Essay 15-C: The Fifteenth Amendment, Black Male Suffrage, and Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

It might seem surprising that the word “equal” appears only once, and in a very narrow way, in the original Constitution. The word appears in Article V addressing the amendment procedure, specifying that no amendment could be ratified that revoked the “equal” suffrage of the states in the Senate. Not only does the Constitution omit invoking the natural right of equality, which is central to the Declaration of Independence, but it also says nothing about the right to vote, which can be derived from the Declaration’s axiom that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”  

The issue of voting rights was debated at the Constitutional Convention, where some delegates argued that there should be a property qualification attached to the right to vote. The thought was that laborers and the poor did not have a stake in society and thus could not be trusted to vote responsibly. Benjamin Franklin vehemently opposed property qualifications and instead argued for universal male suffrage. Franklin argued that the “common people” had proved their mettle in the Revolutionary War and should be rewarded with the right to vote. Ultimately, of course, the delegates did not impose any property qualifications for voting or office holding, leaving it up to the states to regulate the right to vote. Many states did impose property qualifications and limitations on the right to vote.

The Constitution’s silence on the fundamental right of equality and the right to vote may seem like glaring omissions. Indeed, this is why many historians have argued that the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Reconstruction Amendments constituted a “second founding,” or at the very least, a delayed completion of the founding. Lincoln had reminded Americans in the Lincoln-Douglas debates of the 1850s, as well as in speeches during his presidency, that the Declaration of Independence was “our ancient faith” and the “sheet anchor” of our republic. He described the Declaration, borrowing from the Book of Proverbs, as “the apple of gold” around which the Constitution—its “silver frame”—adorned and preserved it. After the Civil War, the spirit of the Declaration became—in large part thanks to Lincoln—the central expression of the Constitution, embodied explicitly in the Reconstruction Amendments. Ulysses S. Grant, who fought and won the war to secure these rights, served as president when the 15th Amendment was ratified in 1870. Grant captured better than anyone else the direct connection between the Declaration and the 15th Amendment: “The adoption of the 15th Amendment…constitutes the most important event that has occurred, since the nation came to life…It looked to me as the realization of the Declaration of Independence.”  

It is important to keep in mind that, in 1787, the constitutional framers deliberately avoided using the word slavery in the Constitution itself. James Madison, in his notes on the Constitutional Convention, recorded that the delegates chose not to use the words “slave” or “slavery” to make clear that the Constitution did not support the idea of holding “a property in men.” The deliberate omission of the word slavery in these clauses led both Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to view the Constitution as a pro-liberty, anti-slavery document. The Reconstruction Amendments made emphatic what Madison and others had hoped the Constitution would convey over time. In this spirit, the 15th Amendment completed the work of not only the 13th and 14th Amendments but also, as President Grant noted, the work of 1776 as a whole. The 13th ended slavery and the 14th guaranteed due process and equal protection for all citizens and overturned the 3/5 clause of the Constitution, making clear that Black Americans were to be counted like all other Americans in apportioning seats in the House of Representatives.   

However, despite its conferral of citizenship to Black males, the 14th Amendment did not fully protect the right to vote. As Frederick Douglass observed, the 14th Amendment simply penalized states that did not protect the right of Black men to vote, rather than guaranteeing the right itself. The 15th Amendment made it absolutely clear that no state can deny the vote to anyone based on race, color, or previous enslavement.  What was also remarkable about the 15th Amendment was that it conferred the vote instantly to the newly adult freedmen without any qualification.

The right to vote is the most fundamental right of a democratic, self-governing people. Frederick Douglass put it best in his reaction to the passage of the 15th Amendment: “We were always men. Now we are citizens and men among men.” Douglass had argued that Black soldiers in the Civil War had more than earned their right to citizenship and the vote: “Once let the Black man get upon his person the brass letters ‘U.S.,’ let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.” 

Despite widespread opposition to the idea of enfranchisement of the newly freed Black men, Lincoln, in the last speech he ever delivered on April 11, 1865, argued that the right to vote should be conferred on Black Americans who “are very intelligent and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.” John Wilkes Booth was in the audience that day, and the idea of Black enfranchisement was too much for him. A witness at the time reported that Booth turned to his co-conspirator, Lewis Powell, and said, “Now, by God, I will put him through. That will be the last speech he will ever make.” Booth assassinated Lincoln three days later on April 14, 1865, at Ford’s Theater in Washington, DC.

There was one group, women, who were not included in the 15th Amendment. Many women were bitterly disappointed by this exclusion, leading to a rift in the women’s suffrage movement, which had long supported the abolitionist movement. Women would have to keep fighting and wait another fifty years until the passage of the 19th Amendment, in 1920, to gain the right to vote.  Notably, among the earliest and most ardent supporters of women’s suffrage was none other than Frederick Douglass.

Dorothea Israel Wolfson, Ph.D, is managing director of the Hertog Foundation and former program director of the MA in Government Program at Johns Hopkins University.  She is co-author with Benjamin Ginsberg of The Unmaking of American Citizenship:  How Americans Learned Not to Love Their Country and What Can Be Done About It.  

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