Chapter 3

Thus a court created by this new constitution of Mississippi declares that it, in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, discriminates against the Negro race "by reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence," and at the same time upholds that instrument.

The constitutionality of these disfranchising enactments has not been made a direct issue in the Supreme Court of the United States. The case of Williams vs. State of Mississippi[14], the decision of which is commonly supposed to have sustained their constitutionality, only brought the question up collaterally without proper allegations or sufficient proof. From an intimation made by the Court in this case, it is not improbable that when a direct issue upon their constitutionality is properly presented, it may render a decision consonant with that which it rendered in the case of Yick Wo vs. Hopkins, wherein the Court said:

"Though the law in itself be fair on its face and impartial in appearance, yet, if it be applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as to practically make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution."[15]

There are other grounds for the belief that the Federal Supreme Court will refuse to sustain these instruments of disfranchisement, even though it has not of recent years acted in a manner to inspire faith.

These enactments have never received the approval of the people of the states. Of a total of 235,604 male citizens of voting age in South Carolina in 1890, more than 102,000 of whom were white men, only 60,925 participated in the election of November 6, 1894, at which the members of the constitutional convention were elected. Of the number thus voting only 31,402 were counted in favor of holding the convention. Thus one-seventh of the citizens called a convention and enacted a constitution which disfranchised more than one hundred thousand electors. The constitutions of Mississippi and Louisiana were adopted in the same way.

These so called constitutions, besides being repugnant to the spirit and purpose of the Fifteenth Amendment are also violative of the acts of Congress restoring the rebellious states to the Union, which acts the Federal Supreme Court has on several occasions declared constitutional.[16]

Pursuant to the reconstruction legislation, these states adopted constitutions admitting the Negro to the ballot and then asked to be readmitted to representation in Congress. Congress, having approved of their constitutions, enacted that they be entitled to representation in Congress, "upon the following _fundamental_ conditions: That the constitutions of neither of said states shall ever be so amended or changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of the United States of the right to vote in said states, who are entitled to vote by the constitution thereof herein recognized."[17]

These states accepted these fundamental conditions and are consequently bound by them.[18]

III

What effect have these disfranchising enactments had upon the status of the Negro? Has he lost nothing more than the bare right to vote? Has he been deprived of nothing but an abstract right to a voice in the affairs of government and of no other privilege than the possibility of a share of political power?

Surely the loss of any one of the foregoing is not unimportant in a democratic form of government. But he has lost much more, and the probabilities are that, if these obvious discriminations are allowed to continue, he will be brought to his deepest humiliation. The law which deprives him of the badge of citizenship, changes at once his legal status and cuts him off from respect. His disqualification as an elector shuts him out of the jury box in courts where what few rights he has left are adjudicated and his grievances redressed. His disqualification as an elector and as a juror discredits him as a witness. In the states which have adopted these disfranchising constitutions, more than three hundred thousand citizens have been thereby disqualified as jurors. This is all the more outrageous, because in the same states advantage has been taken in criminal legislation of what the Supreme Court of Mississippi has termed "certain peculiarities of habit and character of the Negro" whereby "furtive offenses," which in other communities are treated as mere misdemeanors, are made felonies and are usually visited with greater punishment than are the "robust crimes" of the whites. In South Carolina, for instance, the breach of a labor contract has been made a crime, the object being to reduce the Negro to a state of serfdom.

Not only has the legal status of the Negro been gravely affected by these disfranchising enactments; his economic status has also been lowered. A Mississippian states the following as the reason for disfranchising the Negro in his state:

"It is a question of political economy which the people of the North can not realize nor understand _and which they have no right to discuss as they have no power to determine_. If the Negro is permitted to engage in politics his usefulness as a laborer is at an end. _He can no longer be controlled or utilized._ The South has to deal with him as an industrial and economic factor and _is forced to assert its control over him in sheer self-defense_."[19]

Thus Negro labor must be managed, and control must be asserted over him. His possession of the ballot would make him a free laborer and would enable him to demand the wages of free labor. It is truly an "economic problem," in which not only the Negro of the South is concerned, but also the interests of free labor in every section of this country.

These disfranchising enactments in that they lower the legal and economic status of the black man, also tend to lower his educational and social status. The political and economic supremacy of the southern oligarchy is dependent upon the ignorance and the social degradation of the Negro. It is, therefore, not surprising that the politicians now dominant in the South assert that education disqualifies him as a field hand,--as a manageable factor,--and that consequently there must be a decrease in the amount of money expended for his education or that his education must be directed along lines which will make him more adaptable to management as an economic factor for their sole benefit. The educated Negro is not more desirable now than he was fifty years ago. It is a marvel how the great body of southern white people, a great many of whom are favorable to the advancement of the Negro, will permit men of the type of the average politicians who now exercise control among them to stand thus in the way of the true progress of the South.

