The question of Black enfranchisement hung over the project of the 14th Amendment from the earliest days after the Civil War. In 1865, Frederick Douglass wrote What the Black Man Wants - a passionate plea for Black voting rights. He predicted that without political power, Black people would simply have called down “not only upon ourselves, but upon our children’s children, the deadly hate of the entire Southern people,” with no means to protect themselves. For that reason, Douglass warned that “this war shall not cease until every freedman in the South has the right to vote.” Douglass was particularly exercised by the notion that loyal Black men would be denied the vote, while white former Confederates, who had been disloyal to the Union, would enjoy full voting rights.
Word that the draft of the 14th Amendment failed to include an affirmative right to vote for Black people was met with widespread condemnation among abolitionists and activists. Radical Republicans in Congress, including Rep. Thaddeus Stevens, among the most passionate congressional champions of full Black citizenship and voting, conceded that the Amendment “fell short.” Senator Charles Sumner, a leading congressional abolitionist and framer of the Reconstruction Amendments, came to regard the 14th Amendment as “an installment, not a finality.”
No affirmative right to vote was included in the 14th Amendment. But the Amendment was not silent about the importance of Black political representation. The framers drafted a provision that they hoped would discourage southern whites from disenfranchising Black men. In Section 2 of the 14th Amendment, the framers set forth a regime that would exact political punishment for southern states that denied or interfered with Black voting.
The punishment scheme was simple. Southern states risked losing seats in Congress if they denied or abridged voting for eligible Black men. In fact, the representation count for states engaged in racial disenfranchisement would be reduced in proportion to the number of Black men they disenfranchised. Section 2 reads:
But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the Executive and Judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.