Although President Johnson issued a proclamation declaring the Rebellion at an end on April 2, 1866, Congress still refused to recognize the credentials of Southern representatives and declared that it would determine when a State should be admitted. On June 13, 1866, Congress proposed the Fourteenth Amendment. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. Of the Southern States, Tennessee alone ratified the proposed amendment and was readmitted on July 24, 1866. The other ten ex-Confederate States rejected the offer to be readmitted upon ratification of the Amendment. In December 1866, Senator James G. Blaine of Maine demanded Negro suffrage clauses in all the Southern constitutions, and three months later Congress passed an act that according to its title was designed to "provide for a more efficient government of the Rebel States." The act declared that no government then existed in the ten ex-Confederate States; this had the effect of overturning the governments set up under the administration plan. The act divided the South into five military divisions and required of each State, before it could be declared entitled to representation in Congress, (1) that Negroes be admitted to suffrage when elections for delegates to the constitutional conventions were held; (2) that the new constitutions provide permanently for Negro voting, and (3) that the Fourteenth Amendment be ratified. An act passed on March 23, 1867, designated who might vote for delegates to the conventions and moved to enfranchise the Negroes by simply not excluding them—although excluding certain white Southerners. Reconstruction, conducted under military rule, was now begun. In the South, Negroes and Radical Republicans soon were in command of the ballot box; Radical Governors were in command of Negro militia; and carpetbaggers were in command of State treasuries. 14 Stat. 758 (1866). This proclamation, however, did not apply to Texas. Another proclamation followed in August declaring the rebellion at an end in that State. 14 Stat. 814 (1866). The second section provided for reduction of representation in Congress in the event of the abridgement of the right to vote in Federal elections, and the fifth authorizes enactment of enforcement legislation. 14 Stat. 364 (1866). 14 Stat. 428 (1867). 15 Stat. 2 (1867). The Southern white man's answer was the Ku Klux Klan, founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, and commanded by General Nathan Bedford Forrest. Although always ready with the whip and the bucket of tar and feathers, the Klan was most active at election time. In some desperation, Congress passed enforcement acts that included a prohibition against wearing masks on a public highway for the purpose of preventing citizens from voting. The Klan movement declined, not so much as a result of the new laws as through the withdrawal of moderate men of influence who could not stomach its bloody violence. Meanwhile, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified on July 28, 1868. Section 1 of the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on March 30, 1870, declared: The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Negro suffrage had not yet gained widespread currency throughout the nation. Extension of the suffrage, with this single exception, had always been an evolutionary, rather than a revolutionary, process. Large numbers of Negroes were members of the Southern State assemblies but were largely dominated by the military district commanders. The result of all this was that ratification of these two amendments by the ten Southern States was in large measure the consequence of Congressional coercion. Having adopted constitutions consistent with the Fifteenth Amendment, the former Confederate States undergoing reconstruction were all readmitted to the Union by 1870. In 1877, Reconstruction ended with the withdrawal of Federal troops, and control of the South was returned to its own white leaders. The South's new leadership was moderate and conservative. Its aim was not reform, but rebuilding. Eager to industrialize, it was hungry for Northern capital. Congressional coercion of Negro suffrage in the South was at an end. Northerners in turn, weary of the "bloody shirt" and eager for conciliation, were eminently gratified. Amid the booming business expansion of the period, financiers and industrialists especially welcomed the "soundness" of leading Southern opinion. Harper's Weekly, for decades violently anti-Southern, now observed that Southern Democracy "is wonderfully like the best Northern Republicanism." 10 The Civil Rights Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870, 16 Stat. 140, later amended by the Act of February 28, 1871, 16 Stat. 433; the Ku Klux Klan or Anti-lynching Act of April 20, 1871, 17 Stat. 13. 10 Quoted in William B. Hesseltine, The South in American History, Prentice-Hall, 1943, p. 568. The New York Tribune, once a major voice of Abolition, said that the Negroes had been given "ample opportunity to develop their own latent capacities, but instead had proven that "as a race they are idle, ignorant, and vicious." It was a sentiment shared by much of the Northern press. The courts, too, seemed generally agreed that the battle flags should be stored away. In decision after decision, they took pains to give the most limited interpretation possible to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.12 In 1883, the Supreme Court declared parts of the Civil Rights Acts unconstitutional.13 While the North looked the other way, the Southern conservatives began fashioning a political structure according to their own necessities. In that structure, there was a place for the Negro only when he was needed. For some 15 years the legal sanctions that had given the vote to the Southern Negro remained on the books, but on election day the Negro generally remained at home. To keep Negroes from the polls and thus consolidate white control, ingenious and sometimes violent methods were employed. Porter has succinctly catalogued the practices employed: The activities of the Ku-Klux have been immortalized in book and play. Less dramatic were the practices of brute violence and intimidation, clever manipulation of ballots and ballot boxes, the deliberate theft of ballot boxes, false counting of votes, repeating, the use of tissue' ballots, illegal arrests the day before election, and the sudden removing of the polls.14 These methods were eminently successful. It is true that some Negroes did vote and, in rare instances, some even held office. But their vote was closely controlled, and was used only when a white faction needed it to assure victory. Too often, election day, especially in the Deep South, was bloody. Rioting in the 1878 elections in Louisiana left more than 30 dead, and the 1884 elections were only slightly less violent. What fraud could not do, violence accomplished. Responsible Southerners deplored the situation; many others simply would have no part of politics. One of them, later writing of the era, expressed sentiments that were widely shared: We got rid of Negro government, but we got in place of it a government resting upon fraud and chicanery, and it very soon became a serious question which was worse, a Negro government or a white government resting upon stuffed ballot boxes.15 11 Quoted in C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913. Louisiana State University Press, 1951, p. 216. 