It did not offer a blanket guarantee of the right to vote because many Radical Republicans feared that would void the disenfranchisement of ex-Confederates. Many states, North and South, required payment of poll taxes, property ownership, or literacy as a condition of voting. The 15th Amendment did not address any of those stipulations. Feminists, especially, fought against the amendment because women were not included in the guarantee of suffrage. .
When the founding fathers first wrote our constitution, the general consensus was that slavery was a necessary evil. Blacks were not afforded rights as citizens (indeed the constitution considered blacks as only 3/5 of a person when calculating state population) Almost one hundred years later; this issue was on the front burner of American politics. Under the "slave codes" of the period, black Americans did not even have a right to seek redress in court. In 1857, as the nation argued the merits of slavery, the U. S. Supreme Court announced its decision in the case of Dred Scott v. Sandford. Dred Scott was a freed slave who was reenslaved when he returned to the South from a trip North with his former master. Mr. Scott sued in federal court for his permanent emancipation and citizenship status. The Court ruled that no blacks whether slave or free, could be citizens of the United States because the Constitution itself excluded them from the national community.
All Southern State rewrote their constitutions between 1890 and 1910, but Mississippi took the lead in devising legal guidelines to end black suffrage and finish the process that had began with statutory disfranchisement in the 1880's. "Residence requirements were aimed at transient black sharecroppers and tenant farmers, and the disqualification for the conviction of crimes was created care of the races alleged predisposition toward criminal behavior. But, the really ingenious devices were found in the chapters on "literacy and understanding tests- and the poll tax.