Fifteenth Amendment Quotes

Reconstruction did not fail. It was overthrown.

The Republican Party's history is rich and chock full of emancipation and black history.

Republicans passed the Fourteenth Amendment, securing for blacks equal rights under the law, and the Fifteenth Amendment, giving blacks the right to vote, over the Democrats' opposition.

I think it's important to understand the history of the Republican Party. It was founded in 1854 because of the moral collapse of the Whig Party, specifically around the question of race and the expansion of slavery into the western territories.

The Fifteenth Amendment nullifies sophisticated as well as simple-minded modes of discrimination.

Select Committee of the House and Senate on the Insurrectionary States

The failure of the South to faithfully observe the Fifteenth Amendment is the cause of the failure of all efforts towards complete pacification. It is on this hook that the bloody shirt now hangs.

Our party was built upon the beliefs of President Abraham Lincoln, who took the significant step to put us on the long path for equality.

My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to save or destroy Slavery. What I do about slavery and the colored race, I do because it helps to save the Union, and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.

Prodded by the needs of the Union cause, the Republican Party created a strong national government that educated young men and gave them land to farm. Ultimately, the GOP abolished slavery, then gave freedmen the vote so they could protect their own economic interests.

The post–Civil War Radical Republicans, as a group, cared very little for the black vote until they came to believe that it would help to secure their position ... against a Democratic resurgence. Once convinced that they would profit from the black vote, they passed the Fifteenth Amendment

It could be clearly proved that by a practical nullification [by the South] of the Fifteenth Amendment the Republicans have for several years been deprived of a majority in both the House and Senate. The failure of the South to faithfully observe the Fifteenth Amendment is the cause of the failure of all efforts towards complete pacification. It is on this hook that the bloody shirt now hangs.

It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and '60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.

I too mean to be out of politics. The ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment gives me the boon of equality before the law, terminates my enlistment, and discharges me cured.

Voting rights expert and legal scholar Pam Karlan reports that as of 2004, there were more black men disenfranchised than in 1870, the year the Fifteenth Amendment was ratified prohibiting laws that deny the right to vote on the basis of race.