4 BRNOVICH v. DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE KAGAN, J., dissenting 1855, on the precipice of the Civil War, only five States permitted African Americans to vote. Id., at 55. And at the federal level, our Court’s most deplorable holding made sure that no black people could enter the voting booth. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 19 How. 393 (1857). But the “American ideal of political equality . . . could not forever tolerate the limitation of the right to vote” to whites only. Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U. S. 55, 103–104 (1980) (Marshall, J., dissenting). And a civil war, dedicated to ensuring “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” brought constitutional change. In 1870, after a hard-fought battle over ratification, the Fifteenth Amendment carried the Nation closer to its founding aspirations. “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Those words promised to enfranchise millions of black citizens who only a decade earlier had been slaves. Frederick Douglass held that the Amendment “means that we are placed upon an equal footing with all other men”—that with the vote, “liberty is to be the right of all.” 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 270–271 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds. 1991). President Grant had seen much blood spilled in the Civil War; now he spoke of the fruits of that sacrifice. In a selfdescribed “unusual” message to Congress, he heralded the Fifteenth Amendment as “a measure of grander importance than any other one act of the kind from the foundation of our free Government”—as “the most important event that has occurred since the nation came into life.” Ulysses S. Grant, Message to the Senate and House of Representatives (Mar. 30, 1870), in 7 Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789–1897, pp. 55–56 (J. Richardson ed. 1898). Momentous as the Fifteenth Amendment was, celebration of its achievements soon proved premature. The Amendment’s guarantees “quickly became dead letters in