THE SOUTHERN BALLOT-BOX
Free negroes could vote in North Carolina until 1835, when a
Constitutional Convention, not without division of sentiment, abolished
negroid franchise on the ground that it was an evil. Thereafter, negroes
first voted in the South in 1866, when the "Prince of Carpet-Baggers,"
Henry C. Warmouth, who had been dismissed from the Federal Army, conferred
the privilege in a bogus election; he had a charity-box attachment to
every ballot-box and a negro dropping a ballot into one had to drop fifty
cents into the other, contributions paying Warmouth's expenses as special
delegate to Washington, where Congress refused to recognize him. He
returned to Louisiana and in two years was governor and in three was worth
a quarter of a million dollars and a profitable autograph. "It cost me
more," said W. S. Scott, "to get his signature to a bill than to get the
bill through the Legislature"--a striking comparison, for to get a bill
through this Legislature of which Warmouth said, "there is but one honest
man in it," was costly process. Warmouth said of himself, "I don't pretend
to be honest, but only as honest as anybody in politics."
Between the attitude of the army and the politicians on the negro
question, General Sherman drew this comparison: "We all felt sympathy for
the negroes, but of a different kind from that of Mr. Stanton, which was
not of pure humanity but of politics.... I did not dream that the former
slaves would be suddenly, without preparation, manufactured into
voters.... I doubted the wisdom of at once clothing them with the elective
franchise ... and realised the national loss in the death of Mr. Lincoln,
who had long pondered over the difficult questions involved."
April Fool's Day, 1870, a crowd clustered around General Grant in the
White House; a stroke of his pen was to proclaim four millions of people,
literate or illiterate, civilised or uncivilised, ready or unready,
voters. When the soldier had signed the instrument politicians had
prepared for him, the proclamation announcing that the Fifteenth Amendment
had been added to the Constitution of the United States by the
ratification of twenty-nine, some one begged for the historic pen, and he
silently handed it over. One who was present relates: "Somebody exclaimed,
'Now negroes can vote anywhere!', and a venerable old gentleman in the
crowd cried out, 'Well, gentlemen, you will all be d----d sorry for this!'
The President's father-in-law, Dent, Sr., was said to be the speaker." In
Richmond, the Dent family had seen a good deal of freedmen. Negroes voted
in 1867, over two years prior to this, Congress by arbitrary act vesting
them with a right not conferred by Federal or State Constitutions. They
voted for delegates to frame the new State Constitutions; then on their
own right to vote!--this right forming a plank in said Constitutions.
The Southern ballot-box was the new toy of the Ward of the Nation; the
vexation of housekeepers and farmers, the despair of statesmen, patriots,
and honest men generally. Elections were preceded by political meetings,
often incendiary in character, which all one's servants must attend. With
election day, every voting precinct became a picnic-ground, to say no
worse. Negroes went to precincts overnight and camped out. Morning
revealed reinforcements arriving. All sexes and ages came afoot, in carts,
in wagons, as to a fair or circus. Old women set up tables and spread out
ginger-cakes and set forth buckets of lemonade. One famous campaign
manager had all-night picnics in the woods, with bonfires, barrels of
liquor, darkeys sitting around drinking, fiddling, playing the banjo,
dancing. The instant polls opened they were marched up and voted. Negroes
almost always voted in companies. A leader, standing on a box, handed out
tickets as they filed past. All were warned at Loyal Leagues to vote no
ticket other than that given by the leader, usually a local coloured
preacher who could no more read the ballots he distributed than could the
recipients. Fights were plentiful as ginger-cakes. The all-day picnic
ended only with closing of polls, and not always then, darkeys hanging
around and carrying scrapping and jollification into the night.
How their white friends would talk and talk the day before election to
butlers, coachmen, hoers and plowers, on the back porch or at the woodpile
or the stables; and how darkeys would promise, "Yessuh, I gwi vote lak you
say." And how their old masters would return from the polls next day with
heads hung down, and the young ex-masters would return mad, and saying,
"This country is obliged to go to the devil!"
There were a great many trying phases of the situation. As for example:
Conservatives were running General Eppa Hunton for Congress. Among the
General's coloured friends was an old negro, Julian, his ward of pity, who
had no want that he did not bring to the General. Election day, he sought
the General at the polls, saying: "Mars Eppie, I want some shingles fuh my
roof." "You voted for me, Julian?" "Naw, naw, Mars Eppie, I voted de
straight Publikin ticket, suh." He got the shingles. When "Mars Eppie"
was elected, Julian came smiling: "Now, Mars Eppie, bein' how as you's
goin' to Congress, I 'lowed you mought have a leetle suppin tuh gimme." A
party of young lawyers tried to persuade their negro servant to vote with
them. "Naw, naw," he said. "De debbul mought git me. Dar ain't but two
parties named in de Bible--de Publikins an' Sinners. I gwi vote wid de
Publikins."
