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The Fifteenth Amendment. Celebrated May 19th 1870.
The Fifteenth Amendment. Celebrated May 19th 1870.
ENTRY

Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

SUMMARY

The Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified on February 3, 1870, and granted the right to vote to African American men. It was the third of three amendments adopted during Reconstruction that profoundly altered American society, government, and politics. The Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished and prohibited slavery in the wake of the American Civil War (1861–1865), was ratified in December 1865, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which defined citizenship and guaranteed the rights of citizens, was ratified in July 1868. Specifically, the Fifteenth Amendment prevented the federal and state governments from using race or former servitude as an excuse not to allow its citizens to vote. At the time of the amendment’s ratification in 1870, African Americans had already legally voted in Virginia, but during the next generation, with the use of a poll tax and other methods, that right would be chipped away. In 1901–1902, delegates to the state constitutional convention openly debated the best way to disfranchise Black people while not technically violating the Fifteenth Amendment. They largely succeeded and Black voting rights were not fully restored until the 1960s.

Contributor: Brent Tarter

    Amendment

    The Fifteenth Amendment contains two short sections. The first prohibits the government of the United States or of any state to deny any male citizen the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” The second section grants Congress enforcement power.

    Ratification

    Electioneering at the South.

    Electioneering at the South.

    The defeat of the Confederacy and the abolition of slavery in 1865 left many unanswered questions about the newly freed population. Among those questions was whether they should be allowed to vote, then regarded as one of the essential rights of citizenship for American men. Very few states at the time allowed African American men to vote, but President Abraham Lincoln and some other national leaders came to believe that men who had fought in the United States Army and Navy during the war had earned that right of citizenship. As part of the overall plan that Republican Party leaders in Congress developed after the war to guarantee that freedom from slavery could become genuine freedom, not merely an absence of slavery, Congress submitted the proposed constitutional amendment to the states on February 26, 1869. It granted African American men the right to vote by prohibiting the states from denying the vote to any citizen because of race, skin color, or having once been held in slavery.

    Because Virginia had been a Confederate state and had not yet been fully reinstated to the Union, no Virginians served in Congress when it submitted the amendment to the states. Following the end of the Civil War, the Senate and House of Representatives placed the states of the former Confederacy (except Tennessee but including Virginia, part of which had remained one of the United States during the war) under military rule and refused to seat any men elected to either house of Congress from those states.

    Constitutional Convention of 1867–1868

    African American men had voted in Virginia for the first time sixteen months before Congress passed the amendment and twenty-eight months before it became part of the Constitution. In 1867, Congress required that all the states of the former Confederacy hold conventions and write new constitutions. On October 22, 1867, the United States Army conducted an election in Virginia to authorize the convention and to elect members. The army allowed African American men to vote in that election. Most of them were formerly enslaved, but some had been born free or had been freed before emancipation. Twenty-four African Americans won election to the convention, which drafted a new state constitution. Among other things, it created the first statewide system of free public schools in Virginia. The suffrage article of the new constitution guaranteed the right to vote to “Every male citizen of the United States, twenty-one years old,” except men who had fought in the Confederate army.

    President Ulysses S. Grant

    President Ulysses S. Grant

    The disfranchisement of former Confederates was the most controversial part of the new constitution and it delayed the scheduled 1868 ratification referendum. Eventually, a group of men known as the Committee of Nine worked out a compromise with President Ulysses S. Grant that authorized separate voting on the section that disfranchised former Confederates. On July 6, 1869, in the second election in which African Americans voted in Virginia, the voters approved the new constitution and rejected the disfranchisement section. On that same day, voters elected statewide officers and members of a new assembly.

    On the fourth day of its next session, the General Assembly ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, making Virginia the eighteenth state to do so. Both houses of the General Assembly ratified the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments on October 8, 1869. The vote on the Fifteenth Amendment was 132 to 0 in the House of Delegates and 40 to 2 in the Senate of Virginia. All twenty-one of the twenty-three African American members of the House of Delegates who were present voted for it; one of the six African American senators, Isaiah L. Lyons, voted against it. The Fifteenth Amendment became part of the U.S. Constitution on February 3, 1870, when the legislature of Iowa was the twenty-eighth state to ratify it.

