FAILURE AND CONDEMNATION OF MANHOOD SUFFRAGE AFTER A TEN YEARS’
EXPERIMENT IN THE SOUTHERN STATES
Perhaps the most noted instance of a complete test of the principles
upon which manhood suffrage claims to be founded was that made in the
Southern States during the so-called reconstruction period from 1866 to
1876, when the establishment by the Federal Government of unrestricted
suffrage in a dozen states where a considerable part of the population
was composed of negroes resulted in a complete and even scandalous
failure. It not only failed in the opinion of the world at large, but
even in that of most if not all its supporters, and finally had to be
abandoned; so that in all those dozen states where most of the laborers
and many of the farmers to the number of about two millions of voters
are negroes, they have been for the last forty years and upwards
excluded from the polls.
For the ten years, however, from 1866 to 1876, which was the period of
the manhood suffrage experiment, they were permitted and urged to vote,
under the protection of the Federal Government. At the close of the
Civil War in 1865, when the conquered Southern States had undertaken to
establish state governments on the basis of white suffrage, Congress and
the Federal Government had interposed the strong arm and required
negroes to be included in the electorate; thus making pure manhood
suffrage the foundation of the new state governments. In so doing the
Federal Government was logically right, upon any and all of the manhood
suffrage theories. On none of them can the negro vote be properly
rejected. The southern negroes were natives of the soil, free,
self-supporting, and intensely loyal to the government. Whether you
adopt the theory of a natural right to vote, or that the ballot is a
weapon of defence for the poor, or that it is an educative force, or
that the desires of all classes should be represented in the vote, the
negroes’ claim to the franchise was and is well made out.
The trial of manhood suffrage that was actually made in the instance
referred to was in all respects a fair and good test of its qualities.
It was of course a severe one, because the negroes were very numerous
and mostly very ignorant; but for that very reason the test was
valuable. To ascertain the real effects of ignorance and incapacity as
of other elements, they must be tried out as far as possible without
dilution or mixture. In this instance the amount of both that was
injected into the body politic was greater than the dose which the
Northern electorate has received, but the effect _pro tanto_ was the
same. The test was unusually good for another reason, namely, because it
was suddenly applied and as suddenly ended, and therefore the period of
its operation is distinctly separated from the time before and after, so
that the comparison between the negro suffrage epoch and that of the
before and after period is clear and easily made. Again, the trial was
good because it was applied to large regions of country, all parts of
which were inhabited by great numbers of the newly made voters,
amounting to hundreds of thousands in all; so that merely local causes
could not be said to affect the result. And further, the negroes were,
generally speaking, illiterate and propertyless; and this circumstance
also helped to make the test more clear and certain; for the claim of
the extreme manhood suffragists everywhere is and has been that the poor
and lowly are above all entitled to the vote.
So here we have had a trial in our own country of manhood suffrage plain
and simple; of the much vaunted system applied to a class of people who
most needed the so-called uplifting power or influence of the ballot.
Here were the negroes, simple, poor, unsophisticated, unspoiled by the
possession of wealth, the ideal people of the radical orator and
philosopher. They were docile and religious, being nearly all
evangelical Christians; very much under the influence of their
clergymen; intensely patriotic and devoted to the government and the
flag. In short the southern negroes at the close of the war, as was then
pointed out by their friends, had every quality to entitle them to vote
except book learning, business experience and property, neither of which
in the eyes of the champions of manhood suffrage is essential to the
voter. Other conditions there were favorable to the success of the
experiment. The new voters did not have to construct a state, a social
polity, or a code of laws, or to establish public order. The framework
of a well-developed republican government was already erected; the
statute books contained the political wisdom of a highly civilized and
free people; they had the United States government to guide and
encourage them; there was perfect order everywhere, and a friendly and
well-disciplined army was quartered among them to maintain it and to
protect them in the exercise of their rights. They had therefore that
guidance, precedent and protection, the lack of which has been said to
have caused the failure of similar attempts by peoples unpractised in
self-government. Besides all this, they had abundance of moral support
and enthusiastic sympathy. At that time the Republican party organs
claimed a monopoly of patriotic enlightenment, and throughout the great
North and West a large portion of the most intelligent and vociferous
American press, including nearly all the Republican newspapers, also two
thirds of the protestant clergy, besides moral and political orators by
the thousand, justified and applauded the proposal to give the vote to
the late slaves then and at once without delay or qualification, and
poured out the slush and uttered the gush appropriate to such
agitations. The project was enthusiastically heralded as a “Reform,” as
a “Liberal Measure,” as an inevitable step in advance; as a carrying out
and logical application of democratic doctrines; it was proudly pointed
to as an evidence of our superiority in wisdom over our ancestors. The
cry was that the ballot is a natural right; that the republican legend
is not that some men, white men, educated men, or propertied men may
vote; but that all men have an absolute right to the suffrage; a right
inherent in man as man: and was not the freedman a man and a native of
the soil? The ballot, said they, is a weapon of defense, needed more by
poor peasants and laborers be they white, black or brown than by any
other class. What if the negroes were ignorant and easily led; give them
the vote and they would swiftly acquire learning and strength of
character. People talked as if the ballot box was a cure-all; as if
there was a sort of magic in it; as if merely to handle it was
salvation; without it, said they, man is still a slave and can never be
expected to improve; nor can the community rise while he is
“disfranchised” as they expressed it; but with the ballot in hand he
will at once mount to meet his opportunities. This arrant nonsense has
been recently made familiar to us by the woman suffragists and need not
be further recapitulated.
