The Fifteenth Amendment
—Chrissie
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The last of the Reconstruction Amendments is the Fifteenth. This was created to fix the deficiencies perceived in the voting rights section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Yes, it established that a state would lose part of its federal representation if it prevented citizen men over the age of 21 from voting, but it did not actively and positively assure a right to vote for African American men.
The election of 1868 exemplified the need for such an amendment, though it had been discussed previously. The Democrats campaigned on a platform of returning white rule to the South and the Republicans campaigned on not allowing that to happen. Republicans also shied away from making the enfranchisement of Blacks part of their platform, for fear it would lose them white votes. However, the very thin margin of Ulysses S. Grant’s win of the presidency, along with the amount and types of voter suppression seen over the course of that election, convinced the party it was worth the potential losses.
There were two options for the format of the amendment: the first had affirmative language that established a federal standard for who could vote, thereby generally outlawing any attempts at disenfranchisement; the second would cite specific criteria which could not be used to prevent someone from voting (such as race), but left the overall criteria for determining who was eligible to vote to the states, as had been established with the original Constitution. It also left massive loopholes for voter suppression that are still seen in the 21st century.
The issue of removing the power to determine voters from the states was one big reason why the affirmative language was not used, the second was a combination of racism and nationalism. Even Radical Republicans expressed concern about allowing immigrants to vote, particularly the Chinese and Irish. It was one thing to allow the formerly enslaved to vote; they, at least, had been born in the United States, but to open it to immigrants created a potential for foreign influence or rule by “impoverished and criminal classes.” They were concerned that these people would cause the American government to become socialist by electing people who promised them money or other benefits. This fear was soon also applied to Black voters and was the beginning of the American misunderstanding of the concept of socialism.
Debate over the wording of the Amendment (particularly how extensive the list of prohibited types of disenfranchisement should be) and its scope (whether it should include a right to hold office in addition to the right to vote) continued through the early part of 1869. In the end, it outlawed only racial restrictions in voting, because that was the most likely route to ratification and addressed directly the group who had prompted the need. It was approved in the House and Senate in March 1869 with the following wording: “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.” It is followed, like the other Reconstruction amendments, with the statement “Congress shall have the power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”
There was no question among those involved that it was weak and left far too much room for other methods of disenfranchisement. Because of this, it relied on the enforcement of Section Two of the Fourteenth Amendment to have any real effect, a reliance which proved unfulfilled. The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified as of the end of March 1870, sweeping away all laws that had limited the vote to white men. As with the Fourteenth Amendment, women’s suffrage advocates were disappointed; while it did not specify men this time, it did nothing to enfranchise women. This encouraged the suffragists to focus on state-level laws, where they found success from which to build toward the Federal amendment ratified in 1920.
For all of its inadequacies, the Fifteenth Amendment was still a radical and important step toward equality. Alongside the other Reconstruction Amendments, it serves to reassert the ideals of equality and democracy on which the United States claims to be founded and attempts to demonstrate for the world.