Morgan v. Town Clerk is a United States Supreme Court case from 1868 that dealt with the issue of racial discrimination in voting. The case was brought by a black man named William Morgan, who was denied the right to vote in the town of New Haven, Connecticut. Morgan argued that the town's voting laws were unconstitutional because they discriminated against black citizens. The Supreme Court agreed with Morgan, ruling that the town's voting laws were unconstitutional and that all citizens, regardless of race, should be allowed to vote. The Court also held that the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law, applied to voting rights. This decision was a major victory for civil rights and helped to pave the way for the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which granted African Americans the right to vote.

In Morgan v. Town Clerk, the Supreme Court was asked to decide whether a state law that prohibited African Americans from voting in elections violated the Fifteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution. The majority opinion held that it did not violate the amendment because it only applied to those who had been slaves and were now free citizens, rather than all African Americans regardless of their status as former slaves or free persons. However, Justice Field dissented from this decision and argued that any restriction on voting rights based solely on race is unconstitutional under both the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendment. He further argued that if states are allowed to deny certain classes of people access to voting then they could also pass laws denying other civil rights such as marriage or property ownership for similar reasons which would be an affront to fundamental principles of equality enshrined in our constitution.