The negroes were thereupon invited to go through all the performances in
which the white masses had long been accustomed to display themselves;
and, as a Chinaman once said, to exercise their ignorance. They, and
especially the fools and idlers among them, responded with alacrity.
They talked politics at great length; those who could read fed their
minds with newspaper rubbish; they attended political meetings addressed
by frothy orators and office seekers just as many white people do, and
like them they fell under the leadership of designing demagogues some of
whom speedily learned to be competent rivals in rascality to many white
politicians. Of course the colored peoples’ political orators were of a
new crop; the old-fashioned pretentious white humbugs who had deceived
and tongue lashed the southern people into a heartless and hopeless
insurrection were out of the running, or, driven to the side of the
dismayed and discouraged conservatives, stood hungrily envying the luck
of their late servants. In vain the better class of the whites protested
against the prospect of being squeezed by this new and ignorant
democracy out of whatever the war had left them; their protests were
received with derision by the radical and enlightened North. They and
their minority of conservative northern sympathizers were stigmatized as
would-be autocrats, aristocrats, oppressors of the poor; old time
Bourbons unable to grasp new ideas; this and that piece of wisdom had
not “dawned” on them; with their antiquated brains they could not
realize the beauty and power of true democracy carried to the limit,
etc. The controversy between the southern whites and the new colored
democracy was given great prominence in excited political discussions
all over the country; in most states the general elections were made to
turn upon this question; all the sentimental “highbrows” and the same
class of emotionalists and enthusiasts who are now advocating woman
suffrage were then supporting negro suffrage; to oppose it was to be
ignorant or antiquated. The friends of unlimited suffrage carried state
after state in the North and West by majorities far exceeding those
since recorded in favor of woman suffrage, and the negro was by Federal
authority given the vote in every southern state.
The first elections, of course, went off successfully; nothing is easier
or requires less intelligence than to cast a ballot; a child of ten
years can be taught the trick in an hour. The negroes voted in great
numbers; and the cry went up from pulpits and other mouthpieces of
American super-intelligence, from newspaper offices and political
platforms, “Behold one more triumph for universal suffrage!” That is
what they called it, for at that time the notion of giving the vote to
negresses had not become popular. That is a later fad reserved for our
day; the great American people usually amuses itself with but one
political folly at a time. The negro had shown himself to be a qualified
voter according to the only recognized test, namely, ability to talk and
to vote in droves under leadership. As for office-holding capacity it
is and always has been a fact that uncultivated men, white or black,
usually apply and can apply but one test to a political candidate; that
of eloquence. If he has but a winning tongue most of them consider him
competent for any office no matter how difficult its duties. The colored
people produced men of their race who readily reached the standard of
glibness and who made political speeches which charmed and convinced
even white audiences of a certain shallow and emotional type. Just as
women have been found who can compare favorably with men in platform
ranting, so were negro politicians found who, gifted with fluency,
filled with vanity and stimulated by applause showed themselves equal or
nearly equal to white demagogues in that fascinating art. And thus the
champions of universal suffrage were able in 1868 to point triumphantly
to successful southern political campaigns conducted to a considerable
extent by colored men who passed all the tests nowadays applied by a
white democracy in a similar case; the leaders talked and orated
fluently and the masses voted for them in droves as slavish and
unquestioning as the best trained white voters. And so the black leaders
got into office and at once began the customary idle and dishonest
career of the professional place hunter.
The result is told in one of the darkest chapters in American history.
Many white friends and champions of the colored race went south to aid
them in their political life, but the case was hopeless from the start.
