Again I ask why is all this thus? It is not because the Negro is an alien or because he is an undesirable citizen. For he is not that at all, as we have seen, but quite the contrary. But how explain this enormous contradiction between the rights which he is legally entitled to and those which he actually possesses? Here he is fifty years after emancipation, forty-four years after his investiture with American citizenship, and forty-two years after the adoption of the great Amendment to the Constitution which gave him the right to vote, a voice in making the laws, not more than half free, than half a citizen in many States of the Union. Why is this so, I ask again? Is it not because he is the ballotless victim in those states of one-party governments in which he is denied a voice? In 1866 Governor John A. Andrew foresaw clearly what would be the fate of the Negro in the old slave states without the ballot. The condition which the great War Governor foresaw then fits remarkably well the Negro’s actual condition to-day in certain sections of the nation. “Meanwhile,” he said, “the disfranchised freedmen, hated by some because he is black, contemned by some because he has been a slave, feared by some because of the antagonisms of society, is condemned to the condition of a hopeless pariah of a merciless civilization. In the community he is not of it. He neither belongs to a master nor to society.” The thing which John A. Andrew foresaw in 1866 as likely to come to pass in case of disfranchisement of the blacks, has been coming to pass ever since. And the cause which has reduced the Negro to his present anomalous position in the Republic of which he is a citizen, is his lack of the right to vote, which makes its possessor a part of the community in which he lives, and enables him to make that community respond to his needs as a vital part of its body social and politic.
The Negro in the mass is a disfranchised man. His political influence in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia is practically at the zero point. The mass of the disfranchised in those seven Southern States is so great that by the law of gravitation its very weight and number affect more or less adversely the status of the rest of the race in other states. The disfranchised Negro operates in many ways to depreciate the rights of the enfranchised Negro, and to draw him by the invisible threads of race kinship and of race prejudice toward if not quite within the zone of his own limitations and disabilities. A disfranchised class in an industrial republic like ours is as much at the mercy of an enfranchised class as is a flock of shepherdless sheep at the mercy of a pack of wolves. The wolves will devour the sheep and the enfranchised class will prey on the disfranchised class. To the wall the weak will be driven and harried and destroyed whether they be sheep or men, and this the strong will do every time whether they be men or wolves. The shepherd protects the sheep from the depredations of the wolves, and the ballot protects poverty against property, a weak race or class against the hate and aggressions of stronger ones within the same country.
A citizen without the ballot in America is in fact, whatever he may be in law, a de-citizenized man—exposed in consequence to the enmities, the jealousies, the insults and the violence of other citizens who are more fortunate in this regard. He is, whatever may be his legal status on paper, a proscribed man, subject to unmerited and unmeasured ignominies and injustices at the hands of his country, its society, its passions and prejudices. Governor Andrew was right, a disfranchised man, a disfranchised class must become ultimately, “The hopeless pariah of a merciless civilization.” This is the peril, the fate which hangs over the colored race at the close of the first fifty years of its emancipation.
Governor Andrew’s scheme for the reconstruction of the rebel states included not only the extension of the suffrage to the blacks but the re-admission to their full citizenship of the class of old slaveholders who had carried those states out of the Union. They were needed as leaders in the work of restoration and reconstruction, he shrewdly argued. And he was right. They were indeed the natural leaders of the South, and had they turned their backs upon the past and faced patriotically the new problems and the new posture of their affairs they might have led both races into the promised land of freedom and peace and Southern industrial expansion and greatness. Had they seized their golden opportunity for progressive and constructive statesmanship, the sceptre of their ascendency in the governments of their section could not have been wrested from them by another class of whites, risen since the war, who distrust and hate them, but they might instead have transmitted their ascendency undiminished to their descendants, who ought to be today the leaders of the new South.
The course laid down by Governor Andrew was not followed either by the South or by the North. The Southern leaders taking advantage of the opportunity given them by Andrew Johnson reconstructed their section along the lines of their old social system, reducing its changes to a minimum. They emerged out of their reconstruction operation with a Negro serf system to take the place of their old slave system. The Negro as a serf was just about as valuable as an industrial asset to the great landlords and to the small ones too for that matter, as had been the Negro as a slave. Just about as much unpaid and involuntary labor could be got out of the first as out of the last. Thus did the old master class perform their task without changing materially their old social system. But they likewise issued from their labors not less fortunate in another respect. Their old political power would not suffer any radical change in consequence of the abolition of slavery either. For whereas five slaves had counted for them in the ante bellum apportionment of representatives as three freemen, five serfs would count in the post-bellum apportionment as five free men—a pretty large gain for the new power over the old one in federal numbers. But in achieving this double success the old master class overreached itself. The return of the South into the newly restored Union stronger as a serf power than it had been as a slave power aroused the instant fear of the North and set Congress in motion to thwart such reappearance of that section into the arena of national politics.
