The Lesser Effects of War
The Civil War also had an impact on other suffrage-related matters. One unusual, but not surprising, consequence was the appearance of a new qualification: loyalty. Both the federal Reconstruction Act and the constitutions adopted by Reconstruction governments in a half dozen southern states disfranchised prominent Confederates because of their role in the rebellion. Although more draconian provisions were considered—in 1868 one angry Virginia conservative complained that the draft constitution ought to read “no white man shall vote”—these punitive measures ended up affecting only a few thousand men, usually temporarily.45
Other consequences of the war cut in the opposite direction, toward expansion of the franchise. For the first time, states were obliged to contend head-on with the issue of absentee voting: reluctant to deny the franchise to men who were bearing arms to defend the Union, nineteen states enacted laws enabling soldiers in the field to vote. In so doing, they established a precedent for loosening the links between residence and participation in elections. The experience of war also led to the enfranchisement of some military veterans who failed to meet existing qualifications: Massachusetts, for example, voted to exempt ex-soldiers from the pauper exclusion in its constitution.46
Similarly, declarant aliens, many of whom were serving or had served in the army, were enfranchised in ten states or federal territories in the 1860s. The war, however, attached new strings to noncitizen voting. After a series of contested legal actions in the states, Congress specified in 1863 that aliens who had declared their intention to become citizens were subject to the military draft. A short while later, President Lincoln signed a proclamation offering declarant aliens the choice of becoming eligible for the draft or renouncing their intention to become citizens and leaving the country within sixty-five days. An exception was made for declarants who had already voted: they were not given the option of renunciation and were immediately vulnerable to the draft. The path connecting military service to voting had begun to carry traffic in both directions. 47
The South Redeemed
I cannot do justice to my own feelings without . . . commenting upon . . . that great fifteenth amendment . . . the hearts of the Virginia people have never approved it, and true Virginians can never approve it. We do not believe that the colored man is the equal of the white man, and that is what the fifteenth amendment means.
I wish to put myself on record here as being opposed to what is known as manhood suffrage. I believe that the greatest mistake that any people ever made was made when the Convention of 1850 adopted manhood suffrage. I believe that the right to vote, as it is generally conceived by some ignorant politicians, is not a right but a privilege.
—R. L. GORDON, CONSTITUTIONAL
CONVENTION OF VIRGINIA, 1901-1902
Even before Reconstruction came to a quasi-formal end in 1877, black voting rights were under attack. Elections were hotly contested, and white Southerners, seeking to “redeem” the region from Republican rule, engaged in both legal and extralegal efforts to limit the political influence of freedmen. In the early 1870s, both in the South and in the border states, districts were gerrymandered (i.e., reshaped for partisan reasons), precincts reorganized, and polling places closed to hinder black political participation. Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia reinstituted financial requirements for voting, while local officials often made it difficult for freedmen to pay their taxes so that they could vote.48
Far more dramatic was a wave of what historian Eric Foner has called “counter-revolutionary terror” that swept the South between 1868 and 1871. Acting as the military, or paramilitary, arm of the Democratic Party, organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan mounted violent campaigns against blacks who sought to vote or hold office, as well as their white Republican allies. In 1870 alone, hundreds of freedmen were killed, and many more badly hurt, by politicized vigilante violence. Although the Klan was never highly centralized and actions generally were initiated by local chapters, its presence was felt throughout the region. Whites of all classes (but not all whites) supported the Klan, its leadership often drawn from the more “respectable” elements of society; support was so widespread that Republican state governments, as well as local officials, commonly found it impossible to contain the violence or convict offenders in court.49
The national government did not stand by idly. In May 1870, stretching the limits of its constitutional powers, Congress passed an Enforcement Act that made interference with voting a federal offense, punishable in federal courts—which presumably were more reliable than state courts. This first enforcement act was followed by others, including the Ku Klux Klan Act, which, among its provisions, authorized the president to deploy the army to protect the electoral process. These acts, pioneering efforts to enforce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments with federal machinery, gave enough support to sympathetic state and local officials to produce crackdowns on the Klan and similar organizations. As a result, violence declined in 1872. A few years later, however, the incidence of violence rose sharply again, and this time the federal government responded less forcefully. By the mid-1870s, many northern Republicans, including President Grant, had lost their enthusiasm for policing the South; preoccupied with an economic depression and labor conflict in the North, they wearily drifted toward a “let alone policy.” In September 1875, one Republican newspaper referred to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments as “dead letters.”50
The Redeemers who were gaining power throughout the South in the 1870s had goals that were at once political, social, and economic. Most immediately they sought to drive the Republicans from power and elect Democrats, an objective hard to attain in a fully enfranchised South. Limiting black voting therefore was a means to a precise end. But it was more than that: keeping freedmen from the polls was also a means of rebuffing broader claims to equality, a way of returning blacks to “their place,” of making clear that, whatever the Fourteenth Amendment said, blacks did not enjoy full citizenship.
