THE MAKING OF RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION ★^585Republicans that, if acquitted, he would
stop interfering with Reconstruction
policy. The final tally was 35–19 to con-
vict Johnson, one vote short of the two-
thirds necessary to remove him. Seven
Republicans had joined the Democrats
in voting to acquit the president.
A few days after the vote, Repub-
licans nominated Ulysses S. Grant,
the Union’s most prominent military
hero, as their candidate for president.
Grant’s Democratic opponent was
Horatio Seymour, the former governor
of New York. Reconstruction became
the central issue of the bitterly fought
1868 campaign. Republicans identified
their opponents with secession and
treason, a tactic known as “waving the
bloody shirt.” Democrats denounced
Reconstruction as unconstitutional
and condemned black suffrage as a vio-
lation of America’s political traditions.
They appealed openly to racism. Sey-
mour’s running mate, Francis P. Blair
Jr., charged Republicans with placing
the South under the rule of “a semi- barbarous race” who longed to “subject the
white women to their unbridled lust.”
The Fifteenth Amendment
Grant won the election of 1868, although by a margin— 300,000 of 6 million
votes cast— that many Republicans found uncomfortably slim. The result led
Congress to adopt the era’s third and final amendment to the Constitution.
In February 1869, it approved the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited
the federal and state governments from denying any citizen the right to vote
because of race. Bitterly opposed by the Democratic Party, it was ratified in 1870.
Although the Fifteenth Amendment opened the door to suffrage restric-
tions not explicitly based on race— literacy tests, property qualifications, and
poll taxes— and did not extend the right to vote to women, it marked the cul-
mination of four decades of abolitionist agitation. As late as 1868, even after
Congress had enfranchised black men in the South, only eight northern states
A Republican campaign poster from 1868
depicts Ulysses S. Grant and his running mate
Henry Wilson not as a celebrated general
and U.S. senator but as ordinary workingmen,
embodiments of the dignity of free labor.What were the sources, goals, and competing visions for Reconstruction?