The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment (review)

190CIVIL WAR HISTORY Stevens' view that its purpose was to secure equal protection of Negro and white. Again he seems to absolve the Radical Republicans from all guilt in joining in the Great Barbecue; he even finds a "certain kind of idealism" at work here. In developing the revisionist thesis it seems to me that some effort should have been made to explain why such eminent historians as James Ford Rhodes, John W. Burgess, William E. Dunning, James G. Randall, and James Bryce, who should have had no reason to sympathize with the South, were so positive in their condemnation of the evils of Radical Reconstruction. Another minor question is why Professor Stampp should have expected, as he seems to have done, the Confederates to have completely reversed their views and to have accepted the Radical program as right and proper. But these are minor points. With the publication of The Era of Reconstruction the Dunning School has been decisively beaten; revisionism must be the accepted interpretation of Reconstruction. Fletcher M. Green The University of North Carolina The Right to Vote: Politics and the Passage of the Fifteenth Amendment . By William Gillette. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1965. Pp. 181. $4.50.) This is a timely book. In 1965 the Congress of the United States enacted a Civil Rights law to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment; and in 1966 the Attorney General of the United States appeared before the Supreme Court to enforce the new law. Why was the Fifteenth Amendment added to the Constitution in 1870? All historians agree in relating its origins to the election of 1868. The Republican party, which had imposed Negro suffrage on the South by military means, had then straddled the issue in its platform. Its plank read that conferring the vote on southern Negroes "was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude and of justice . . . while the question of suffrage in all the loyal States properly belongs to the people of those States." W. A. Dunning, pointing to Democratic victories in Georgia and Louisiana , intimidation by whites, and doubts about the constitutional validity of congressional laws, attributed the amendment to a desire to make secure Negro suffrage in the South. J. F. Rhodes shared these views, adding that many persons felt the platform had been "a cowardly subterfuge ." The standard study of the amendment (now superseded by this new work), John Mathews' Legislative and Judicial History of the Fifteenth Amendment, a Johns Hopkins book published in 1909, assigned as "the controlling motive" "the need of supplying a new basis for the continuance of congressional control over the suffrage conditions of the Southern States." BOOK REVIEWS191 All these historians agree, then, in saying the amendment was aimed at safeguarding Negro suffrage in the South. It is the revisionist thesis of William Gillette that, The Fifteenth Amendment had a limited objectfirst , to enfranchise the northern Negro, and second, to protect the southem Negro against disfranchisement, and it was chiefly the work of moderates in Congress." Gillette has made the first systematic investigation of the politics and passage of the Fifteenth Amendment. Mathews disposed of that subject in a highly unsatisfactory way, failing to trace this history because of his preoccupation with political science concepts, and laying main stress on judicial interpretation. Gillette uses the historical method, to which he brings insight as well as fresh research. The largest and most valuable source I tapped," he tells us, "was 172 newspapers from 36 states." He argues the pragmatic character of the amendment's framing and passage, dismisses the influence of the abolitionists (unlike James M. McPherson ), and recognizes the role of the Republican party in instigating and ratifying the amendment. The framers chose a middle course between those who wanted no change and those who wanted thoroughgoing suffrage reform. The first extreme would not help the party; the second could not be passed. On this latter point Gillette differs with W. R. Brock, who has lamented that the Radicals missed the opportunity to ordain an uncompromising manhood suffrage measure. In support of his contention that the amendment was aimed at the northern Negro, Gillette has adduced a great deal of evidence. Though he is perhaps...