In everything but politics, the negro still reposed trust in "Ole
Marster;" his aches, pains, "mis'ries," family and business troubles, were
all for "Ole Marster," not for the carpet-baggers. The latter feared he
would take "Ole Marster's" advice when he went to the polls, so they
wrought in him hatred and distrust. The negro is not to blame for his
political blunders. It would never have occurred to him to ask for the
ballot; as greatness upon some, so was the franchise untimely thrust upon
him, and he has much to live down that would never have been charged
against him else.
"Brownlow's armed cohorts, negroes principally," one of my father's
friends wrote from Tennessee in 1867, "surround our polls. All the
unlettered blacks go up, voting on questions of State interest which they
do not in the least understand, while intelligent, tax-paying whites, who
must carry the consequences of their acts, are not allowed to vote. I
stayed on my plantation on election day and my negroes went to the polls.
So it was all around me--white men at home, darkeys off running the
government. Negro women went, too; my wife was her own cook and
chambermaid--and butler, for the butler went."
Educated, able, patriotic men, eager to heal the breaches of war, anxious
to restore the war-wrecked fortunes of impoverished States, would have to
stand idly by, themselves disfranchised, and see their old and faithful
negroes marched up to the polls like sheep to the shambles and voted by,
and for the personal advancement of, political sharpers who had no solid
interest in the State or its people, white or black. It would be no less
trying when, instead of this meek, good-natured line, they would find
masses of insolent, armed blacks keeping whites from the polls, or receive
tragic evidence that ambushed guards were commanding with Winchesters all
avenues to the ballot-box. Not only "Secesh" were turned back, but Union
men, respectable Republicans, also; as in Big Creek, Missouri, when a
citizen who had lost four sons in the Union Army was denied right to vote.
"Kill him! kill him!" cried negroes when at Hudson Station, Virginia, a
negro cast a Conservative ticket.
"This county," says a Southerner now occupying a prominent place in
educational work for the negro, "had about 1,600 negro majority at the
time the tissue ballot came into vogue. It was a war measure. The
character and actions of the men who rode to power on the negro ballot
compelled us to devise means of protection and defense. Even the negroes
wanting to vote with us dared not. One of my old servants, who sincerely
desired to follow my advice and example in the casting of his ballot, came
to me on the eve of election and sadly told me he could not. 'Marster,' he
said, 'I been tol' dat I'll be drummed outer de chu'ch ef I votes de
Conserv'tive ticket.' A negro preacher said: 'Marse Clay, dee'll take away
my license tuh preach ef I votes de white folks' ticket.' I did not cease
to reproach myself for inducing one negro to vote with me when I learned
that on the death of his child soon afterwards, his people showed no
sympathy, gave no help, and that he had to make the coffin and dig the
grave himself. I would have gone to his relief had I known, but he was too
terrorised to come to me. I did not seek to influence negro votes at the
next election; I adopted other means to effect the issue desired."
"If the whites succeed at the polls, they will put you back into slavery.
If we succeed, we will have the lands of the whites confiscated and give
every one of you forty acres and a mule." This scare and bribe was used in
every Southern State; used over and over; negroes only ceased to give
credence when after Cleveland's inauguration they found themselves still
free. On announcement of Cleveland's election, many negroes, prompt to
choose masters, hurried to former owners. The butler of Dr. J. L. M. Curry
(administrator of the Peabody Education Fund), appeared in distress before
Dr. Curry, pleading that, as he now must belong to some one, Dr. Curry
would claim him. An old "mammy" in Mayor Ellyson's family, distracted lest
she might be torn from her own white folks and assigned to strangers, put
up piteous appeal to her ex-owners.
From the political debauchery of the day, men of the old order shrank
appalled. Even when the test-oath qualification was no longer exacted and
disabilities were removed, many Southerners would not for a time touch the
unclean thing; then they voted as with averted faces, not because they had
faith in or respect for the process, but because younger men told them the
country's salvation demanded thus much of them. If a respectable man was
sent to the Legislature or Congress, he felt called upon to explain or
apologise to a stranger who might not understand the circumstances. His
relatives hastened to make excuse. "Uncle Ambrose is in the Legislature,
but he is honest," Uncle Ambrose's nieces and nephews hurried to tell
before the suspicious "Honourable" prefixed to his name brought judgment
on a good old man who had intended no harm, but had got into the
Legislature by accident rather than by design--who was there, in fact, by
reason of circumstances over which he had no control. The few
representative men who got into these mixed assemblies had difficulty in
making themselves felt. Judge Simonton, of the United States Circuit Court
(once President of the Charleston Library Association, Chairman of the
Board of School Commissioners, bearer of many civic dignities besides),
was member of a reconstruction legislature. He has said: "To get a bill
passed, I would have to persuade a negro to present it. It would receive
no attention presented by me."
