Part 3

"A roll containing the names of all persons thus registered, sworn to and certified by the officers of registration, shall be filed, for record and preservation, in the clerk's office of the circuit court of the county, or the clerk's office of the corporation court of the city, as the case may be. Persons thus enrolled shall not be required to register again, unless they shall have ceased to be residents of the State, or become disqualified by section Twenty-three. Any person denied registration under this section shall have the right of appeal to the circuit court of his county, or the corporation court of his city, or to the judge thereof in vacation."

Section 20. "After the first day of January, nineteen hundred and four, every male citizen of the United States, having the qualifications of age and residence required in section Eighteen, shall be entitled to register, provided:

"First. That he has personally paid to the proper officer all state poll taxes assessed or assessable against him, under this or the former Constitution, for the three years next preceding that in which he offers to register;

"Second. That, unless physically unable, he make application to register in his own hand-writing, without aid, suggestion or memorandum, in the presence of the registration officers, stating therein his name, age, date and place of birth, residence and occupation at the time and for the two years next preceding, and whether he has previously voted, and, if so, the state, county and precinct in which he voted last; and,

"Third. That he answer on oath any and all questions affecting his qualifications as an elector, submitted to him by the officers of registration, which questions, and his answers thereto, shall be reduced to writing, certified by the said officers, and preserved as a part of their official records."

Section 21. "Any person registered under either of the last two sections, shall have the right to vote for members of the General Assembly and all officers elective by the people, subject to the following conditions:

"That he, unless exempted by section Twenty-two, shall, as a prerequisite to the right to vote after the first day of January, nineteen hundred and four, personally pay, at least six months prior to the election, all state poll taxes assessed or assessable against him under this Constitution, during the three years next preceding that in which he offers vote; provided that, if he register after the first day of January, nineteen hundred and four, he shall, unless physically unable, prepare and deposit his ballot without aid, on such printed form as the law may prescribe; but any voter registered prior to that date may be aided in the preparation of his ballot by such officer of election as he himself may designate."

Section 22. "No person who, during the late war between the States, served in the army or navy of the United States, or the Confederate States, or any State of the United States, or of the Confederate States, shall at any time be required to pay a poll tax as a prerequisite to the right to register or vote."

Section 23. "The following persons shall be excluded from registering and voting: Idiots, insane persons, and paupers; persons who, prior to the adoption of this Constitution, were disqualified from voting, by conviction of crime, either within or without this State, and whose disabilities shall not have been removed, persons convicted after the adoption of this Constitution, either within or without this State, of treason, or of any felony, bribery, petit larceny, etc."

The intention of these acts needs no showing. They have three points in common: (a) Some device enabling all the white voters to evade the force of the disfranchising clauses; (b) The limiting clauses themselves which deprive a majority of the colored voters of their franchise; (c) The reservation of sufficient discretionary power in boards of registrars to enable them to give full effect to the acknowledged purpose of the framers of the constitutions. I know of no lesson they can teach us, except how to do the things we ought not to do. In some cases, by knowing the way down, one may, by reversing the steps taken, regain the lost height. But it is not so here; our fall, like our rise, has been too sudden. We have been thrown from a window, and before we could understand our position, legislated out of a back gate. Only by superior chicane can we repair the second injury, only by superior force repair the first--unless there be justice in the heart of the nation. It behooves us then to study carefully the state of public opinion in the country, which underlies these laws, and gives them whatever stability they possess.

There is, of course, a series of events leading up to this radical change in the institutions of the Republic, a history beginning before the formation of the Union itself. The first part was African slavery. Religious, moral and economic forces had acted upon serfdom, the more common sort of slavery in Europe, and aided by the resulting increase of vigor among the serfs themselves, had disintegrated it. But these forces either did not act upon the trade in Negro slaves, when profits to be obtained from that traffic filled the minds of merchants, or were helpless to stop it. The New World was not, like the Old, overcrowded, but in need of laborers--and the slaves were blacks. Tropical South America, the West Indies, and the hot belt of the United States absorbed hundreds of thousands of Negro slaves. All the forces above enumerated set to work again after a time and slavery once more began to disintegrate. In this country it had become firmly rooted in the Southern states, where the same American people who had fought in '76 for the freedom of two million white men, women and children fought as stubbornly to keep in slavery four million black men, women and children. But victory was again to crown the cause of freedom, and by the will of the victors, forced forward by the unbroken spirit of resistance of the conquered, these four millions of slaves were declared possessed of freedom, civil rights and political privileges.

