Congress made ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment a condition of readmission to statehood.

Evidence

In a matter of weeks, at the end of February 1869, Congress sent the Fifteenth Amendment to the states for ratification: “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.” President Ulysses Grant endorsed the change. States in New England and the Midwest came on board easily. Congress held the key to readmission to the Union for those Confederate states that had not yet been readmitted and, as with the Fourteenth Amendment, made ratification a condition of statehood. Black men were citizens and the Constitution now protected their votes. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 737

Categorization

• XREF: The coercive mechanism — ratification as a condition of statehood — parallels the reader’s infrastructure-of-origins theme: institutional design used to enforce a new definition of national belonging.