Capitol Men

by Philip Dray

  Washington's suggestion that blacks abandon their agitation for re-form likely found a receptive hearer in Ben Tillman, but Tillman meant to meet the educator's idea more than halfway; he intended to fix the "problem" of Negro voting once and for all. The Tillmanites perhaps sensed some new urgency in this project, for with the election of Benjamin Harrison in 1888, the Republicans controlled the White House and both houses of Congress again for the first time since the end of Reconstruction. Such a majority could mean a revived threat of federal intervention, and indeed, beginning in early 1890, the Republicans came close to passing two pieces of legislation that were anathema to the South.

  The first, introduced by Senator Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire, was an education bill that would provide money to upgrade the region's schools. Many Southerners recognized the need for such help, but the bill also provoked anxieties of federal meddling in school curricula, teacher qualifications, and, far worse, the desegregation of its schools and pupils. It suffered a narrow defeat when Senate Republicans, confronting a bloc of Democratic opposition, failed to hold their own majority. An even sharper concern for Southerners was the legislation crafted by Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, which would establish federal supervision of elections. The merit of Lodge's proposal was obvious: dire statistics clearly showed how blacks were being disenfranchised. But the bill resembled the infamous Enforcement Acts and other intrusive laws and thus ran into a shatterproof wall of Southern resistance, with the assistance of some feckless Republicans.

  Although the bills that Blair and Lodge proposed were turned back, the extended debates they generated in Congress and in the press hardened Southerners' determination to further marginalize the black electorate. In 1865 Mississippi had been the first state to write and enforce a series of Black Codes, which other states then emulated; in 1875 it had again shown the way, bringing about home rule with its Mississippi Plan; now it achieved another first, convening a state constitutional convention in late summer 1890 that aimed, among other reforms, to devise more permanent means of disenfranchising the state's black majority.

  For white Mississippians, as later for Ben Tillman, key legal and constitutional issues stood at stake. Any steps to relegate the black voter to the sidelines could not directly violate the Fifteenth Amendment, which stated, "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." In addition, each state of the former Confederacy readmitted to the Union during Reconstruction did so under the condition that its constitution would never "be amended or changed as to deprive any citizen, or class of citizens of the United States, of the right to vote." The renovation of the state constitution in Mississippi had to cleverly void or nullify these federal restrictions without openly defying them. If federal law could prohibit states from denying blacks access to the ballot, state law might establish criteria for the exercise of suffrage that would erect insurmountable hurdles and permit wide discretion on the part of official registrars, effectively accomplishing the same result.

  The most ingenious of these was put forward in 1890: the "understanding clause" was the brainchild of James Z. George, one of the architects of the Mississippi Plan. By requiring that every voter "be able to read any section of the Constitution of this State; or he shall be able to understand the same when read to him, or give a reasonable interpretation thereof," the clause provided registrars not only with a rigorous means of challenging would-be voters but also with enormous latitude in judging who had failed or succeeded in qualifying.

  At first, the state's press and public were taken aback by the prospect of enshrining so ignoble and blatant a fraud in a section of the new constitution. One delegate termed it diabolical, noting that "the mephitic vapor that arises from the section actually stinks in the nostrils of an honest man." As a small-town editor cautioned, if the legendary minds of Daniel Webster and John C. Calhoun could not agree about what the U.S. Constitution meant, then surely in Mississippi there would be "honest differences of opinion between a corn-field nigger and inspectors of election."

  The outcry gradually subsided though, because even the critics of the proposed clause came to agree that it was a kind of silver bullet—an indestructible means of attaining the objective of black disenfranchisement while maintaining the voting privileges of ignorant, even illiterate whites. Its cleverness and potential efficacy simply could not be denied. Leading newspapers from Jackson and Vicksburg began to tout the clause, and at the convention even the sole black delegate, Isaiah T. Montgomery of the all-black town of Mound Bayou in the Mississippi Delta, acquiesced to it, apparently recognizing that resistance was futile. On November 1, 1890, the new Mississippi constitution, including the "understanding clause," was successfully adopted.

