The New Nation

by Frederic L. Paxson

The State of Mississippi, in a new constitution framed in 1890, defined the franchise in terms that bore heavily upon the negro. In the debates of its convention members talked frankly and freely of their intention to disqualify the race; the clause bore no mention of discrimination. It permitted persons to vote who, being male citizens over twenty-one, and having reasonable residence qualifications, had paid a poll or other tax for two years preceding the election, and could read, or understand and interpret when read to them, any section of the constitution of the State. Under this clause, between the cumulative tax and the large discretionary powers vested in the officers of enrollment, the negro electorate was reduced until it was negligible in Mississippi; and it was a subject of admiration for other Southern States, which proceeded to imitate it.

All of the cotton States but Florida and Texas, and most of the old slave States, revised their electoral clauses in the next twenty years. Arkansas, in 1893, based the franchise on a one-year poll-tax. South Carolina, in 1895, used residence, enrollment, and poll-tax, while the convention called to disfranchise the negro passed resolutions of sympathy for Cuban independence. Delaware, in 1897, established an educational test. Louisiana, in 1898, established education and a poll-tax; North Carolina, in 1900, did the same. Alabama, in 1901, made use of residence, registry, and poll-tax. Virginia based the suffrage on property, literacy, or poll-tax in 1902. Georgia did the same in 1908, and the new State of Oklahoma followed the Southern custom in 1910.

It was relatively easy to exclude most of the negroes by means of qualifications such as these, but every convention was embarrassed by the fact that each qualification excluded, as well, some of the white voters. In nearly every case revisions were accompanied by a determination to save the whites, and for this purpose a temporary basis of enrollment was created in addition to the permanent. Louisiana devised the favorite method in 1898. Her constitution provided that, for a given period, persons who could not qualify under the general clause might be placed upon the roll of voters if they had voted in the State before 1867 or were descended from such voters. The "grandfather clause," as this was immediately called, saved the poor whites, and was imitated by North Carolina, Alabama, Virginia, and Georgia. The governor of Louisiana, in 1898, sang the praises of the new invention: "The white supremacy for which we have so long struggled at the cost of so much precious blood and treasure is now crystallized into the constitution as a fundamental part and parcel of that organic instrument, and that, too, by no subterfuge or evasions. With this great principle thus firmly embedded in the constitution and honestly enforced, there need be no longer any fear as to the honesty and purity of our future elections." The Supreme Court, in Williams vs. Mississippi (1898), and Giles vs. Teasley (1903), declined to go behind the innocent phraseology of the clauses, and refused to overthrow them.

Before the courts had shown their unwillingness to interfere, Congress had done the same. Two methods of redress were discussed during the years of Republican ascendancy, 1889-91. One of these contemplated a reduction of the Southern representation in the House, under that part of the Fourteenth Amendment that requires such reduction in proportion to the number of citizens who are disfranchised. Although urged angrily more than once, this action was not taken, and would not have affected cases in which the denial was by force and not by law. To meet the former situation the Republican party pledged itself in 1888. A Force Bill, placing the control of Southern elections in federal hands was considered. It received the enthusiastic support of Henry Cabot Lodge, and was the occasion for another waving of the "bloody shirt." It passed the House, with the aid of Speaker Reed, but in the Senate was abandoned by the caucus and allowed to die in 1891. The South was left alone with its negro problem. In the words of a Southern governor, "There are only two flags—the white and the black. Under which will you enlist?"

The New South removed the negro from politics, but he remained, in industry and society, a problem to whose solution an increasing attention was paid. At the time of emancipation he was almost universally illiterate and lived in a bankrupt community. Northern philanthropy saw an opportunity here. The teachers sent south by the Freedmen's Bureau stirred up interest by their letters home. In 1867 George Peabody, already noted for his benefactions in England and in Baltimore, created a large fund for the relief of illiteracy in the destitute region. His board of trustees became a clearing-house for educational efforts. Ex-President Hayes became, in 1882, the head of a similar fund created by John F. Slater, of Connecticut. Through the rest of the century these boards, in close coöperation, studied and relieved the educational necessities of the South. In 1901 the men who directed them organized a Southern Educational Board for the propagation of knowledge, while in 1903 Congress incorporated a General Education Board, to which John D. Rockefeller gave many millions for the subsidizing of educational attempts.

The negro advanced in literacy under the pressure of the new influences. In 1880 seventy per cent of the American negroes over ten years old were illiterate, but the proportion was reduced in the next ten years to fifty-seven per cent; to forty-five per cent by 1900; and to thirty per cent by 1910. As the negro advanced, his own leaders, as well as his white friends, differed in the status to which they would raise him and in the methods to be pursued. Some of his ablest representatives, W.E.B. DuBois among them, resented the discrimination and disfranchisement from which they suffered, and insisted upon equality as a preliminary. Others, like Booker T. Washington, who founded a notable trade school in Alabama in 1881, worried little over discrimination, and hoped to solve their problem through common and technical education which might lead the race to self-respect and independence.

Friction increased between the races at the South after emancipation. Freedom and political pressure demoralized many of the negroes, whose new feeling of independence exasperated many of the whites. Southern society still possessed many border traits. Men went armed and fought on slight provocation. The duel and the public assault aroused little serious criticism even in the eighties, and the freedmen lived in a society in which self-restraint had never been the dominant virtue. In Alabama, in 1880, the assessed value of guns, dirks, and pistols was nearly twice that of the libraries and five times that of the farm implements of the State. The distribution of the races varied exceedingly, from the Black Belt, where in the Yazoo bottom lands the negroes outnumbered the whites fifteen or more to one, to the uplands and mountains, where the proportions were reversed. But everywhere the less reputable of both races retarded society by their excesses.

In spite of its unsolvable race problem the South was reviving in the eighties and was changing under the influence of the industrial revolution. Northern capital was a mainstay of its agriculture. Transportation, manufacture, and city development found stimulation from the same source. In 1884 the National Planters' Association promoted a celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the export of the first American cotton. In a great exposition at New Orleans they showed how far the New South had gone in its development.

In the twenty years after 1880 the South became a modern industrial community. Its coal mines increased their annual output from 6,000,000 tons to 50,000,000; its output of pig iron grew from 397,000 tons to 2,500,000; its manufactures rose in annual value from $338,000,000 to $1,173,000,000, with a pay roll swelling from $76,000,000 to $350,000,000. The spindles in its cotton mills were increased from 610,000 to 4,298,000. With the industrial changes there came a shifting of Southern population. The census maps show a tendency in the black population to concentrate in the Black Belt, and in the white population to increase near the deposits of coal and iron. Factory towns appeared in the Piedmont, where cheap power could be obtained, and drew their operatives from the rural population of the neighborhood. Unembarrassed by the child-labor and factory laws of the North, the new Southern mills exploited the women and children, and were consuming one seventh of the cotton crop by 1900. In Alabama, Birmingham became a second Pittsburg.

The Southern railway system was completely rebuilt after the Civil War. In 1860 it included about one third of the thirty thousand miles of track in the United States, but war and neglect reduced it to ruin. Partly under federal auspices it was restored in the later sixties. After 1878 it suddenly expanded as did all the American railway systems.