Browse Items (11 total)

The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution prohibits the United States government and the government of any state from denying the vote to any citizen "on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." It was passed by Congress in…

On January 11, 1871, entrepreneur and woman suffrage advocate Victoria Woodhull became the first woman to address a congressional committee. In her remarks she declared that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments granted women the right to vote. She…

For decades, Virginia localities kept separate registers for African American and white voters. These registers are for Southampton County and record the African Americans and whites who voted at the first precinct of the second magisterial district…

A former slave in Southampton County, John Brown emerged as a leader among the freedpeople there after the Civil War. As a candidate for the convention called in 1867 to write a new state constitution as required by federal law, he had ballots like…

On October 22, 1867, African American men voted in Virginia for the first time. The army officers who conducted the election recorded the votes of white and black men on separate lists, and in King George County (and likely in other counties as well)…

This printed broadside was circulated in Caroline County to notify men where and how to register to vote prior to the election for convention delegates in 1867, the first in which African American men were able to vote.

African Americans in several states, including Virginia, voted for the first time in the autumn of 1867. In this image, a white man is seen conducting the election. An old African American, probably a former slave and wearing patched clothes,…

During the summer of 1865, the Secretary of the Commonwealth issued instructions to commissioners of election in the counties that had not been part of the loyal Restored government of Virginia. He advised registrars that by an act of General…

Virginia's Attorney General Thomas R. Bowden, a Unionist Republican, published his opinion during July 1865 in response to questions about who could vote in the state's upcoming election. He specified that white men over age twenty-one could vote…

After the Civil War many white Virginians could not vote because they had supported the Confederacy. In June 1865, the General Assembly restored voting rights to some of those white men, but the federal government required men who had supported the…