The negro level of intelligence and honesty was so low, and the business
experience of the voters so small, that even their very ablest
representatives would have been sadly deficient in the primary qualities
necessary for legislation and administration; but as is inevitable under
the system of universal suffrage, the worst were often chosen at the
polls. The men elected to the state legislatures in the South under this
régime were often ignorant, drunken, debauched and dishonest. Many of
them were without means, had never paid taxes and were incapable of
measuring the value of money, or of understanding financial dealings.
All the Southern States had suffered severely during the Civil War; most
of them were so financially exhausted as to be deserving of real
sympathy, but the new gang of black and white scallawags was pitiless.
Waste, peculation, folly and every form of misgovernment followed;
public credit was destroyed, property values fell; there were ten
wretched years of violence, scandals and shame, at the end of which
negro suffrage had disappeared, abandoned even by its strongest
supporters. As soon as it was gone a sound reaction began, public credit
was restored, values increased, public waste and robbery diminished,
political scandals became fewer and less flagrant, and the South entered
at once upon a career of comparative prosperity in which it has
continued to this day. Such misgovernment as still continues in the
South is mild compared with the experience of those ten dreadful years
of negro domination.
Let us for a moment refer to the recorded testimony concerning this
remarkable episode in the history of manhood suffrage in this country.
The historian Lecky says:
“Then followed, under the protection of the Northern bayonets, a
grotesque parody of government, a hideous orgy of anarchy,
violence, unrestrained corruption, undisguised, ostentatious,
insulting robbery, such as the world had scarcely ever seen. The
State debts were profusely piled up. Legislation was openly put up
for sale. The “Bosses” were all in their glory, and they were
abundantly rewarded, while the crushed, ruined, plundered whites
combined in secret societies for their defense, and retaliated on
their oppressors by innumerable acts of savage vengeance.”
(_Democracy and Liberty_, Vol. I, p. 94.)
Senator Tillman of South Carolina, who lived in the midst of it,
described the result as a “government of carpet-baggers and thieves and
scalawags and scoundrels who had stolen everything in sight and
mortgaged posterity; who had run their felonious paws into the pockets
of posterity by issuing bonds.”
From another writer:
“When installed in power the negroes and their white mentors
indulged in an unprecedented robbery of the public purse. They made
the legislatures issue bonds on the state to provide for public
works which were never taken in hand, and shared the proceeds among
themselves, leaving the taxpayers to submit to fresh taxation; they
openly passed fraudulent disbursements or swelled the expenses
incurred for furnishing offices, etc., in the wildest fashion,
fitting them up, for instance, with clocks at $480 apiece, with
chandeliers at $650. The official positions were distributed among
illiterates; in one state there were more than two hundred negro
magistrates unable to read or write; justice was openly bought and
sold.” (_Ostrogorski on Democracy_, p. 56.)
A few of the details are as follows: In Mississippi the yearly
expenditures trebled; the state debt was greatly increased, the actual
figures have been disputed; the tax levy was multiplied by fourteen. In
1866 the State Treasurer embezzled $61,962. The state librarian is
believed to have stolen books from the state library. In South Carolina
upon the inauguration of manhood suffrage, there followed, says the
Encyclopedia Britannica, “an orgy of crime and corruption.” A bar and
restaurant was annexed to the legislative chambers, free to the members
and their friends; in place of the plain furniture placed there by the
South Carolina aristocracy, consisting of $5 clocks and $10 benches,
there were installed by the representatives of the working people of the
state sofas at $200 each on which the black and white legislators might
loll and repose, and clocks at $600 each, for those capable of reading
time. In one session $95,000 and in four years $200,000 was appropriated
for State House furniture. When the orgy was over a few years later, the
whole lot was valued at less than $18,000. In eight years the printing
ring stole or squandered over $150,000 of state money. Enormous sums
were obtained by means of fraudulent pay certificates issued under
legislative authority. In the four years from 1868 to 1872 the state
debt increased from less than $7,000.000 to an unknown sum, of which
over $18,000,000 was actual and evidenced by written obligations, to
which might be added about $10,000,000 more, clearly fraudulent and
contingent on the continuance in power of the plunderers. It may be said
that all of this increase beyond the original $7,000,000 represented