Said Lord Shaftesbury to Charles the Second, when called on for his resignation as Lord Chancellor, "It is only to lay aside the gown and take up the sword." The South, defeated in arms, reversed the process, and laying down the musket, put on the gown of the law-maker, and began to accomplish by legislation, the reenslavement of the millions set free. Hampered in this, for a time by the armies and the northern civil officers, who obtained power largely by the suffrage of the colored people, and by the colored voters themselves, the Southern men waited for the withdrawal of the Union armies--an event hastened by outcry at home--and then taking out the side-arms, which the generous terms of surrender had permitted them to retain, they rapidly dispersed the opposing force, and took the reins of government again into their own hands. With musket in one hand to retain political power, and pen in the other to undo the Reconstruction legislation, they soon deprived the black millions of all their transitory political and civil rights. It is hard to see that anything remained to be done. Emancipation laws and proclamations to the contrary, the Negro seemed safely penned. But moral and economic forces were still at work, and the end was not yet reached.

The South could no longer close its eyes to the want of prosperity. In 1890, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, in spite of their 262,175 square miles and abundant resources, had but 8,346,667 people and 288,405,107 dollars worth of manufactured products. An equal territory in the States of the North, namely; Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Ohio and Illinois with 260,823 square miles had 25,074,143 people and 6,484,643,842 dollars worth of manufactured products--which is to say, the Southern states had but one-third of the population, and one-twenty-second of the manufactures of the same area North. The South wanting prosperity began to seek ways of obtaining it. This led to the consideration of obstacles: and first among these was the large and economically inefficient colored population. It must be made, for want of other labor, productive, a contributory agent to the new industrial prosperity of the South--and not the less, cut off from any sort of control, even of the industries, which by its labor must mainly be built up. The problem was a difficult one, yet such as the South felt itself able to solve. And many in the North stood ready to help.

In 1890, however, came troubles so serious as to require a diversion of attention from economical to political problems. The Republican party pledge to secure for all citizens 'a free ballot and a fair count' was yet unredeemed; and in that year a debate broke out in Congress over the fulfilling of its promise, with an Elections bill as the means. Simultaneously, the Populist movement was growing to threatening proportions. Before this, the cry had been that the Negro by sheer numbers could dominate, if not prevented from doing so. But now there presented itself a new and more threatening danger. "In any state where the whites divide," said Mr. Tillman in the Senate in 1900, "and they have divided in every Southern State except mine and Mississippi--into Populists and Democrats--the Negro has been the balance of power." The Populist movement died, but this phantasm once evoked, of a black man poised at the centre of the party see-saw, continued to hover at the beck of its creators until again wanted. The occasion, this time a lasting one, has been found in the balance of the Republican and the Democratic parties in the "border" states. So in Maryland, for a while, a "doubtful" state, where the colored population is but one-fifth of the whole, a disfranchising law is justified, apparently, by the danger to good government of allowing the Republican party to obtain control. Again, in the county and town election contests, even in the Southern states where the Democratic party is in entire possession of the State government, this compact(?) and mobile(?) army of black voters occupies a position of such strategical importance that unless they be dislodged by the most radical method their mastery must be forever acknowledged(?). Now, to conclude, since a dozen colored voters might hold the balance of power in town or county, the bitter irony of the situation is overwhelming.[1] The South is simply driven by its own irrefutable(?) logic to total disfranchisement of the Negro, there being no safe stopping point short of the practical exclusion of the colored inhabitants of a dozen or more states from any part in the making or administering of the laws, national, state or municipal under which they live(!). All this the South, impelled by her honest desire(!) for good government, and resolutely turning her back upon past methods of fraud and violence,(!) means to accomplish legally--provided Congress and the Supreme Court throw over her naked but unalterable will the broad mantle of legality.