There were important class dimensions to this political and racial agenda. Freedmen not only were men of a different race, they also constituted the primary labor supply of the agricultural South. Emancipation and Reconstruction threatened white control over needed black labor, and white landowners and merchants sought both to halt the erosion of labor discipline and to utilize the state to enforce their dominance. It was no accident that the Klan targeted economically successful blacks or that it tried to keep freedmen from owning land. When Redeemer governments came to power, they commonly passed draconian vagrancy laws (subjecting anyone without a job to possible arrest) as well as legislation prohibiting workers from quitting their jobs before their contracts expired. The Redeemers also enacted laws that harshly punished petty theft, gave landlords complete control of the crops grown by tenants, and reduced the proportion of tax revenues that went to education and social improvements. The resistance to black voting was rooted in class conflict as well as racial antagonism.51
The pace of Redemption was quickened by the presidential election of 1876 and the subsequent removal of the last federal troops from the South. At roughly the same time, the Supreme Court (in U.S. v. Cruikshank and U.S. v. Reese) challenged key provisions of the enforcement acts, largely on the grounds that the acts were too vaguely worded and too loosely tied to race to be enforceable under the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1878, moreover, Democrats won control of both houses of Congress for the first time in twenty years. The upshot of these events—which reflected the North’s growing fatigue with the issue of black rights—was to entrust the administration of voting laws in the South to state and local governments. Between 1878 and 1890, the average number of federal prosecutions launched annually under the enforcement acts fell below 100; in 1873 alone there had been more than 1,000.52
In the Deep South, the Republican Party crumbled under the onslaught of Redemption, but elsewhere the party hung on, and large, if declining, numbers of blacks continued to exercise the franchi
se. Periodically they were able to form alliances with poor and upcountry whites and even with some newly emerging industrial interests sympathetic to the probusiness policies of the Republicans. Opposition to the conservative, planter-dominated Redeemer Democrats, therefore, did not disappear: elections were contested by Republicans, by factions within the Democratic Party, and eventually by the Farmers’ Alliance and the Populists. Consequently, the Redeemers, who controlled most state legislatures, continued to try to shrink the black (and opposition white) electorate through gerrymandering, registration systems, complicated ballot configurations, and the secret ballot (which served as a de facto literacy test). When necessary, they also resorted to violence and fraudulent vote counts. In 1883, a black man in Georgia testified to a Senate committee that “we are in a majority here, but you may vote till your eyes drop out or your tongue drops out, and you can’t count your colored man in out of them boxes; there’s a hole gets in the bottom of the boxes some way and lets out our votes.”53
This period of limbo and contestation, of participation coexisting with efforts at exclusion, started coming to an end in 1890. One key ingredient in the shift was Congress’s failure to pass the Federal Elections Bill, commonly known as the Lodge Force Bill. The bill had its origins both in Republican outrage about the conduct of elections in the South and in national partisan politics. National elections were extremely close and fiercely contested in the late 1870s and 1880s; congressional majorities were unstable; and in 1884 Grover Cleveland became the first Democratic president since before the Civil War. In the eyes of many Republicans, the Democrats’ success, their ability to wield national power, was illegitimate, dependent on wholesale violations of the Fifteenth Amendment in the South. In its 1888 platform, the Republicans charged—and many Republicans believed—“that the present Administration and the Democratic majority owe their existence to the suppression of the ballot by a criminal nullification of the Constitution and laws of the United States.” After that year’s elections, the Republicans had a chance to do something about it: they had won the presidency and control of both houses of Congress.54
With the support of President Benjamin Harrison, congressional Republicans, led by two Massachusetts leaders, George Frisbie Hoar in the Senate and Henry Cabot Lodge in the House, drafted legislation to expand and strengthen the enforcement acts of the 1870s. Although the Supreme Court in the mid-1880s had shifted course and upheld several provisions of these acts, Republicans were convinced that stronger medicine was needed—both to end suppression of the black vote in the South and eliminate the growing problem of fraud in congressional elections throughout the nation. The bill that they drafted, the Federal Elections Bill, was ostensibly nonpartisan and nonsectional in its goals: it authorized federal circuit courts, on petition of a small number of citizens from any district, to appoint federal supervisors of congressional elections. These supervisors were entrusted with a raft of responsibilities, including attending elections, inspecting registration lists, verifying information given by doubtful voters, administering oaths to challenged voters, preventing illegal immigrants from voting, and certifying the count. As important, the bill gave federal officials and courts the power to overturn election results that had been declared and certified by state officials. Although the seventy-five-page bill made little mention of force (the label “force bill” was applied by opponents), the House (but not the Senate) version did authorize the president to utilize the army, if necessary, to guarantee the legal conduct of elections.55