12 Slaughter House Cases, 16 Wall. 36 (1873), United States v. Cruckshank, 92 U.S. 542 (1876), Virginia v. Rives, 100 U.S. 313 (1880), Ex parte Virginia, 100 U.S. 339 (1880) as to the Fourteenth Amendment; United States v. Reese, 92 U.S. 214 (1875) as to the Fifteenth Amendment. 13 Civil Rights Cases, 109 U.S. 3 (1883), United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883). "K. H. Porter, A History of Suffrage in the United States, 1918, pp. 196-97. 15 William L. Royall, Some Reminiscences, New York, 1909, pp. 201-202. Because of the frequent charges of fraud and corruption, the U.S. House of Representatives often closely scrutinized the returns in Southern congressional elections. Fraud was the basis for contesting 16 of the 20 disputed House elections from Virginia between 1874 and 1900.16 Of 183 contested House elections in approximately the same period, 107 were in the South.17 Fraud, accomplished in part with controlled Negro votes, prompted moves toward systematic disfranchisement of Negroes. But probably the greatest motivating force was the threat posed to the solidarity and dominance of the Democratic Party by the Southern Farmers Alliance. This agrarian protest movement, which sprang up to challenge the business-minded conservatives during the farm depression of the 1870's and 1880's was everywhere identified with, and in many places merged with, the Populist Party. Beginning with the campaigns of 1888, both the conservatives and the Populist-Alliance used Negro voters in great numbers. In the bitter disputes of the 1890's, sometimes fought out within the Democratic party (as by Ben Tillman in South Carolina), sometimes involving a third party challenge (as by Tom Watson in Georgia), sometimes involving fusion movements (as by Republicans, Negroes, and Populists in North Carolina), the Negro played a key role. Either as a voter or as an issue, the Negro was a major factor in the politics of the period.1 In North Carolina, where the future of the Democratic party was threatened by a fusion of Republicans and Populists, over 1,000 Negroes held political office at one time in the mid-1890's. The Negro, it appeared, might soon hold the balance of power in Southern politics. White factions, though bitterly at odds with each other, began to close ranks against him. It was not Emancipation or Reconstruction but this move to preserve white political dominance that also brought the beginnings of mass compulsory segregation called Jim Crow. This was the timetable of measures aimed at Negro voting: 1889 Florida adopted a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting and set up a system of confusing "multiple" ballot boxes. (The latter statute was repealed in 1895.) 1890 Mississippi Constitution: 1. Increased the residence requirement to two years for the state and one year for the election district. 2. Instituted the payment of a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting. 3. Required that registration must be completed four months before an election. 4. Instituted a literacy or "understanding" requirement. 5. Specified crimes for which conviction could cause disqualification at the polls. 1890 Tennessee: Adopted payment of a poll tax as a voting prerequisite. Vladimer O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation, A. A. Knopf, 1949, p. 540. 17 Woodward, op. cit. supra note 11, at 326. 18 Hugh D. Price, The Negro and Southern Politics, New York, 1957, pp. 15-16. 1893 Arkansas: Adopted payment of a poll tax as a voting prerequisite. 1895 South Carolina Constitution: 1. Required a poll tax as a prerequisite of voting. 2. Required that all assessed taxes must be paid up. 3. Instituted disqualifications for certain criminal convictions. 1898 Louisiana Constitution: 1. Provided for a poll tax and required that the receipt for payment be shown by the voter. 2. Made a property test the alternative for a literacy test. 3. Instituted the "grandfather clause," which qualified as voters those who could vote in 1867 or the descendants of such persons, providing they registered within a year as permanent voters. 1901 Alabama Constitution: 1. A poll tax as a prerequisite of voting. 2. Criminal disqualifications. 3. Property qualifications as an alternative to a literacy qualification. 1902 North Carolina: 1. Instituted a "grandfather clause," an educational requirement, and poll tax as a prerequisite of voting. 2. Extended the residence requirement. 1902 Virginia Constitution: 1. Provided for a poll tax as a prerequisite of voting. 2. Instituted a literacy test and a "grandfather clause." 19 1902 Texas: Adopted a poll tax as a prerequisite of voting. 1908 Georgia: Which had a poll tax as early as 1877, added a literacy requirement. The members of the conventions and legislatures that ratified the fait accompli of Negro disfranchisement left little room for misunderstanding of their motives. The chairman of the suffrage subcommittee in the Virginia convention declared: "I expect the examination with which the black men will be confronted to be inspired by the same spirit that inspires every man upon this floor and in this convention. I do not expect an impartial administration of this clause.” 20 Arguing in favor of the literacy requirement in the North Carolina legislature, a member concluded that "there's not the slightest difference of principle between that law [the Massachusetts' educational qualification for suffrage] and the one we now have under consideration. Our's is to protect us against ignorant negroes, their's [sic] to protect them against ignorant foreigners." 21 Purification of elections was frequently given as the justification for restriction of the electorate, although how genuine this justification was is open to some question. A delegate in the Alabama con 19 Strictly speaking, this requirement was somewhat different from the so-called grandfather clauses in that it provided that any person or son (not descendant) of a person who served in time of war in the Army or Navy of the United States or of the Confederate States or of any State of the United States or of the Confederate States was eligible to register. 20 Quoted in Porter, op. cit. supra note 14, at 218. 21 Helen G. Edmonds, The Negro and Fusion Politics in North Carolina, 1894-1901, Chapel Hill, the University of North Carolina Press, 1951, p. 182. |