  Thus with rather dismal expectations the South Carolina blacks saw their own state constitution opened for adjustment and repair. "The convention which met [in Columbia] in 1895 was very different both in intent and personnel from that of 1868," notes the historian Okon Edet Uya. "The latter had been called for the special purpose of giving the blacks political rights consonant with their status as citizens; that of 1895 met for the expressed purpose of taking those rights away." John Gary Evans, the new governor and convention president (Ben Tillman had become a U.S. senator but essentially controlled the convention), opened the proceedings by urging delegates to "do our duty in this matter boldly and fearlessly, without regard to the censure of foreigners and aliens. We have experienced the cost and hardship of the rule of the ignorant, and know what it means."

  The six African American delegates, sent by districts so overwhelmingly black that even Tillman had not managed to expunge these men, would be allowed their say, for the Tillmanites were keen on dressing the convention in as much propriety as possible. Held in a building with the marks of General Sherman's cannonballs still visible outside and the original ordinance of secession hanging inside, the gathering had from the start a self-willed sense of historic importance and inevitability, a "momentous" event, averred the Charleston News & Courier, "for millions of people now living and for millions more yet unborn."

  For Robert Smalls, the gathering seemed more likely a "momentous" nightmare, a topsy-turvy world in which everything he had accomplished was to be mocked or destroyed. Listening to Pitchfork Ben, a man Smalls considered a degenerate and a criminal, arraign Reconstruction and the state's black leadership, would have been especially painful. Equally disturbing were the idiotic remarks offered by delegates in defense of white supremacy, such as Robert Aldrich's characterization of the federal mandate for the 1868 convention as "the greatest crime of the nineteenth century," or worse, Henry C. Burns's view that "slavery to the negro was a blessing in disguise," for "when [they] landed at Jamestown they were ... barbarians, idolaters, they ran about like turkeys, catching grasshoppers and lizards and eating them with the highest relish."

  If there was anything encouraging about the situation, it was the extent to which men like Smalls, and the other black delegates including William J. Whipper, had evolved as politicians. (Whipper, the former state legislator who had figured unfavorably in the Black Thursday fiasco under Chamberlain, had become a judge in the Sea Islands.) Long mistreated as upstarts or "aliens," it was they who possessed the status of political veterans and carried the institutional memory of the state's government, they who spoke most knowledgably about the past three decades of its political history. Yet if their battle with the Tillmanites was one of wisdom versus cleverness, cleverness unfortunately had the greater numbers, as well as the podium and the gavel.

  Tillman's own speech to the convention coarsely summed up the evolution of state politics since the war. He began by linking the arrival of the carpetbaggers to the national agitation over the Black Codes. "[The Codes] gave the black Republicans, Thad Stevens and his gang, excuse for their Reconstruction deviltry," Tillman said, "and caused these hellhounds, a
ctuated by hate for the Southern people, to determine upon degrading us to the lowest level possible, and they had at hand an instrument which the most fertile imagination, if it had been given a thousand years to concoct a scheme of villainy, could not have surpassed. It was the presence among us of our slaves set free by the results of the war.

  "How did it come about and who must bear the blame [for Reconstruction]?" he asked.

  We are told the negroes didn't do it. "Oh, we didn't do it," they say [mimicking the blacks seated in the hall]. You blindly followed and obeyed the orders of the Freedmen's Bureau and the Union League and ignored the appeals of your former masters, who treated you with kindness and furnished you with your daily bread. I myself can testify that appeal after appeal was made by me, and by almost every white man in the state ... But every one of you, almost up to 1876, blindly followed wherever these white thieves ordered.

  The negroes furnished the ballots ... The negroes put the little pieces of paper in the box that gave the commission to these white scoundrels ... and this must be our justification, our vindication and our excuse to the world that we are met in convention openly, boldly, without any pretense or secrecy, to announce that it is our purpose, as far as we may, without coming in conflict with the United States Constitution, to put such safeguards around this ballot in future, to so restrict the suffrage and circumscribe it, that this infamy can never come about again.

