The Lewis & Clark Expedition / The 15th Amendment

In the spring of America’s twenty-eighth year, Captains Meriwether Lewis and William Clark began a mission assigned by President Thomas Jefferson to chart an all-water route from the Atlantic to the Pacific, document the natural resources of the Pacific Northwest and the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase territory, and learn about the people living on the land. The expedition left St. Louis, Missouri, in May 1804 and, as the Corps of Discovery, included thirty-two people, among them Lewis and Clark as co-captains, George Drouillard and Touissant Charbonneau as interpreters, York, Clark’s slave, and twenty-five sergeants and privates. Charbonneau’s Shoshone wife, Sacagawea, also played an important part as an interpreter and guide while caring for her infant son, Jean Baptiste. After enduring bitter cold, exhausting heat, blisters, hunger, and other hardships, the party returned to St. Louis on September 23, 1806. In 1999, the U.S. Mint honored Sacagawea by issuing a golden dollar coin bearing her image, and in 2003 the U.S. government inaugurated the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial Celebration to encourage study of the journey and experience of the trail. Ratified on February 3, 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution declared that the right of citizens of the United States to vote could not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, and it gave Congress power to enforce the article by appropriate legislation. For almost a century, however, its ratification had little impact, especially in the South, where blacks were discouraged from voting by intimidation, poll taxes, and violence.

Hyattsville, Maryland · United States