waste and theft. A large part of this debt was afterwards repudiated. In
Florida $600,000 in taxes was collected and embezzled by the collectors
and the treasury was swept absolutely bare. Legislative expenses were
quadrupled, state taxes increased eight-fold; in the four years from
1868 to 1872 the state debt mounted from $4,000,000 to $12,000,000. In
Tennessee the state debt rose from $16,000,000 to $42,000,000. In
Arkansas land taxes were increased ten-fold and state expenses
twelve-fold in eight years. Of over $7,000,000 expended by the state in
six years, the greater part was squandered; only $100,000 was spent for
public improvements. A bonded debt of $10,000,000 was fraudulently
created and the money wasted on pretence of paying for buildings and
railroads which were never constructed. In Georgia the state debt was
increased from $6,000,000 to $18,000,000 in three years without any
benefit whatever. In Alabama members publicly boasted of receiving large
sums for passing measures. The state debt increased from $8,000,000 to
$25,000,000 in two years. The value of land fell from $50 an acre to
between $3 and $15 an acre. In Louisiana two hundred new offices were
created; the public debt in two years jumped from $7,000,000 to
$41,000,000. In four years state and city government expenses increased
to ten times their normal volume; taxation was enormously increased, and
about $54,000,000 of debt created with nothing to show for it. “In North
Carolina,” says the _Encyclopedia Britannica_, “the government
established in accordance with the views of Congress in 1868 was
corrupt, inefficient and tyrannical.” The state debt was increased in a
few years from $16,000,000 to $42,000,000 and the proceeds wasted. In
Texas the extravagance of the reconstruction period caused a debt of
$4,700,000. In all these states salaries and miscellaneous expenses
were enormously increased during this episode. Crime was unpunished,
pardons were bought and sold and bribery of public officials was
notorious. At the close of the manhood suffrage rule nine southern
states were unable to pay their debts, amounting in all to about
$170,000,000 and had to repudiate them. This is not extraordinary when
we consider that these states had been stripped by the war of all
property but land, and that in seven of them the increase of state debts
ranged from $35 to $94 per capita inhabitant. A New York state debt of
$940,000,000 in 1918 would correspond in figures with what was saddled
on poor Louisiana in 1872; but in order to express its relative weight,
considering the date and the value of money and the wealth of the state,
it would have to be multiplied at least five times. Imagine a New York
state debt of $4,700,000,000. It seems an impossible misfortune, but
granted an illiterate population and we might reasonably expect such a
result in about ten years’ time, under a system of universal suffrage.
The attempt to establish manhood suffrage in the South by means of the
Fifteenth Amendment was a crime. The amendment itself is founded upon a
palpably false conception. In effect it provides that the right of
colored citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or
abridged by any state. It amounts to a solemn declaration that there are
no inferior races and that a voter does not need intelligence. It
proposes to establish a government to be called civilized where the
ignorant shall govern the intelligent; the inferior shall govern the
superior; poverty shall rule wealth; the pyramid shall stand on its
apex. It turns the democratic movement into a backward march; assuming
to speak for democracy, it declares it an enemy of civilization; it
flouts the wisdom of science; it overrules the Creator, who created five
races of men fundamentally different in capacity. To attempt this was a
crime and not the less but the more so because done through a sham
legality. As already shown in these pages, a law passed in contravention
of civilization, in opposition to the canons of Society is no law, and
therefore the old statutes authorizing the tortures of the Inquisition,
the execution of witches and the rendition by free peoples of fugitive
slaves to their masters were illegal and void, and disobedience thereto
was a virtue. The Abolitionists were fond of denouncing the Constitution
as a covenant with hell; the Fifteenth Amendment was a compact with
rascality, entered into at the command of passion and party advantage
rather than of cool reason and patriotism. It was possible because the
long régime of political corruption had demoralized the best of the
party leaders; they had grown accustomed to quackery and demagogism and
a corrupt use of the spoils of office to control elections and
government, and they found it easy to apply these means to the problem
of the government of the conquered Southern States, with the object of
party gain. But they never would have dared to do the deed had the way
not been first prepared by the spread of the false doctrine that every
man has a natural right to a vote. Thus once more we have the lesson of
the ultimate costliness of lying and false logic.
