Republican congressmen backed Black suffrage for electoral advantage, not moral conviction

Evidence

Numerous Republican congressmen, such as Ohio’s James A. Garfield, were privately expressing “a strong feeling of repugnance” about Blacks being “made our political equal.” But when these racist Republicans calculated the serious advantages the “loyal” Black vote could give them in swing states, they finally gave their support to Black suffrage. As with the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, these powerful congressmen had not been morally persuaded to open the door to Black rights. It was about self-interests. On February 27, 1869, the Republican-dominated Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 656

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence of Kahneman’s core thesis (policy before ideas, self-interest driving beliefs rather than the reverse) — this is the kind of case to test the ignorance→hate→discrimination reversal against.
• SEED: Angle for an essay: the Fifteenth Amendment as a textbook example of self-interest producing rights — how ‘cynical’ motives sometimes deliver genuine structural reforms that moral persuasion never could.