First, it is asserted that the right to vote destroys his usefulness as a laborer; then, that education turns his head and makes him discontented with the plantation where wages reach the high water mark of six dollars a month, which may or may not be paid according to the whim of his employer; and finally that the privilege of respectable accommodations furnished by common carriers which enjoy unusual public franchises makes him impudent, noisy and self-respecting, the proper remedy for which is a system of "Jim Crow Cars." Thus with the passing away of the Negro's right to vote, begins the reappearance of the odious system of Black Laws which are designed to degrade the womanhood and manhood of the Negro race. The whole trend of southern legislation is to fix what has been termed the "proper status of the Negro--subordination to the superior race." Not a single line has been written upon the statute books of a single southern state within the last decade in recognition of the Negro as a man entitled to respect, or fair and just consideration.

In 1857, Mr. Lincoln uttered the following words in reference to slavery, which are not wanting in significance in their bearing upon the present assault upon the Negro:

"To aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it (the Declaration of Independence) is assailed and sneered at, construed and hawked at and torn, till, if the framers could rise from their graves, they would hardly recognize it. All the powers of earth seem combined against him. Ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining in the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person and left no prying instrument with him; and now they have him as it were bolted with a lock of a hundred keys which can never be unlocked, except by the concurrence of every key in the hands of a hundred different men and they scattered to a hundred different places. And now they stand musing as to what invention in all the domain of mind and matter can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is."

IV

The nation can not put up with many more of these instruments of disfranchisement. It can not endure the present ones very much longer. The question is ceasing to be one of interest merely to the Negro; it is rapidly becoming one of national moment. It is becoming a contest between democracy and oligarchy in which the stability and integrity of republican institutions are involved. Already a few thousand minions of oligarchy are exerting a larger influence in the national government than do millions of freemen who are obeying the Federal Constitution by maintaining a republican form of government. The election returns from the three states of Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi show how startling is the power which they exercise in Congress by reason of these disfranchising instruments. The following shows the number of votes polled in these states for members of Congress in 1898 and in the case of Louisiana the votes polled may be compared with the returns of 1896 when the old constitution was in force:

LOUISIANA

District. Total Vote, 1898. Total Vote, 1896.

I 6,318 15,412 II 7,856 16,848 III 5,903 15,968 IV 5,900 16,148 V 4,805 15,264 VI 2,494 16,482 ----- ------ Average 5,549 Average 16,020

MISSISSIPPI SOUTH CAROLINA

District. Total Vote, 1898. District. Total Vote, 1898.

I 2,468 I 4,559 II 3,175 II 4,138 III 2,661 III 4,361 IV 4,551 IV 4,632 V 5,105 V 4,230 VI 6,071 VI 4,916 VII 3,605 VII 4,938 ----- ----- Average 3,948 Average 4,539

The total congressional vote of Louisiana which elected six members to Congress is less by nearly 500 votes than the average for one district in Iowa. _One elector in Louisiana exercises about seven times as much power in Congress as one in Ohio._ The average congressional vote of Mississippi for seven districts is nearly 35,000 votes less than the average for twenty-one districts in Ohio, while the total congressional vote of South Carolina for seven Congressmen is more than seven thousand below the total vote of a single congressional district in North Carolina. The total vote cast in the twenty congressional districts of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi in the election of 1898 was 91,184; while that polled in the ten congressional districts of Wisconsin was 332,204. Thus, although these states cast nearly two hundred and fifty thousand votes less than the state of Wisconsin, they control twice as much power as that state in the national legislature.

The southern people themselves can not permit these violent infringements of the principles of republican government to continue without irrevocable detriment to their best and highest interests. In the degree that they stand by in silence and see the Negro stripped of his civil and political rights by a band of unscrupulous men who seek no higher end than their personal aggrandizement, they compromise their own civil and political freedom, and put in jeopardy the industrial progress of the south. The bane of the South today is her selfish and misguided political leadership, the men who will not scruple to sacrifice upon the altars of their insatiable ambition for power every interest linked with her economic prosperity and all consideration for civic virtue by which alone the greatness of a people is measured.

Her misfortune lies not in any danger from Negro domination, for of all the classes of her population the Negro is the least capable of working her injury and the least disposed to do so. Her real danger lies in the pernicious activity of her dominant political leaders who perpetuate their control by overriding local and national authority to the diminution of both public and private security. Law has been dethroned and the respectable and industrious portion of the people must witness the spectacle and endure the humiliation of riot, bloodshed, and assassination with impunity of innocent and unoffending citizens by the beneficiaries under these disfranchising constitutions.