Negroes were carried by droves from one county to another, one State to
another, and voted over and over wherever white plurality was feared.
Other tricks were to change polling-places suddenly, informing the negroes
and not the whites; to scratch names from registration lists and
substitute others. Whites would walk miles to a registration place to find
it closed; negroes, privately advised, would have registered and gone.
When men had little time to give to politics, patriotism was robust if it
could devote days to the siege of a Registration Board, trying to catch it
in place in spite of itself.
The Southerner's loathing for politics, his despair, his inertia,
increased evils. "Let the Yankees have all the niggers they want," he was
prone to say. "Let them fill Congress with niggers. The only cure is a
good dose!" But with absolute ruin staring him in the face, he woke with a
mighty awakening. Taxpayers' Conventions issued "Prayers" to the public,
to State Governments, to the Central Government; they raised out of the
poverty of the people small sums to send committees to Washington; and
these committees were forestalled by Radical State Governments who, with
open State Treasuries to draw upon, sent committees ahead, prejudicing the
executive ear and closing it to appeal.
The most lasting wrong reconstruction inflicted upon the South was in the
inevitable political demoralisation of the white man. No one could regard
the ballot-box as the voice of the people, as a sacred thing. It was a
plaything, a jack-in-the-box for the darkeys, a conjurer's trick that
brought drinks, tips and picnics. It was the carpet-bagger's
stepping-stone to power. The votes of a multitude were for sale. The votes
of a multitude were to be had by trickery. It was a poor patriot who would
not save his State by pay or play. Taxation without representation, again;
the tissue ballot--a tiny silken thing--was one of the instruments used
for heaving tea--negro plurality--into the deep sea.
"As for me," says a patriot of the period, "I bless the distinguished
Virginian who invented the tissue ballot. It was of more practical utility
than his glorious sword. I am free to say I used many tissue ballots. My
old pastor (he was eighty and as true and simple a soul as ever lived)
voted I don't know how many at one time, didn't know he was doing it, just
took the folded ballot I handed him and dropped it in, didn't want to vote
at all." Others besides this speaker assume that General Mahone invented
the tissue ballot, but General Mahone's intimates say he did not, and that
to ask who invented the tissue ballot is to ask who struck Billy
Patterson. Democrats waive the honour in favor of Republicans, Republicans
in favor of Democrats; nobody wants to wear it as a decoration. For my
part, I think it did hard work and much good work, and quietly what else
might have cost shedding of blood.
"We had a trying time," one citizen relates, "when negroes gained
possession of the polls and officered us. Things got simply unendurable;
we determined to take our town from under negro rule. One means to that
end was the tissue ballot. Dishonest? Will you tell me what honesty there
was, what reverence for the ballot-box, in standing idly by and seeing a
horde of negroes who could not read the tickets they voted, cram our
ballot-boxes with pieces of paper ruinous to us and them? We had to save
ourselves by our wits. Some funny things happened. I was down at the
precinct on Bolingbrook Street when the count was announced, and heard an
old darkey exclaim: 'I knows dat one hunderd an' ninety-seben niggers
voted in dis distric', an' dar ain' but th'ee Radicule ballots in de box!
I dunno huccum dat. I reckon de Radicule man gin out de wrong ones. I
knows he gin me two an' I put bofe uv 'em in de box.'"
Tissue ballots were introduced into South Carolina by a Republican named
Butts, who used them against Mackey, another Republican, his rival for
Congressional honours; there was no Democratic candidate. Next election
Democrats said: "Republicans are using tissue ballots; we must fight the
devil with fire." A package arrived one night at a precinct whereof I
know. The local Democratic leader said: "I don't like this business." He
was told: "The Committee sent them up from the city; they say the other
side will use them and that we've got to use them."
According to election law, when ballots polled exceeded registration
lists, a blindfolded elector would put his hand in the box and withdraw
until ballots and lists tallied. Many tissue ballots could be folded into
one and voted as a single ballot; a little judicious agitation after they
were in the box would shake them apart. A tissue ballot could be told by
its feel; an elector would withdraw as sympathy or purchase ran. Voting
over at the precinct mentioned, the box was taken according to regulations
into a closed room and opened. Democrats and Republicans had each a
manager. The Republican ran his hand into the box and gave it a stir;
straightway it became so full it couldn't be shut, ballots falling apart
and multiplying themselves. The Republican laughed: "I have heard of
self-raising flour. These are self-raising ballots! Butts' own game!" That
precinct went Democratic.
