In 1870, the 15th Amendment added a guarantee of African Americans’ voting rights to the US Constitution. Many white southerners and Republicans opposed such sweeping protection. President Lincoln himself made clear his doubts about a quick move to a federal guarantee of universal black male suffrage.
African Americans were delighted. Huge celebrations accompanied the passage of the 15th Amendment: thousands of African Americans participated in parades like the one pictured above in Baltimore. They hailed the 15th as the “greatest gain of the Civil War.”
Today the 15th Amendment is dismissed not because it attempted too much, but because it delivered too little. This website explores that proposition in two Kentucky counties to show why the 15th Amendment allowed African Americans to become partners in a new political majority in one case but not in the other.
The Great Disenfranchisement
The greatest disenfranchisement in American history came in the 1890s and the early 1900s when state legislatures, both Northern and Southern, imposed new restrictions on the right to vote -- new tax requirements, new reading and understanding requirements, and new voting procedures that were designed to intimidate African Americans, as well as the poor and immigrants. It worked. Little black political participation survived this successful program of voter suppression. The 1890s and early 1900s was when the great defeat of the 15th Amendment took place.
Between the celebration of the 15th Amendment and the defeat of its intentions was a generation of African Americans. Their stories, of African Americans who proudly and determinedly exercised the Civil War’s greatest gain have never been told. Until now. Those stories are not stories of defeat: they are stories of remarkable courage and belief in equal political rights.
How Did African Americans Vote? The First Evidence
The Kentucky poll books tell the stories of African American political engagement because Kentucky law continued to require “by voice” voting in the years after African Americans had acquired the vote. The Kentucky poll book data is unique. All viva voce elections produce “poll books” that name each voter and the candidates for whom they voted. We matched those names with census and tax records that record the race of residents by town and county for two counties in Kentucky. All very easy -- with poll books, and a lot of patience in name matching.