  Tillman read aloud some of the evidence from that hallmark of innuendo, the 1877 "Report on Public Frauds," which alleged that the black members of the Reconstruction state legislature had indulged in expensive and needless articles, such as 40$ spittoons, 25$ hat pegs, $4 looking glasses, $200 crimson plush sofas, Havana cigars, champagne, and $600 mirrors, in addition to defrauding the people with extravagant printing costs. Tillman assailed the name of the former state senator Charles P. Leslie, disgraced as the inept head of Richard Cain's state land commission in the early 1870s, who had once said, according to Tillman, "The state had no right to be a state unless she could pay and take care of her statesmen." But Leslie was an easy target. Corrupt, slipshod in his administrative methods at the land commission, he had provided conservatives for many years with a ready illustration of Republican and carpetbag excess. When a black delegate, James E. Wigg, interrupted Tillman to remind him that Leslie was a white man, Tillman shushed him, warning, "I will find you a plenty of nigs after a while."

  This rant about Reconstruction-era expense accounts was deeply hypocritical, of course, for even the worst allegations in the "Report on Public Frauds" could hardly be measured against the momentous fraud Tillman and his friends wished to perpetrate in disenfranchising thousands of South Carolina citizens; and one point seldom conceded—or ever mentioned—was that prior to the Civil War, state politicians tended to be wealthy landowners who had little need of government-provided supplies, travel costs, or even a salary.

  Looking now to the future, Tillman demanded, "Can we not rise to the necessities of the occasion, and put into this Constitution such an Article in reference to suffrage as will guarantee, as far as the law can guarantee, to future generations that they shall have the blessings of Anglo-Saxon civilization and liberty in this State? How pitiable, how puerile, how ineffably, unutterably contemptible appear the personal ambitions and petty spites of men alongside of this grand and glorious purpose!"

  In addition to Mississippi's example, the Tillmanites had for inspiration a pamphlet by a former state legislator named Edward McCrady Jr., bearing the innocuous title "The Necessity of Raising the Standard of Citizenship," which explained how certain simple proofs of citizenship could be legalized that would effectively deny the vote. McCrady, the father of the "eight box law," had outlined the danger of allowing even a significant black voting minority to exist, for fear it would at some point be exploited by whites in an unscrupulous coalition. An old-fashioned conservative in the mode of Wade Hampton, McCrady was known to disapprove of Tillman, but Tillman's convention seized upon many of McCrady's ideas for placing severe "citizenship" restrictions on the state's voters, such as rules concerning place of residency, literacy, and past criminal records. The crimes enumerated were those that blacks were more often accused of, such as burglary, arson, forgery, adultery, bigamy, wife beating, fencing stolen goods, and sodomy. Curiously, murder, rioting, and lynching—more typically white crimes—were not listed. (The black delegates proposed that lynching be added to the list, but the resolution was not carried.)

  The most controversial proposed rule was Mississippi's "understanding clause," the loophole that empowered local registrars to quiz voting applicants to see whether they "understood," and could explain to the registrar's satisfaction, a paragraph chosen from the state's constitution. Smalls, seeing the clause for what it was—a means of barring blacks from the polls while admitting any white—spoke out against it, calling instead for a straight-up literacy test. There were, as of the census of 1890, he said, a total of 102,657 white males over the age of twenty-one in South Carolina, and 132,949 black males. Of the whites, 13,242 were estimated to be illiterate; of the blacks, 58,086. Thus, if a fairly applied test kept all illiterate men from the ballot, the whites would reverse the blacks' voting majority in the state by about 15,000. What many delegates knew, however, was that since virtually all the white illiterates in the state belonged to the Tillmanite faction, the blacks of the state might still attain a majority if they managed to forge an alliance with moderate whites—the very coalition that had worried McCrady and that existed briefly in the decade's Southern Populist movement. As the black delegate James Wigg noted, "The doctrine so persistently taught that the interests of the negro and Anglo-Saxon are so opposed as to be irreconcilable is a political subterfuge; a fallacy so glaring in its inception, so insulting to Providence, so contrary to reason and logic of history, that one can scarcely refrain from calling in question either the sanity or honesty of its advocates." It was the truth of Wigg's statement, and the fear of just such a partnership, that made an across-the-board literacy test unacceptable to the Tillmanites.