Nor has the evil passed away with the practical nullification of the
amendment. One of the most mischievous of all shams is a sham law. The
Fifteenth Amendment, which our manhood suffrage politicians are too
cowardly to repeal, has still a place in the Constitution, a sham law, a
dead carcass, breeding disease and pestilence. This is plain to the
student of American politics, though millions of American voters are too
ignorant to recognize it and too irresponsible to care. For over
forty-three years this amendment has been by eleven southern states
openly flouted and defied because its enforcement would mean negro
domination and a relapse into barbarism. The nullification of any
existing law, and above all of a constitutional provision, is
demoralizing to the nation; but in this case not only the fact of its
nullification has been demoralizing, but the manner in which it was
done; by methods admittedly evil in themselves, by violence, electoral
trickery, theft of and tampering with ballot boxes, falsification and
the use of fraudulent, technical and tricky law and procedure. There
were probably 850,000 adult negro citizens in the southern states in
1870, of whom all but about 50,000 were ultimately disfranchised by
these means, and by methods still in effectual operation. It is
difficult to say which has been more scandalous, the enactment of the
amendment by its friends, or the method of its nullification by its
enemies. Nor is this the whole story of this shameful business. The net
result has been and is to deprive a dozen southern states, say
one-quarter of the Union, of all proper share and interest in Federal
politics. This comes about because while the Fifteenth Amendment stands
the South feels that there is danger of its enforcement by the
Republican party; a fear encouraged by the weak hypocrisy of the blatant
northern Republican politicians who pretend to believe in manhood
suffrage and by the warnings of the blatant southern Democratic
politicians who also pretend to believe in its imminence. The southern
whites, therefore, have for over forty years voted, and still vote, _en
masse_, the Democratic ticket for Congress and the president
irrespective of all questions of Federal statesmanship. It is a most
deplorable state of things, tending to corruption in one party, to
partisanship in the other, and to confusion all around. Hence the “Solid
South.” Be the question one of war or peace, high or low tariff,
colonial expansion, internal improvement, civil service betterment or
any other important question, the vote of the “Solid South,” instead of
expressing the opinion of the southern people merely voices a negative
to the Fifteenth Amendment.
The result is practical disfranchisement, north and south. The total
vote in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina fell from 492,357 in
1876 to 177,822 in 1900. Allowing for the increase in population, it
should have been about 690,000, evidencing an extinguishment of
three-fourths, by fraud, terror, or discouragement. In South Carolina
the Republican vote, mostly colored, fell from 91,780 in 1876, to 3,963
in 1908. In 1910 the vote for congressmen in proportion to the
population was in Massachusetts one to eight; in South Carolina one to
fifty; in Mississippi one to seventy-five. A population equal to that
which provided a hundred votes in Massachusetts, provided no more than
sixteen in South Carolina and eleven in Mississippi. Allowing the
negroes as a rough estimate half the population, we find that
thirty-four white men in one hundred refrained from voting in
Mississippi. These whites were not actually forbidden to vote, but they
were practically disfranchised by a system of solid Democratic
representation which made voting a useless ceremony. The menace of the
Fifteenth Amendment is such that only one party can exist in the
Southern States. In the present Congress every single member in both the
Senate and the House from the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida,
Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and
Texas, is a Democrat and from Virginia there is but one Republican
member. And so it comes about that a constitutional measure pretended to
be enacted to enfranchise the blacks not only completely fails of that
intent, but results in partly disfranchising the whites both north and
south. The southern white voter is disfranchised because he is
practically prevented from making a free choice between candidates; the
northern white voter is practically disfranchised wherever a Republican
measure which he favors is defeated without consideration of its merits
by southern votes cast against him under this arbitrary pressure. There
are about twenty million white people in eleven southern states who are
thus misrepresented and held in political bondage owing to the enactment
of the Fifteenth Amendment by manhood suffrage fanaticism and stupidity.
Assuming that these people, if liberated from the fear of the brutal
régime of manhood suffrage with which they are threatened, would divide
about equally in politics like their northern fellow citizens, and we
have say ten millions of northern people, and about two millions of male
northern voters who are practically disfranchised; their votes being
nullified by the blind vote of these eleven southern states. The
existence of this condition of affairs is well recognized by lawyers
and statesmen. Says one writer, “The indifference to political interests
and responsibilities which such conditions produce is a serious menace
to the progress of the south and to that of the country as well.”
(Appleton’s _Cyclopedia_; American Government, Suffrage.)
Such in brief is the story of the results and reactions of the attempt
made a generation ago with great power and with all the seriousness of
fanaticism, to put into actual effect in our Southern States the silly
doctrine of the political equality of all men. The lesson and the
conclusion are alike plain and undeniable. No sensible white man is now
heard to urge that the pauper southern negroes be once more invited to
take part in our political life. And yet, if there be truth in the
theory that every man is entitled to a vote, no matter how humble, then
the disfranchisement of the southern negro is a foul injustice, for
which the whole American people are responsible, since they all
acquiesce in it. But there is no truth in it. The mass of negroes are
properly excluded from voting in the South, because as a class they lack
the training, experience and temperament necessary to a proper exercise
of the suffrage. All this seemed perfectly plain from the beginning; and
yet it was only after a long and severe political agitation, accompanied
by violence and bloodshed, that the South got rid of its rotten manhood
suffrage governments; and it will take time and much talk to bring the
American people to the point where they will feel compelled to apply to
the ignorant and shiftless whites the principle then so fully
illustrated, tried out and verified, that the suffrage is a function of
government and cannot safely or justly be conferred on any class which
is morally or mentally incompetent to perform it.