Alfred Byron Cruikshank

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:

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.