    Virginia’s ratification of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and enfranchisement of African Americans in the new state constitution ended congressional Reconstruction in the state. Congress passed a bill that the president signed on January 26, 1870, permitting Virginia’s senators and elected representatives to take their seats in Congress.

    Application

    Many white Virginians disapproved of Black men voting. In 1876 a majority of Virginia’s voters, who were white men, ratified a constitutional amendment requiring pre-payment of a poll tax for men who wished to vote. The tax reduced the number of African Americans who were able to vote during the remainder of the decade. At the end of the 1870s, a biracial coalition known as the Readjuster Party gained control of both houses of the General Assembly and two years later elected a governor. The Readjusters then repealed the poll tax. After Democrats regained control of the assembly and the governorship in the mid-1880s, they adopted new laws governing the conduct of elections that made it increasingly difficult for Black men to vote in Virginia.

    Constitutional Convention of 1900–1901

    In 1901–1902 another state constitutional convention provided a legal framework that enabled the General Assembly to disfranchise about 90 percent of otherwise eligible African American voters through complex voter registration laws and a new poll tax. That constitution and those laws did not technically violate the Fifteenth Amendment, which merely prohibited states from denying citizens the right to vote because of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The severe restrictions on voter registration that went into place at the beginning of the twentieth century disfranchised Black men for reasons other than race, even though that was the intent of the white men who adopted them. Those restrictions also disfranchised a large number of white Virginia men.

    Registering and voting remained difficult for African Americans in Virginia until ratification of the Twenty-fourth Amendment in 1964, passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections in 1966 removed most of the barriers.

    MAP
    TIMELINE
    March 2, 1867
    The U.S. Congress requires that the legislature of each state in the former Confederacy ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before its senators and elected representatives can be seated in Congress.
    October 22, 1867
    The U.S. Army conducts an election in Virginia to authorize a state constitutional convention and to elect delegates. The army allows African American men to vote in the election.
    February 25, 1869
    The U.S. House of Representatives approves the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
    February 26, 1869
    The U.S. Senate approves the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
    July 6, 1869
    Voters ratify a new state constitution, often called the Underwood Constitution, rejecting separate provisions that would have disfranchised men who had held civil or military office under the Confederacy. The new constitution supplants the former one, proclaimed on April 7, 1864.
    October 8, 1869
    Both houses of the General Assembly of Virginia ratify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution.
    January 26, 1870
    The U.S. Congress passes an act permitting Virginia's senators and elected representatives to take their seats in Congress. This ends Congressional Reconstruction in Virginia.
    February 3, 1870
    Iowa becomes the twenty-eighth state to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, completing the ratification process.
    1876
    Democrats devoted to white supremacy amend the state constitution to make payment of the poll tax a prerequisite for voting, hoping to disfranchise some Black voters.
    1902
    Provisions of the newly passed Virginia Constitution effectively deny suffrage to most of Virginia's African American men and to about half of the white men who had voted before it was passed.
    January 23, 1964
    South Dakota becomes the thirty-eighth state to ratify the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, completing the ratification process.
    May 1964
    Evelyn Thomas Butts's case charging that the poll tax is unconstitutional is dismissed for failure to prosecute the case with due diligence.
    November 12, 1964
    The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia decides Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, upholding the constitutionality of the poll tax.
    August 6, 1965
    President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act into law. It prohibits racial discrimination in voting.
    March 24, 1966
    In the case of Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, the U.S. Supreme Court rules that the poll tax is unconstitutional.
    February 25, 1977
    Both houses of the General Assembly of Virginia ratify the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, outlawing poll taxes.
    FURTHER READING
    • Lowe, Richard G. Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia, 1856–70. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991.
    • Foner, Eric. Forever Free: The Story of Emancipation and Reconstruction. New York: Random House, 2013.
    • Tarter, Brent. The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013.
    CITE THIS ENTRY
    APA Citation:
    Tarter, Brent. Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. (2020, December 07). In Encyclopedia Virginia. https://encyclopediavirginia.org/entries/fifteenth-amendment-to-the-u-s-constitution.
    MLA Citation:
    Tarter, Brent. "Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 27 Sep. 2023
    Last updated: 2023, July 11
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