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An illustration shows the House of Representatives bringing its case against President Johnson to the Senate. Representatives sort through papers, convene, and make arguments before the senators.
This illustration by Theodore R. Davis, which was captioned “The Senate as a court of impeachment for the trial of Andrew Johnson,” appeared in Harper’s Weekly in 1868. Here, the House of Representatives brings its grievances against Johnson to the Senate during impeachment hearings.

The fifteenth amendment

In November 1868, Ulysses S. Grant, the Union’s war hero, easily won the presidency in a landslide victory. The Democratic nominee was Horatio Seymour, but the Democrats carried the stigma of disunion. The Republicans, in their campaign, blamed the devastating Civil War and the violence of its aftermath on the rival party, a strategy that southerners called “waving the bloody shirt.”

Though Grant did not side with the Radical Republicans, his victory allowed the continuance of the Radical Reconstruction program. In the winter of 1869, Republicans introduced another constitutional amendment, the third of the Reconstruction era. When Republicans had passed the Fourteenth Amendment, which addressed citizenship rights and equal protections, they were unable to explicitly ban states from withholding the franchise based on race. With the Fifteenth Amendment, they sought to correct this major weakness by finally extending to black men the right to vote. The amendment directed that “[t]he right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Unfortunately, the new amendment had weaknesses of its own. As part of a compromise to ensure the passage of the amendment with the broadest possible support, drafters of the amendment specifically excluded language that addressed literacy tests and poll taxes, the most common ways blacks were traditionally disenfranchised in both the North and the South. Indeed, Radical Republican leader Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, himself an ardent supporter of legal equality without exception to race, refused to vote for the amendment precisely because it did not address these obvious loopholes.

Despite these weaknesses, the language of the amendment did provide for universal manhood suffrage—the right of all men to vote—and crucially identified black men, including those who had been slaves, as deserving the right to vote. This, the third and final of the Reconstruction amendments, was ratified in 1870 ( [link] ). With the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, many believed that the process of restoring the Union was safely coming to a close and that the rights of freed slaves were finally secure. African American communities expressed great hope as they celebrated what they understood to be a national confirmation of their unqualified citizenship.

An illustration depicts a series of scenes and portraits, shown in gilded frames and surrounded by American flags, relating to black rights and the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. A large central scene shows the parade celebrating the Fifteenth Amendment’s passage. In the upper corners, portraits of Ulysses S. Grant and Schuyler Colfax are shown. Other scenes include a black man reading the Emancipation Proclamation; three black men with Masonic paraphernalia (labeled “We Unite in the Bonds of Fellowship with the Whole Human Race”); a Bible (labeled “Our Charter of Rights”); a black classroom scene (labeled “Education Will Prove the Equality of the Races”); a black pastor preaching to a congregation (labeled “The Holy Ordinances of Religion Are Free”); two free blacks tilling their own fields; a black officer commanding his troops (labeled “We Will Protect Our Country as It Defends Our Rights”); a black man reading to his family (labeled “Freedom Unites the Family Circle”); a black wedding ceremony (labeled “Liberty Protects the Marriage Alter”); a black man voting (labeled “The Ballot Box Is Open To Us”); and Hiram Revels in the House of Representatives (labeled “Our Representative Sits in the National Legislature”). Other individual portraits include Abraham Lincoln, Hiram Revels, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and John Brown.
The Fifteenth Amendment. Celebrated May 19th, 1870 , a commemorative print by Thomas Kelly, celebrates the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment with a series of vignettes highlighting black rights and those who championed them. Portraits include Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, and John Brown, as well as black leaders Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and Hiram Revels. Vignettes include the celebratory parade for the amendment’s passage, “The Ballot Box is open to us,” and “Our representative Sits in the National Legislature.”

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Source:  OpenStax, U.s. history. OpenStax CNX. Jan 12, 2015 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11740/1.3
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