Popular misgovernment in the United States

by Alfred Byron Cruikshank

CHAPTER XVI

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: