- [Instructor] In the last video,
we discussed who did and did not
have citizenship and voting rights
from 1789
to the 1830s.
To summarize, citizenship was reserved
for white men, women, and children.
And by the 1830s, the right to vote
extended to all white men,
regardless of whether they owned property.
Although they were citizens,
white women could not vote.
Indigenous people, enslaved
people, and free Black people
weren't permitted to be
US citizens, or to vote.
So let's pick up the
story now in the 1840s,
when the United States rapidly
colonized North America.
As part of the Treaty
of Guadalupe Hidalgo,
the peace treaty that ended
the Mexican-American war,
the Mexican government ceded the territory
that's now most of the Western
half of the United States.
The Mexican people who were already living
in that territory were
granted US citizenship.
Although the indigenous people
who were living there were not.
Although the Mexican-American citizens
were eligible to vote in theory,
in practice they faced
intimidation from white Americans
that limited their access to voting.
During the 1850s, debate over
the institution of slavery,
and the status of Black
Americans, consumed the country.
In the midst of this turmoil in 1857,
the Supreme Court issued
the Dred Scott opinion,
which we'll talk about in
more detail in another video,
ruling that Black people
were not guaranteed
birthright citizenship, and
had no pathway to citizenship.
Asian immigrants, who started
coming to the United States
in larger numbers in the 1850s,
were also not considered
eligible for citizenship.
And in the late 19th century,
and early 20th century,
the US government banned immigration
from China and Japan altogether.
In the 1860s, the tensions between slave
and free states boiled over into war.
The Southern states
succeeded from the Union
to protect slavery, starting a civil war
that lasted for four years.
During the Civil War, the US government
issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
declaring the end of slavery
in the Southern states,
and after the war, ratified
the 13th Amendment,
which outlawed slavery
everywhere in the country.
But ending slavery didn't
automatically guarantee
citizenship rights for Black
people in the United States.
In 1868, the ratification
of the 14th Amendment
established that all persons
born, or naturalized,
in the United States were citizens.
This ensured that Black people,
both men and women, had citizenship.
As well as the US born
children of Asian immigrants.
Although, again, it was
still not interpreted
to mean that indigenous people
had citizenship at this time.
In addition, a new
Naturalization Act of 1870
broadened the people who
were eligible for citizenship
to include aliens of African nativity,
and persons of African descent.
But, just like the end of slavery
didn't automatically
guarantee citizenship rights,
citizenship didn't automatically
guarantee voting rights.
Nowhere in the Constitution,
or the Bill of Rights,
was the right to vote protected.
Elections then, as now, were
controlled by the states.
And although the 14th Amendment stipulated
that states would lose
representation in Congress
if they denied the vote to any
male citizen of voting age,
this was the first time that the word male
was introduced into the Constitution,
which we'll see the
importance of in just a sec,
it quickly became clear that a
stronger Amendment was needed
to ensure Black citizens could vote.
So in 1870, Congress passed,
and the states ratified,
the 15th Amendment, which prohibited
the Federal Government, and the states,
from denying a citizen the right to vote
based on that citizen's race, color,
or previous condition of servitude.
This was intended to ensure that Black men
had the right to vote,
which they exercised in the
South for several years,
until the US government stopped enforcing
the rights of Black citizens in the South,
and white supremacist
governments returned to power.
The 15th Amendment also did not prevent
the denial of voting
rights on the basis of sex,
which was a major blow for
the women's suffrage movement.
Women would not succeed in their campaign
for the vote until 1920.
So that's a very brief
overview of the changes
in citizenship and voting
rights in the first 100 years
after the founding of the United States.
I'll leave you to reflect
on a few questions.
Why do you think that
citizenship changed over time?
What does the history
of who did, and didn't,
have citizenship at various points
tell us about the concept of citizenship
in the United States?
And what's the relationship between
citizenship and voting rights?
