Interactive: Drafting Table—The Fifteenth Amendment

Explore the National Constitution Center’s interactive drafting table on the Fifteenth Amendment to discover how the Reconstruction generation framed and ratified this transformational amendment that promised to end racial discrimination in voting. The Fifteenth Amendment represented the third of three constitutional promises that the Reconstruction generation made to establish a multiracial democracy.

Click on different provisions of the amendment and scroll through the timeline to see how the various provisions changed over time. Click on the supplemental documents and people to read further descriptions of the vital moments and characters in the drafting and ratification story.

Here’s the link to the drafting table.

Guiding Questions:

Click through each of the tabs—“Voting Rights in 15th” and “Enforcement of 15th”—and read the background text for each one. As you read this background information, please also click on each of the three pictures associated with each tab.
Click on the “Voting Rights in the 15th” tab.

What were some of the different proposals advanced during the congressional debates over the amendment? How would you describe the different approaches seen in the various proposals?

What role did the U.S. House play in the framing of the amendment? What about the U.S. Senate? How were these disagreements resolved?

Scroll along the timeline at the bottom. How did the drafting and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment affect the women’s suffrage movement?

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