[1] In West Virginia there are, on the Census basis (958,800 = whole population, less 43,499-colored population = 915,301-white population, divided by 3.6 = ratio of white population, generally to white males of voting age.) 254,250 white voters; and (43,499 = colored population, divided by 4.3-ratio of colored population to colored male adults = 10,116 colored voters, of whom 32.3 per cent. are illiterate, = 3267 illiterate colored men,) but 3,267 illiterate colored voters, or about one eightieth of the electorate (257,517 divided by 3,267): yet, even though the national ticket threatened to be hurt by it, it was impossible to stifle the cry for disfranchisement of ignorant black voters as the paramount issue of the West Virginia democratic campaign of 1904.

We are reminded of the story of the princess, who wandering in rags, came to a palace and begged accommodation there befitting one of royal blood. The old queen, not sure that she was a princess, determined to test her veracity in this way: She lay a pea upon the floor and piled upon it a dozen feather-beds. If she felt the pea, it was plain that she was a true princess. Morning came none too soon for the unhappy lady, who confessed to the queen having spent a miserable night, something hard in her bed having bruised her till she was black and blue. No longer could the queen doubt that she was a real princess, for who else could have been so delicate. And she was forthwith married to the heir apparent to the throne. So the South acts on the belief that if she be absolutely intolerant of the slightest degree of political power in the hands of colored men, that the North must see in the very violence of her antipathy, the hopelessness of any other solution.

This happily settled, the South after fifteen years of uncertainty, hopes to be able to turn her attention to material problems. But though the Caesars may rob February of days to enrich July and August, the seasons remain unchanged. The economic and moral laws of the universe remain in operation and give assurance that no solution can be more than temporary in which the Negro is dealt with falsely and unjustly.

Meantime what had been the course of the Republican party, which, by its own declaration "had reconstructed the Union with freedom instead of slavery as its corner-stone?" Listen to the reading of the suffrage planks in the platforms of ten presidential campaigns:--

[1868.]

The guarantee by Congress of equal suffrage to all loyal men at the South was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice, and must be maintained; while the question of suffrage in all the loyal States properly belongs to the people of those States.

The recent amendments to the National Constitution should be cordially sustained because they are right, not merely tolerated because they are law, and should be carried out according to their spirit by appropriate legislation, the enforcement of which can safely be entrusted only to the party that secured those amendments.

[1872.]

Complete liberty and exact equality in the enjoyment of all civil, political and public rights should be established and effectually maintained throughout the Union by efficient and appropriate State and Federal legislation. Neither the law nor its administration should admit any discrimination in respect of citizens by reason of race, creed, color or previous condition of servitude.

[1876.]

The Republican party has preserved these governments to the hundredth anniversary of the Nation's birth, and they are now embodiments of the great truth spoken at its cradle--"that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that for the attainment of these ends governments have been instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." Until these truths are cheerfully obeyed, or, if need be, vigorously enforced, the work of the Republican party is unfinished.

The permanent pacification of the Southern section of the Union and the complete protection of all its citizens in the free enjoyment of all their rights is a duty to which the Republican party stands sacredly pledged. The power to provide for the enforcement of the principles embodied in the recent Constitutional Amendments is vested by those amendments in the Congress of the United States, and we declare it to be the solemn obligation of the legislative and executive departments of the Government to put into immediate and vigorous exercise all their constitutional powers for removing any just causes of discontent on the part of any class, and for securing to every American citizen complete liberty and exact equality in the exercise of all civil, political and public rights. To this end we imperatively demand a Congress and a Chief Executive whose courage and fidelity to these duties shall not falter until these results are placed beyond dispute or recall.

[1880.]

The dangers of a "Solid South" can only be averted by a faithful performance of every promise which the Nation has made to the citizen. The execution of the laws, and the punishment of all those who violate them, are the only safe methods by which an enduring peace can be secured and genuine prosperity established throughout the South. Whatever promises the Nation makes the Nation must perform. A Nation cannot with safety relegate this duty to the States. The "Solid South" must be divided by the peaceful agencies of the ballot, and all honest opinions must there find free expression. To this end the honest voter must be protected against terrorism, violence or fraud.

[1884.]

The perpetuity of our institutions rests upon the maintenance of a free ballot, an honest count, and correct returns. We denounce the fraud and violence practiced by the Democracy in Southern States, by which the will of a voter is defeated, as dangerous to the preservation of free institutions; and we solemnly arraign the Democratic party as being the guilty recipient of fruits of such fraud and violence.