  Smalls warned that Tillmanite abuses of voting rights would be ultimately destructive: they would further alienate black South Carolinians, perhaps driving them away and creating labor shortages as did the Exodus of 1879, and they would reinforce the state's, and the region's, already glaring reputation for racial injustice. He added that since 1865 as many as fifty-three thousand blacks had been killed in the South, but no more than two or three whites had ever been held accountable for these deaths. In response, Tillman accused Smalls and other blacks of corruption and high-handedness during Reconstruction's "era of good stealing." Smalls vehemently denied the characterization, citing evidence that the charges against him, as enumerated in the "Report on Public Frauds," had been trumped up. "I stand here the equal of any man," Smalls declared. "I started out in the war with the Confederates; they threatened to punish me and I left them. I went to the Union army. I fought in seventeen battles to make glorious and perpetuate the flag that some of you trampled under your feet. Innocent of every charge attempted to be made here today against me, no act of yours can in any way blur the record that I have made at home and abroad."

  It was heartening that a resounding national reaction greeted Smalls's stand in the South Carolina convention. Letters and telegrams of approbation poured in from across the country, many daring to suggest that Smalls's eloquence had demolished the basis of the Tillmanites' assault on black rights. As one editorial noted of Smalls's "brilliant moral victory," white anxiety about blacks in politics "is not born so much of regard for their numbers as their intellectual ability. It is not Negro ignorance but Negro intelligence that is being feared."

  This theory was conveniently demonstrated when "the Boat Thief" managed to turn the tables on the dominant party one more time. The Democrats had sought to establish codes of punishment in the new constitution for committing the social taboo of racial intermarriage. In response, Smalls counterproposed an
amendment stating that any white person caught in cohabitation with a black person should be barred from holding public office and that any offspring from such a union should bear the father's name. And since it was common knowledge that a black man who dared even a romantic pass at a white woman was asking to be lynched, he suggested that a similar, but legal standard be made to apply to white men who sexually exploited black women. "The coons had the dogs up the tree for a change," laughed the Columbia State, for Smalls had successfully indicted a long tradition of misbehavior and hypocrisy among white males, and in doing so he had probably made every Democrat in the chamber squirm. His amendment was refused, but not before Tillman's convention was made to discuss and consider its ramifications.

  The voting measures adopted by the convention gave the franchise to males over the age of twenty-one who had resided in the state for two years, their county one year, and their precinct four months. (These requirements were meant to set limits on black voters, who tended to be more transient.) A poll tax would be paid in May, six months before November elections. (This deadline preyed on farmers, for the late spring was a time when they were traditionally cash poor.) In addition, the convention approved both the literacy test and the "understanding clause," to be applied at the registrar's discretion, although anyone who had paid taxes on $300 worth of property would be exempt. (The U.S. Supreme Court would uphold the "understanding clause" in an 1898 decision, Williams v. Mississippi, refusing to rule that it and other suffrage provisions were discriminatory. Similar clauses were duly enacted by Louisiana in 1898, North Carolina in 1900, Alabama and Virginia in 1901, Georgia in 1908, and Oklahoma in 1910.) The idea of a grandfather clause, requiring black registrants to prove they'd had an ancestor who was a registered voter, was dropped as unnecessary, and Tillman dismissed Robert Aldrich's suggestion that no black person ever be allowed to hold public office as inflammatory and likely to excite Northern opinion. Given the new restrictions on black voting, it was in any case now superfluous.