1870) Indiana: May 14, 1869 Connecticut: May 19, 1869 Florida: June 14, 1869 New Hampshire: July 1, 1869 Virginia: October 8, 1869 Vermont: October 20, 1869 Alabama: November 16, 1869 Missouri: January 10, 1870 Minnesota: January 13, 1870 Mississippi: January 17, 1870 Rhode Island: January 18, 1870 Kansas: January 19, 1870 Ohio: January 27, 1870 (After rejection: April 1/30, 1869) Georgia: February 2, 1870 Iowa: February 3, 1870 Secretary of State Hamilton Fish certified the amendment on March 30, 1870, also including the ratifications of: The remaining seven states all subsequently ratified the amendment: The amendment's adoption was met with widespread celebrations in black communities and abolitionist societies; many of the latter disbanded, feeling that black rights had been secured and their work was complete. President Grant said of the amendment that it "completes the greatest civil change and constitutes the most important event that has occurred since the nation came to life." Many Republicans felt that with the amendment's passage, black Americans no longer needed federal protection; congressman and future president James A. Garfield stated that the amendment's passage "confers upon the African race the care of its own destiny. It places their fortunes in their own hands." Congressman John R. Lynch later wrote that ratification of those two amendments made Reconstruction a success. Application In the year of the 150th anniversary of the Fifteenth Amendment Columbia University history professor and historian Eric Foner said about the Fifteenth Amendment as well as its history during the Reconstruction era and Post-Reconstruction era: Reconstruction African Americans called the amendment the nation's "second birth" and a "greater revolution than that of 1776" according to historian Eric Foner in his book The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. The first black person known to vote after the amendment's adoption was Thomas Mundy Peterson, who cast his ballot on March 31, 1870, in a Perth Amboy, New Jersey referendum election adopting a revised city charter. African Americans—many of them newly freed slaves—put their newfound freedom to use, voting in scores of black candidates. During Reconstruction, 16 black men served in Congress and 2,000 black men served in elected local, state and federal positions. In United States v. Reese (1876), the first U.S. Supreme Court decision interpreting the Fifteenth Amendment, the Court interpreted the amendment narrowly, upholding ostensibly race-neutral limitations on suffrage including poll taxes, literacy tests, and a grandfather