Fifteenth Amendment ratified

On February 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment secured ratification when the necessary number of states approved the measure, and President Ulysses S. Grant celebrated the result in Washington, D.C. Congress had proposed the amendment on February 26, 1869, and Republican legislators in southern Reconstruction governments supplied several of the decisive ratifications. The amendment declared that neither the United States nor any state could deny the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

The Fifteenth Amendment addressed the central Reconstruction problem of whether Black citizenship after the Fourteenth Amendment would include political power at the ballot box. Republican leaders believed that Black voting was necessary to protect the Reconstruction Acts, sustain loyal state governments in the South, and prevent former Confederates from regaining unchecked control. Democratic opponents in the North and South fought the amendment precisely because they understood that Black suffrage threatened the old racial order that slavery had maintained before 1865.

Congress followed ratification with the Enforcement Act of 1870 and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, using federal power to protect Black voters against intimidation and terror. The Fifteenth Amendment also made African American voting a permanent constitutional issue, setting the stage for later battles over disfranchisement, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and modern federal protection of the franchise.