union to that of freeing the slaves. His Emancipation Proclamation, which initially applied as a war measure only behind enemy lines, was eventually secured by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished chattel slavery throughout the nation.

Southern states attempted to limit the freedom of the newly freed slaves through legislation restricting movement and limiting other rights, Congress responded again by proposing the Fourteenth Amendment, which the states ratified in 1868. It overturned the notorious Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and declared that all persons including Blacks “born or naturalized” within the United States were citizens entitled to the privileges and immunities of U.S. citizens and to due process and equal protection. Ironically, by abolishing slavery, the Thirteenth Amendment increased southern representation in the House of Representatives by invalidating the three-fifths clause; Republicans thought they had to act to insure that this increased southern representation did not actually work against African American rights. Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, short of specifically prohibiting states from denying the vote to Blacks, provided great anguish to advocates of woman's suffrage and allowed representation to be reduced in states that denied or abridged the right to vote to “any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, except for rebellion, or other crime.” Congress never reduced a state's representation based on this provision.

During the 1866 congressional elections President Andrew Johnson, who had become president in 1865 after John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln, opposed ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, which Congress had just proposed. Republicans picked up substantial support in this election, and Congress subsequently approved a bill over Johnson's veto on January 8, 1867, granting Black suffrage in the District of Columbia. It followed up with a similar expansion of the franchise in the federal territories and required Nebraska to extend to Blacks the right to vote as a condition of its admission into the Union. In the fifth section of the First Reconstruction Act of March 2, 1867, Congress further required southern states to enfranchise Blacks as a condition of readmission into the Union and representation within Congress. Although the House of Representatives impeached President Johnson in 1868, the Senate fell a single vote shy of the two-thirds needed to convict him and remove him from office.

In the meantime, sentiment against African American voting outside the South continued to be strong, with Democrats picking up some seats that they had lost in 1866 in special elections. The Republican presidential platform that Ulysses S. Grant ran on in 1868 reflected the party's reluctance to extend the policies it had adopted in the South outside that region. Not surprisingly, Democrats praised President Johnson for opposing congressional Reconstruction and continued to advance the view that, despite the outcome of the Civil War, federalism left determination of the franchise to the states.

The Republican Ulysses S. Grant defeated the Democrat Horatio Seymour by only 300,000 votes in the 1868 election; he would have won the Electoral College but not the popular vote without the support of southern Blacks whom Republicans had enfranchised. With most African Americans continuing to be grateful to Republicans for both their freedom and their civil and political rights, expanding the franchise to northern Blacks presented a way to bolster Republican strength in the North.