We extend to the Republicans of the South, regardless of their former party affiliations, our cordial sympathy, and pledge to them our most earnest efforts to promote the passage of such legislation as will secure to every citizen, of whatever race and color, the full and complete recognition, possession and exercise of all civil and political rights.

[1888.]

We reaffirm our unswerving devotion to the national Constitution and to the indissoluble union of the States; to the autonomy reserved to the States under the Constitution; to the personal rights and liberties of citizens in all the States and Territories in the Union, and especially to the supreme and sovereign right of every lawful citizen, rich or poor, native or foreign born, white or black, to cast one free ballot in public elections and to have that ballot duly counted. We hold the free and honest popular ballot and the just and equal representation of all the people to be the foundation of our republican government, and demand effective legislation to secure the integrity and purity of elections, which are the fountains of all public authority.

[1892.]

We demand that every citizen of the United States shall be allowed to cast one free and unrestricted ballot in all public elections, and that such ballot shall be counted and returned as cast; that such laws shall be enacted and enforced as will secure to every citizen, be he rich or poor, native or foreign born, white or black, this sovereign right guaranteed by the Constitution. The free and honest popular ballot, the just and equal representation of all the people, as well as their just and equal protection under the laws, are the foundation of our Republican institutions, and the party will never relent its efforts until the integrity of the ballot and the purity of elections shall be fully guaranteed and protected in every State.

[1896.]

We demand that every citizen of the United States shall be allowed to cast one free and unrestricted ballot, and that such ballot to be counted and returned as cast.

[1900.]

It was the plain purpose of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution to prevent discrimination on account of race or color in regulating the elective franchise. Devices of State governments, whether by statutory or constitutional enactment, to avoid the purpose of this amendment are revolutionary, and should be condemned.

[1904.]

We favor such Congressional action as shall determine whether by special discriminations the elective franchise in any State has been unconstitutionally limited, and, if such is the case, we demand that representation in Congress and in the electoral colleges shall be proportionally reduced as directed by the Constitution of the United States.

From '68 till '96 there was posted on the bill-boards of the party, the same declaration in favor of a free and unrestricted ballot, supported by the unyielding determination of the party to protect this right. But in that year there came a change. Perhaps it was that the mass of unredeemed pledges fell of their own weight, and the time seemed opportune to substitute a less weighty declaration; perhaps the party only sought a more efficient means of accomplishing its unalterable purpose. Whatever the cause, there began from this time, a diminuendo which has grown fainter until in 1904 the 15th Amendment was heard no more. To time, some say, must be left this task, too great for a political party to perform. But there is grave danger in leaving to time the execution of justice. The evil grows, the power of correcting it diminishes. Early in its course injustice may be stopped, later perhaps not at all. The future course of the party with regard 'to the supreme and sovereign right of every lawful citizen, rich or poor, white or black, to cast one free ballot in public elections and to have that ballot duly counted,' is gravely complicated by the rapid and momentous changes taking place in American society.

The gulf between the sections, which the Constitution merely bridged proved so deep, because it grew out of differences in the social, if not the moral natures of the inhabitants of the two parts of the country. These types have been compared to those opposed in the English Civil War, and hence called Puritan and Cavalier. But whatever the name, the differential fact was this: in the North men and women did their own work, while in the South others did their work for them. Until this great economic and social difference, which made diverging ideals, diverging habits, diverging tastes, ceased to be, real sympathy was impossible. That gulf, which widened into bitter civil war, is now closing; the two types are drawing nearer; the divorce between sections is shifting around to a divorce between classes. Therefore it is that in a part of the writing and ruling class, we feel that there is a gravitating of morals southward.[2] The North, which spent millions in lives and money to destroy Negro slavery in the South, seems engaged in making white slaves at home. If the political and social position of the white laborer in the North is declining, our chance of obtaining justice through active Northern sympathy is greatly lessened. In this issue which remains that of the comparative "hideousness" of the slave-holder and the slave, every foot added to the social separation of the Northern employer and employee is a stroke in the knell of political equality for the Negro.

[2] "The Republican party in its work of imposing the sovereignty of the United States upon eight millions of Asiatics, has changed its views in regard to the political relation of races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South upon that subject. The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican party, or Republican administrations, will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man."

--[Burgess--Reconstruction and the Constitution, page 298.]