Most Republicans supported the Federal Elections Bill for a mixture of partisan and principled reasons. The Republicans certainly stood to gain from fair elections in the South and from less corrupt elections in some Democratically run northern cities; they also were likely to control the federal machinery that they were attempting to create. Yet there was more to the force bill than a partisan grab for advantage. Men such as Hoar, who had voted for the enforcement acts of the 1870s, were the partial heirs of the Radical Republicans, appalled by what was occurring in the South, enraged that the hard-won victories of war and Reconstruction were being undermined by fraud and violence. Hoar believed equal rights to be a core value of the Republican Party and that “in all these race difficulties and troubles, the fault has been with the Anglo-Saxon.” Lodge, younger and more ambitious, aspired to Charles Sumner’s Senate seat and had long imbibed abolitionist and radical sentiments. The freedmen, he maintained in a carefully argued speech echoing the debates over the Fifteenth Amendment, “took their muskets in their hands and went to the front by regiments. They died in the trenches and on the battle-field by hundreds for the Government which up to that time had only fastened their chains more securely. . . . Such loyalty and fidelity . . . demand some better reward . . . than the negro has ever received.” Lodge continued,The Government which made the black man a citizen is bound to protect him in his rights as a citizen of the United States, and it is a cowardly Government if it does not do it! No people can afford to write anything into their Constitution and not sustain it. A failure to do what is right brings its own punishment to nations as to men.56
The Democrats, of course, fiercely opposed the bill, denouncing it as “a scheme to rob the people of the States of the dearest right of American citizenship.” They argued that it was partisan, hypocritical, unnecessary, unacceptably expensive, and potentially dictatorial; they also claimed it to be an unconstitutional assertion of federal dominance over the states. (The Republicans defended the bill’s constitutionality by citing both the Fourteenth Amendment and Supreme Court cases of the 1880s.) In the House, where the bill actually came to a vote, no Democrats supported it.57
What sank the Federal Elections Bill, however, was not Democratic hostility but rather parliamentary maneuvering, happenstance, and division among the Republicans. Within the Republican Party, debates about ideology and political strategy had been brewing since Reconstruction. On one side stood those, like Hoar, who believed that the party’s identity should remain closely tied to equal rights and that its best chance for national political dominance was to dissolve the solidly Democratic South by insisting on black suffrage, on a “free ballot and a fair count.” Dissenters to this view, such as Pennsylvania’s powerful Senator Matthew S. Quay, preferred to emphasize the party’s procapitalist, pro-economic development, protariff views; they were convinced that such an approach would attract a new white constituency in the South while shoring up Republican support elsewhere. Although adherents of the latter view were not necessarily opposed to the elections bill, they did not see it as essential or high-priority legislation.
As a result, the bill became stalled in the Senate after being narrowly passed by the House (thanks to Speaker Thomas Reed’s forceful maintenance of party discipline). Quay and his Pennsylvania colleague, J. Donald Cameron, maneuvered to postpone consideration of the elections bill until the short session of Congress, because they wanted the Senate to act first on the McKinley tariff. Then, during the short session, the silver Republicans from the West, led by Senator Stewart of Nevada, joined with the Democrats to again delay discussion, to permit Congress to consider a measure dealing with the coinage of silver. Stewart, who had been one of the principal authors of the final draft of the Fifteenth Amendment, opposed the Lodge Force Bill because he claimed that it was unenforceable and that only time and education could mend the racial divide in the South. When the elections bill finally came to the floor, it was met by a Democratic filibuster—which ended, early in 1891, when the Senate, to the surprise of many, voted to halt debate to take up an apportionment act. This decisive procedural vote, effectively killing the elections bill, passed the Senate by a vote of thirty-five to thirty-four, with nineteen abstentions. 58
The Senate vote brought congressional efforts to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment to a halt. Once again, by a small margin, the federal government backed away from a significant expansion of its role in shaping electoral law and guaranteeing democratic rights; once again, t
his occurred not only because the nation and the Congress were divided, but also because of back-door political dealing and accidents of timing. Congress’s decision in January 1891 was not as consequential as were its actions on the Fifteenth Amendment, but it nonetheless signaled to the South that the federal government was not prepared to act energetically to guarantee the voting rights of blacks. Several years later, when Democrats again gained control of both Congress and the presidency, they amplified that signal by repealing the enforcement acts of the 1870s. Whatever the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments said on paper, the right to vote was back in the hands of the states. Not until the 1960s, when the Lodge Force Bill was reincarnated as Lyndon Johnson’s Voting Rights Act, did Congress again seriously consider federal intervention in southern politics.59
The year 1890 also marked the beginning of systematic efforts by southern states to disfranchise black voters legally. Faced with recurrent electoral challenges, the annoying expense of buying votes, and controversy surrounding epidemics of fraud and violence, Democrats chose to solidify their hold on the South by modifying the voting laws in ways that would exclude African Americans without overtly violating the Fifteenth Amendment. Experiments with these legal strategies had occurred in the 1870s and 1880s, but it was between 1890 and 1905 that they became the primary weapon in enforcing and institutionalizing Redeemer rule. In deploying this weapon, white Democrats turned back the clock on the broadly progressive franchise provisions that had been etched into most Reconstruction-era state constitutions. (See Tables A.10 to A.15.)60
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