A Short History of Reconstruction [Updated Edition]

by Eric Foner

“Power from Without”

To Democrats, the Fifteenth Amendment seemed “the most revolutionary measure” ever to receive Congressional sanction,

Yet while clothing black suffrage with constitutional sanction, the Amendment said nothing about the right to hold office and did not forbid literacy, property, and educational tests that, while nonracial, might effectively exclude the majority of blacks from the polls.

The failure to guarantee blacks’ right to hold office arose from fear that such a provision would jeopardize the prospects of ratification in the North.

Southern Republicans, joined by many Northern Radicals, feared that a blanket guarantee of the right to vote would void the disenfranchisement of “rebels.” Equally important, Northern states wished to retain their own suffrage qualifications. In the West, the Chinese could not vote; if the Fifteenth Amendment altered this situation, noted Californias Republican Sen. Cornelius Cole, it would “kill our party as dead as a stone.”

Pennsylvania demanded the payment of state taxes to vote; Rhode Island required foreignborn citizens to own $134 worth of real estate; Massachusetts and Connecticut insisted on literacy. Indeed, the Northern states during Reconstruction actually abridged the right to vote more extensively than did the Southern. Ironically, it was not a limited commitment to blacks’ rights, but the desire to retain inequalities affecting whites, that produced a Fifteenth Amendment that opened the door to poll taxes, literacy tests, and

And, of course, proponents of both a “strong” and “weak” Fifteenth Amendment ignored the claims of women. To feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the Amendment added to the numerous “humiliations’ Republicans had inflicted on their cause. Rejecting the idea that the Constitution should prohibit racial discrimination in voting while countenancing disabilities bas...