“Resolved, that the Governor be requested to transmit copies of this resolution to the Secretary of State of the United States and to the Senators and Representatives from the State of Oregon in the Congress of the United States.”
The probable explanation of this opposition of Oregon to the Fifteenth Amendment lies in its unwillingness to give the ballot to the Japanese, Chinese, and Indians in the State.
The feeling of New York[[695]] toward Negro suffrage in 1870 appears to be different from that of Oregon. A statute was passed prohibiting any registrar or inspector of elections to demand any oath or ask any questions of a Negro different from what was demanded of white persons, or to reject the name of any colored person from registry except for the same causes as would make it his duty to reject the name of a white person. The violation of this statute was a misdemeanor, punishable by a fine of five hundred dollars and imprisonment for six months.
In order to make the prohibitions of the Fifteenth Amendment effective, on May 31, 1870, two months after the ratification of the Amendment, Congress passed an Act,[[696]] the first section of which reads: “All citizens of the United States, who are or shall be otherwise qualified by law to vote at any election by the people in any State, Territory, district, county, city, parish, township, school district, municipality, or other territorial division, shall be entitled and allowed to vote at all such elections without distinction of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, any constitution, law, custom, usage, or regulation in any State, Territory, or by or under its authority, to the contrary notwithstanding.”
The fourth section of the “Enforcement Act,” as the Act of 1870 was called, provided for the punishment of any person who should, by force, bribery, threats, intimidation, or other unlawful means, hinder, delay, or combine with others to hinder, delay, prevent, or obstruct any citizen from doing any act required to be done to qualify him to vote, or from voting at any election.
In 1875, two inspectors of a municipal election in Kentucky were indicted for refusing to receive and count the vote of a Negro. The Supreme Court[[697]] of the United States, to which the case came by reason of a division of opinion of the Circuit Court, held that the Fifteenth Amendment did not confer the right of suffrage, but rather invested citizens with the right of exemption from discrimination in the exercise of the elective franchise on account of their race, color, or previous condition of servitude. The fourth section of the Act of 1870, by its language, did not confine its operation to unlawful discrimination on account of race or color and was, therefore, unconstitutional. The “Enforcement Act” of 1870, like the Civil Rights Bill of 1875, failed in its desired effect because it was too far-reaching in its scope. Had the Act of 1870 been upheld, the Federal authorities would have taken complete control of all elections, State as well as Federal.
The years between 1870 and 1890 are known for the actual race distinctions in suffrage. Between 1870 and 1877, the white people of the South were largely disfranchised, not because of their race, but because of their participation in the War. After 1877, the Negroes were largely disfranchised by unlawful methods adopted by the white people of the South. If this were a history of the actual race distinctions in suffrage, it would be necessary to consider at length the “tissue ballots,” the stuffing of ballot boxes, the intimidation of Negroes by the Ku Klux Klan and other bodies of white men, and other election devices and practices in the South at that time. But this study, as has been said before, is confined to the race distinctions in the law, not those in defiance of the law. Out of all the suffrage irregularities of the period very little suffrage law was evolved. Few judicial decisions and no statutes bearing directly on the relation of race to suffrage have been found.
Some cases of intimidation of Negroes at the polls reached the courts of record. In Lawrence County, Ohio, in 1870, for instance, two white men by threats of violence kept three Negroes from voting. One of the white men was convicted in the Federal court[[698]] under the Act of 1870, and imprisoned six months; the other was acquitted because he had not been heard to use threatening language. In 1871 a white man in South Carolina was convicted in the Federal court[[699]] for conspiring to keep a Negro from voting at a congressional election. The same year, in a contested election for mayor of Leavenworth, Kansas, the defeated candidate claimed that he would have been elected had not a number of Negroes been improperly kept from voting. He did not show that they had been in the ward thirty days as required by the election law of the State, and the court[[700]] held that Negroes must satisfy the same requirements as to residence as other voters. In a State election in Louisiana, in 1872, it was claimed, upon the affidavits of four thousand voters, that the votes of ten thousand Negroes had been suppressed because of their race and color.[[701]] A tax collector in Delaware, in 1873, refused or failed to collect taxes from Negroes when the payment of taxes was a prerequisite to voting. The Federal court[[702]] held that it had jurisdiction because the tax collector was a State officer and, thus, it was the State denying and abridging the right to vote on account of race. Over one hundred men were indicted in the Federal court of Louisiana in 1874 for intimidating Negroes at the polls.[[703]] The same year the judges of the municipal election of Petersburg, Virginia, were indicted for refusing to allow a number of Negroes to vote.[[704]] In 1878, a Negro in Illinois who was denied the right to vote at a school election sued and recovered a hundred dollars damages.[[705]] In Georgia, in 1844, several white men were convicted in the circuit court of the United States for intimidating, beating, and maltreating Negroes to keep them from voting. The Supreme Court[[706]] held that Congress had power to regulate Federal elections and could prevent such intimidation.
It will be noticed that nearly all of the cases cited above are along the same line—intimidation of Negroes to keep them from voting. Several constitutional principles, however, relating to suffrage were evolved out of the cases decided during this period. In some of these cases a Negro was not a party at all. It was thought at first, for instance, that suffrage was a right of citizenship and that the Fourteenth Amendment entitled every citizen to vote. Consequently, a proceeding was started in the courts of Kentucky in 1874 to establish the right of a woman to vote. The case went up to the Supreme Court[[707]] of the United States which held that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon anyone. Next, it was thought that the Fifteenth Amendment conferred the right to vote upon Negroes, but the case of United States v. Reese settled this point by deciding that the Amendment did not confer upon Negroes the right to vote, but the right not to be discriminated in voting on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.[[708]] Despite the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the principle remains that the individual States retain the right to prescribe the qualifications for voting so long as they do not discriminate against persons on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.