Every election season in the United States revolves around a set of issues—health care, foreign affairs, the economy. In 1868, at the height of the Reconstruction, the pressing issue was Black male suffrage. When voters went to the polls that November, they were asked to decide if and how their nation’s democracy should change to include Black men, millions of whom were newly freed from slavery. It was up to voters to decide: should Black men be granted the right to vote?
With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that this question was answered just two years later in 1870, with ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Fifteenth Amendment stipulates that citizens’ right to vote cannot be restricted based on "race, color, or previous condition of servitude." In 1868, however, there were no definite plans for a Fifteenth Amendment. The decision was still in voters’ hands.
Although African Americans had been fighting for freedom and full citizenship throughout U.S. history, their demands were generally ignored, rejected, or suppressed. Voting rights reflected this larger pattern. Before the Civil War, few states were willing to extend suffrage to groups other than white men. Among the Northern and Western states where slavery was outlawed, only a handful—most clustered in New England—allowed Black men to go to the polls. (Even in these states, Black women—like all women in the United States—were not allowed to vote. By 1868, most political leaders and activists had chosen to decouple the question of woman suffrage and Black male suffrage for strategic reasons. They did not think a majority of the nation would support giving women the ballot, and they feared that a push to secure women’s right to vote would doom efforts to enfranchise Black men. Both in the 1800s and more recently, writers sometimes obscure this aspect of the story by using universal terms like "Black suffrage").