So went other precincts. Republicans had failed on tissues. A
Congressional Committee, composed of Senators McDonald of Indiana,
Randolph of New Jersey, and Teller of Colorado, came down to inquire into
elections. Republicans charged tissue ballots on Democrats. But, alas! one
of the printers put on the stand testified that the Republicans had
ordered many thousand tissue ballots of him, but he had failed to have
them on time!
There were other devices. Witness, the story of the Circus and the Voter.
"A circus saved us. Each negro registering received a certificate to be
presented at the polls. Our people got a circus to come through and made a
contract with the managers. The circus let it be known that registration
certificates would be accepted instead of admission tickets, or entrance
fees, we agreeing to redeem at admission price all certificates turned
over to us. The arrangement made everybody happy--none more than the
negroes, who got a better picnic than usual and saw a show besides. The
circus had tremendous crowds and profited greatly. And one of the most
villainous tickets ever foisted upon a people was killed quietly and
effectually."
An original scheme was resorted to in the Black Belt of Mississippi in
order to carry the day. An important local election was to be held, and
the whites felt that they could not afford to lose. But how to keep out
the black vote was a serious question. Finally, a bright young fellow
suggested a plan. For a week preceding election, he collected, by paying
for it, negro hair from barbers serving negroes, and he got butchers to
save waste blood from slaughter-pens. The night before the election,
committees went out about a mile on every road and path leading to the
town, and scattering wool and blood generously, "pawed up the ground" with
foot-tracks and human body imprints. Every evidence of furious scuffle was
faithfully carried out. The day dawned beautiful and bright, but not a
black vote was cast--not a negro was to be seen. Hundreds had quit
farm-work to come to vote, but stopped aghast at the appalling signs of
such an awful battle, and fled to their homes in prompt and precipitate
confusion.
I heard a good man say, with humour and sadness, "I have bought many a
negro vote, bought them three for a quarter. To buy was their terms. There
was no other way. And we couldn't help ourselves." "There were Federal
guards here and they knew just what we were doing," another relates, "knew
we were voting our way any and everybody who came up to vote, had seen the
Radicals at the same thing and knew just what strait we were in. I voted a
dead man knowingly when some one came up and gave his name. I did the same
thing unknowingly. I heard one man ask of a small funeral procession,
'Who's dead?' 'Hush!' said his companion, 'It's the man that's just
voted!'" "I never voted a dead man," a second manager chimes in, "but I
voted a man that was in Europe. His father was right in front of the
ballot-box, telling about a letter just received from his son, when up
comes somebody in that son's name and votes. The old man was equal to the
occasion. 'Why, my dear boy!'--had never seen the other before--'so glad
you got back in time to cast your vote!' and off they walked, arms around
each other."
"The way we saved our city," one says, "was by buying the Radical manager
of the election. We were standing right under the statue of George
Washington when we paid the $500 he demanded. These things are all wrong,
but there was no other way. Some stood off and kept clean hands. But a
thing had to be done, and we did it, not minding the theoretical dirt. The
negroes were armed with ballots and bayonets, and the bayonets were at our
breasts. Our lands were taxed until we were letting our homes go because
we could not pay the taxes, while corrupt officials were waxing fat. We
had to take our country from under negro rule any way we could." It was
not wounds of war that the Southerner found it hard to forget and forgive,
but the humiliation put upon him afterward, and his own enforced
self-degradation.
I do not wish to be understood as saying that the Southerner re-won
control of local government by only such methods as described; I emphasize
the truth that, at times, he did use them and had to use them, because
herein was his deep moral wound. He employed better methods as he could;
for instance, when every white man would bind himself to persuade one
negro to vote with him, to bring this negro to the polls, and protect him
from Radical punishment. Also, he availed himself of weak spots in the
enemy's armour. Thus in Hancock County, Georgia, in 1870, Judge Linton
Stephens challenged voters who had not paid poll-tax, and, when election
managers would not heed, had them arrested and confined, while their
places were supplied and the election proceeded. The State Constitution,
framed by the Radicals themselves, called for this poll-tax--a dollar a
head--and its application to "educational purposes." The extravagant
Radical regime, falling short of bribing money, remitted the poll-tax in
lieu thereof. Judge Stephens caught them. Governor Bullock disapproved his
action; United States Marshal Seaford haled him before United States
Commissioner Swayze. The Federal Grand Jury ignored the charge against
him, and that was the end of it. The Judge had, however, been put to
expense, trouble, and loss of time.
THE WHITE CHILD