Congress thereupon took upon itself the work of Southern reconstruction. The extreme gravity of the situation as it affected the Negro lay in the political solidity of that section with its one-party governments in which he was denied a voice. His freedom could not long survive such a combination of Southern race prejudice and passion and political power as constituted at that time the solid South and its one-party governments. They were then and they continue to be the greatest obstacle to the freedom and advancement of the Negro as an American citizen. They signalized their first entrance upon the stage of national affairs by an attempt to create a serf class out of their former slaves. When I say that they constitute the greatest obstacle to the freedom and advancement of the Negro, I mean, of course, the greatest obstacle outside of the Negro himself. For I take it that no race that possesses intelligence, industry and character, coupled with unity of purpose and action can be kept forever out of its rights and in a backward state even by the American white people, accomplished as they are in this species of national wickedness, unless they intend to reverse the wheel of their progress and to retrograde in free institutions and civilization.
Against Southern political solidity and its one-party governments Congress directed its reconstruction measures. With the dissolution of this solidity and the introduction of bi-party in place of one-party governments the Republican leaders looked for the passing of the danger to Northern sectional supremacy and the freedom of the Negro. The freedmen were utilized at this juncture to effect the necessary changes in the Southern situation which the exigency demanded. He was first raised to citizenship, and when that proved inadequate to meet the emergency, he was invested with the right to vote on equal terms with the whites. This great constitutional revolution in the status of the Negro laid the basis for a political revolution in the old slave states also. The solid South was dissolved for the nonce and two-party governments made their re-entrance upon the stage of Southern affairs. There followed prompt repeal of the reactionary legislation hostile to the Negro, which had signalized the rise to power of the solid South and its one-party governments. The North received its share likewise of the gains incident to this revolution in the increase of its partisan strength in both branches of the National Legislature, and which in turn confirmed its political domination in the Union.
The changes wrought in the South by the reconstruction measures did not last. Those measures afforded temporary relief and that was all. They did not go deep enough and besides the whites refused to cooperate with the blacks to make them a success. They failed to moderate or abate Southern opinions, race prejudice and passions and were therefore doomed to fail as an experiment in social and political reconstruction. Social and political reconstruction in those states it seems now must come from within and by voluntary action not from without and by compulsory legislation. This is true today whatever might have been possible in this regard immediately after the overthrow of the Southern Confederacy. What was attempted then and failed would certainly fail today if it were possible to repeat the self same experiment. The repetition of such an attempt, however, being wholly outside of the range of the probable in American politics makes all speculation as to what might be its fate therefore nugatory.
After the Presidential election of 1876, the North abandoned its attempt to reconstruct the South and to keep it reconstructed according to its standard of justice and political proportion. The stream of reaction against the Negro set in strongly from that time and it has gathered volume each succeeding year since. The failure of the old master class to seize the opportunity which had come to them a second time, following the collapse of the Rebellion, for progressive and constructive leadership of their section on the race question was an egregious blunder. They set in motion instead the forces and passions which have at length wrested the ballot from the Negro. But they themselves have not escaped the consequences of their egregious blunder, for a new class of whites have in turn wrested from them their leadership in Southern affairs. The black seeds of this blunder of the old master class to lead their section in social justice and progress, the bitter years have ploughed deep into the life of both races. From the black seeds of their blunder black crops of race hatred and crime and misery have been reaped annually by the South along with those other crops of cotton and rice and sugar and tobacco, and sent like them to all parts of the Republic.
The process of Southern political solidification, partially suspended for a few years, resumed promptly after 1876 all of its natural functions and its one party governments. Since that time legislation hostile to the Negro has increased enormously in that section. Its old reconstructed State Constitutions have been one by one revised most favorably to the whites and most unfavorably and unjustly for the blacks. For what with grandfather and understanding clauses, educational and property qualifications, partisan registration boards and election supervisors and white primaries, the great majority of the colored people have been excluded from the electorate, from any voice in the Government, while the vote of the small minority who are included in the electorate has been reduced to a nullity by their exclusion from the white primaries. The states which have thus revised their constitutions have thereby effected the practical disfranchisement of their entire colored population. While they have done this they have managed at the same time to leave the ballot in the hands of every white man.