15th Amendment: A Brief History of Constitutional Amendment

In place since 1870, the US Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment (also written as 15th Amendment) prohibits state legislatures from barring male citizens from voting “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

The amendment is one of the three Reconstruction Amendments, along with the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments, that the United States Congress passed during the Reconstruction era (1865–1877) after the country’s civil war. The US Civil War (1861–1865) centered around the issues of slavery and the secession of the southern states (or the Confederacy) from the northern states (or the Union). The fifteenth constitutional amendment allowed all Black men to vote and hold elected offices in the former Confederacy.

The Fifteenth Amendment was one of three Reconstruction Amendments the US Congress passed just after the United States Civil War. Along with the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments, the Fifteenth Amendment aimed to secure civil liberties for US citizens.

• In 1865, the Civil War concluded. With the 1865 ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment—the first of the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution—enslaved Africans officially became free, and the United States began trying to heal from a bitter and bloody civil war.
• The South began passing Black Codes. The South enjoyed political power due to the Three-Fifths Compromise of 1787. The compromise was a legal agreement that allowed states to count three-fifths of their enslaved population toward their total state population, which determined their number of seats in the US House of Representatives. To try to retain political and economic power, many jurisdictions in former Confederate states like Mississippi and South Carolina utilized Black Codes—laws that controlled the movement of both free and enslaved Black people in the country.
• In 1868, Congress passed the Fourteenth Amendment. To protect all US citizens under the law and to dissuade voter suppression, the US Congress put into effect the Fourteenth Amendment (also written as 14th Amendment)—the second of the Reconstruction Amendments.
• In 1869, Ulysses S. Grant becomes president amid political dissidence. Grant succeeded Andrew Jackson as president. The Civil War had ended in 1865, during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency; however, the country was still in political upheaval in 1869. Grant focused on bridging heated divisions between the northern and southern states following the Civil War while simultaneously encouraging progressive legislation.
• Lawmakers proposed the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1869, the sentiment of Democratic southerners at the time was that radical Republicans in Washington, DC, New York, and elsewhere in the north, would deprive them of their autonomy and state governance—as a way of punishing the South for seceding from the Union. Therefore, it took much debating before members of the United States Senate and US House of Representatives with conflicting viewpoints could agree upon an amendment that would decrease voter suppression. The wording the lawmakers approved banned voter limitations on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
• In 1869 and 1879, states ratified the amendment. The Fifteenth Amendment—the third Reconstruction Amendment—was ratified (accepted) by twenty-eight states between March 1, 1869, and February 3, 1870. The amendment was divisive in several ways. Many states considered the amendment a severe overreach of the federal government, one that infringed upon the sovereignty of states. Progressives felt the amendment did not go far enough in furthering the rights of Black men. Activists for women’s rights argued that the amendment should have also encompassed women. (It was not until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920 that women finally gained the right to vote).
  
• The amendment revealed weaknesses. Even with the occupation of pro-Union troops in the South during the Reconstruction era, the Fifteenth Amendment did little to discourage voter suppression and intimidation. After Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president in 1877, he rolled back many Reconstruction provisions and federal oversights. Southern states regained powers of self-governance and established Jim Crow laws (laws that upheld racial segregation) to continue to oppress former enslaved Africans. Literacy tests, poll taxes, and grandfather clauses reduced Black voter registration. The major weakness of the Fifteenth Amendment was its vague wording, which states could manipulate for their own purposes or to sway the result of a trial or Supreme Court decision.
• The federal government passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The federal government passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which provides more specific protections against voter suppression than the Fifteenth Amendment did. In addition to prohibiting voter discrimination against racial minorities, the act outlawed literacy tests and required jurisdictions to provide bilingual ballots in areas with significant language minority populations.

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