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Indiana University 
the states for the purpose of considering amendments to the 
Constitution of the United States. The resolution declared 
the pretended ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment by the 
Indiana legislature null and void. Several of the southern 
states had ratified under duress ; therefore, the amendment had 
not been legally ratified. In speaking for his resolution, Sena- 
tor Hughes declared: 
The constitution of the state has been trampled underfoot, a state 
which has left dead upon every battlefield of the Union, a state which 
has its deeds in favor of the Union everywhere recorded, whose every 
village and hamlet cemetery is filled Avith not unforgotten bones of the 
loyal dead, the banners of whose regiments, pierced with bullets from the 
enemies’ guns, are deposited as proud emblems to its loyalty to the Union 
and the Constitution, within the walls of this capital.®^ 
The resolution was passed by the Senate but later died in 
a committee of the House. All efforts to revoke the for- 
mer action were in vain. 
At the time of the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, 
negroes were excluded from voting in Indiana by the state 
constitution. Furthermore, free negroes were not permitted 
to come into the state. It was not until 1881 that amend- 
ments were made to the state constitution removing these 
disabilities and bringing the constitution into harmony with 
the Constitution of the United States.^^ 
Meanwhile, the requisite number of states having ratified 
the Fifteenth Amendment, it was declared in force in March, 
1870. With the final adoption of this suffrage amendment, 
George W. Julian, one of the first men in Congress to advo- 
cate the policy, considered the mission of the Republican party 
as perfectly consummated.^® 
The state Republican platform of 1870 congratulated the 
country on “the restoration of law and order in the rebellious 
states, under the reconstruction measures adopted by the gen- 
eral government”.^^ The state Democratic platform de- 
nounced “the infamous and revolutionary character of the 
reconstruction measures of Congress’’. It condemned them as 
an invasion of the sovereign and sacred rights of the people 
and of all the states.^- The Republicans won six out of eleven 
Brevier Legislative Reports, XII, 176, 177. 
Charles Kettleboroug:h, Constitution Making in Indiana (Indianapolis, 1916), II, 
202-207. 
■^0 Julian, Political Recollections (Chicago, 1884), 330. 
Henry, State Platforms, 37. 
36. 