The leading paper of the state of Louisiana, which threw the weight of its influence in favor of the constitutional convention which was held for the sole and avowed purpose of disfranchising the Negro, has recently made the following important confession:

"Assassination is still the order of the day and night in Tangipahoa Parish. William McGee, a white man, employed at a saw mill was the victim. He was waylaid yesterday morning and fired upon, with the result that he was badly hurt. A posse turned out with dogs to find the murderers, but to no purpose, although the posse was fired on several times out of ambush. The authorities in that parish seem incapable of making arrests of the perpetrators of these numerous assassinations that occur among them, but when by some chance an arrest is made, no jury is found that will convict. The result is that outlaws have everything their own way, while the peaceable people have no assurance that at any moment they will not be murdered by cowardly assassins."[20]

Thus it is that the southern white people, by permitting a few desperate politicians to outlaw the Negro, find themselves at the mercy of an oligarchy which has everything its own way.

According to the census of 1890, there are 102,657 white male citizens of voting age in South Carolina and 132,947 colored male citizens of voting age, making a total of 253,604 male citizens who were entitled to vote in that year. The election returns from that state for November 1898 show that the highest total vote polled for any office was only 28,258, averaging less than eight hundred votes to each county, thus showing that less than one eighth of the male citizens have it in their power to control the administration and policies of the state.

If by a mere technicality one class of citizens can be deprived of the rights and immunities guaranteed by the organic law of the nation, what is to prevent any other class from sharing the same fate? If less than one fourth of the male citizens of Mississippi can usurp the right to exclusively manage the local government, what is to prevent a smaller proportion from doing the same? If it is possible for a minority of the people of Alabama to disfranchise one class of citizens on account of race without the consent of the majority, what is to prevent the disfranchisement of any other class on account of _political_ views? Southern white men who view with apprehension these untoward political tendencies, who are alarmed at the passing away of the last vestiges of a republican form of government from that section of our Union, and who silently condemn and deplore the outrageous and inexcusable manner in which the black man is being divested of his political and civil rights for mere party advantage, must seriously and actively face the situation, if they would save the south from the shame and the humiliation with which she is threatened, and which she has already too keenly experienced at the hands of a profligate leadership.

There is a dormant statesmanship in the south that must and will exert itself mightily, "a moral and intellectual intelligence which is not going to be much longer beguiled out of its moral right of way by questions of political punctilio, but will seek that plane of universal justice and equity which it is every people's duty before God to seek."

But the question is not a sectional one. The whole American people are deeply concerned in it. Nullification in South Carolina is as great a national menace today as it proved to be half a century ago. Republican institutions and the national welfare can have no guarantee or protection against the evil consequences threatened by defiant trampling upon constitutional authority. Not in its most palmy days did the slave system possess such power as is aimed at by these latter day nullifiers. Having shorn the Negro of his political rights and brought him into industrial subjection, thereby usurping power both in state and national government, they now threaten to dominate the economic and industrial policies of the nation.

This government can not long continue half republican in form and half oligarchic.

JOHN L. LOVE.

Footnotes:

[1] Greeley's American Conflict, Vol. I, p. 417.

[2] Blaine, "Twenty Years of Congress," II., 94.

[3] McPherson, "History of Reconstruction," p. 40.

[4] Ibid p. 36.

[5] McPherson, History of Reconstruction p. 35.

[6] Blaine, "Twenty Years of Congress," II., 101.

[7] 16 Wall, p. 70.

[8] Blaine, "Twenty Years of Congress," II., 266.

[9] Prof. Kelley Miller, article in "Washington Star," Nov. 14, 1898.

[10] Chicago Weekly "Inter Ocean," Dec. 26, 1890.

[11] I 20 So Rep, 869, also Mississippi Code (1892) Sec. 3802.

[12] Journal of S. C. Constitutional Convention. 1731.

[13] 20 So. Rep. 865.

[14] 170 U. S. 213.

[15] 118, U. S. 373.

[16] 16, Wall., 70-73; 92 U. S., 214.

[17] 15 Stat. at Large. 73. Also 16 Stat. 67.

[18] Art. 6 Const. U. S., 2. Story on Const., Secs. 1836-1843.

[19] Chicago Inter Ocean, Nov. 4, 1890.

[20] New Orleans Picayune, April 4, 1899.

Transcriber's Notes:

Passages in italics are indicated by _underscore_.

The following misprints have been corrected: "Goverment" corrected to "Government" (page 10) "expendtures" corrected to "expenditures" (page 12) "perservation" corrected to "preservation" (page 13) "succeded" corrected to "succeeded" (page 13) "disqualifing" corrected to "disqualifying" (page 16) "requisiion" corrected to "requisition" (page 18) "remarkble" corrected to "remarkable" (page 20) "prosperty" corrected to "prosperity" (page 26) "apprehenson" corrected to "apprehension" (page 27)

End of Project Gutenberg's The Disfranchisement of the Negro, by John L. Love