The Georgetown Election - The Negro at the Ballot Box

This image was published in Harper's Weekly Illustrated Newspaper, March 16, 1867. It illustrates the political tension surrounding African American men's right to vote, in this case, in the District of Columbia during the early years of Reconstruction. President Andrew Johnson looks on holding the "Suffrage Veto" and an "Ex-C.S.A" (Confederate States of America) man watches as a black man, described in the accompanying article as a Union army veteran, places a vote for the Republican mayoral candidate. The Fifteenth Amendment, legally (though not practically) securing black men's right to vote, was ratified in 1870.