"How Much Has Been Gained and How Much Further There Is to Go"

"As Abraham Lincoln noted after the 1857 Dred Scott decision, which declared persons of African descent had 'no rights which the white man was bound to respect,' some of those 'Africans' had voted in the elections to ratify the Constitution. Lincoln went on to list five states—New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina—where black men voted at the country’s founding. Later historians would add three more states.
"Lincoln was outraged that the Supreme Court would strip citizenship from men who had been voting for generations, and he wasn't alone."

Van Gosse in a 2015 Boston Globe article discusses the history of black voting rights.