William Marvel: Amending America

The General Court of New Hampshire passed the 15th Amendment 150 years ago this week, on July 1, 1869. Mysteriously, newspapers in the relatively new state of Nevada showed particular interest in the Granite State’s consideration of the amendment. Nevada statehood had been rushed through Congress in 1864 to provide a handful of additional electors for Abraham Lincoln’s re-election campaign, and the fixation on the amendment reflected continuing Republican domination there. The 15th Amendment was unquestionably a Republican initiative, designed to augment the ranks of Republican voters, and Nevada was the first state to ratify it.

The 15th Amendment guaranteed that no American citizens would be deprived of voting privileges because of their “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It was designed mainly to enfranchise freed slaves, and didn’t apply to most Asians, or to the American Indians interned on reservations because they were not yet considered citizens. Citizenship was still something special then (as it always was, until very recently), and it would be decades before the benefits of citizenship were granted routinely to those less-visible minorities. Women were also excluded, but only by implication; it wasn’t necessary to mention them, because of course everyone knew that women had no place in politics.