Copy of the Fifteenth Amendment Sent to North Carolina Legislature, 1869

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Context

After the Civil War ended and slavery was abolished in 1865, Radical Republicans in Congress became frustrated with the opposition that many white southerners exhibited to extending full rights of citizenship to African Americans. Congress proposed the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution and passed other laws to guarantee the rights of Black Americans in the former Confederate states and nationwide.

Congress submitted the Fifteenth Amendment to the states for ratification on February 26, 1869. It expanded voting rights to include all Black males, allowing citizens to vote regardless of "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." Women were not included. On March 4, 1869, Governor William Woods Holden of North Carolina sent this circular letter to state legislators recommending that they ratify the Fifteenth Amendment because he believed that effective government required that "every male citizen should have the right to vote." Virginia governor Henry Horatio Wells also received a copy of the letter. North Carolina ratified the amendment on March 5.

Virginia's General Assembly ratified the amendment on October 8, 1869. Of the 181 members of the legislature, thirty were Black men who were the first African American assembly members in the state's history. They were able to vote and win election to office by virtue of Virginia's new state constitution, which had been approved in July 1869. Once the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified by three-fourths of the states (28 of the 37 states at that time), it became part of the U. S. Constitution on March 30, 1870.

African American men voted and held office during the 1870s and 1880s, but by the 20th Century many white legislators in southern states had passed laws that excluded Black voters. These barriers were written in such a way that they did not outright forbid African Americans from voting and instead made it harder to vote through a variety of means such as literacy tests, poll taxes, and "grandfather clauses" (which excluded from voting anyone whose ancestors had not been able to vote in the 1860s). Such actions severely limited the ability of Black men to vote and hold elected office until the 1960s.

Citation: Fifteenth Amendment Circular, May 4, 1869, Henry H. Wells Executive Papers, Accession 43756, Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.