“If the reader now will come with me, and watch for a while how the voting proceeds, I promise him a novel experience. We will not take the first day of the voting, for then it was painful to see the crowd of ragged colored men standing for hours in the pitiless storm, waiting to slip in their tickets, and so fearful of losing their turns, that one who had deposited his vote found no avenue of egress, save that paved with the heads of those behind. Let us choose the third day, for the air is bland and the sky cloudless. There stand the black pilgrims, you see, ranged (for better order prevails to-day) in a double queue. At the side of the window, where the vote is handed in, are two policemen—one to admit the voter, the other to point the way out. In front of the window is the Conservative challenging committee of four. One of the four keeps tally of the vote; another scans the registration list as the name of each voter is announced; the third writes down the names not found registered, and the fourth makes himself generally watchful. Behind the window three judges are seated around a table, bearing in its centre a large pine ballot-box.
“The column of negroes waiting to vote is jammed together as if by some uncontrollable muscular impulse, but it surges back whenever the barrier of the first policeman threatens to give way. They do not talk to each other, deeming silence, perhaps, to be due to the sacred importance of the occasion. If their eye catches yours (you are a Caucasian, remember), it falls with an expression of embarrassment, as if they felt that you, being white, looked with keen disfavor on the act they had drawn up to perform. Falstaff’s recruits were not greater ragamuffins. Look at the garb of these negroes, and I defy you to point out one unpatched garment in fifty. Gray coats and blue coats, worn out three years ago, still are forced to serve in a tattered sartorial invalid corps. One coat (doubtless for Sunday and elections) is made of cheap ingrain carpeting. The pantaloons are more shred-like than the coats; the hats advanced to all degrees of organic decay. Not one in twenty wears boots, and few shoes retain much of their original homely integrity. In shape, they might inclose either a small ham, or the foot of any human being deformed by toil among the clods of cotton-fields. If you study the heads and the faces, you will find more indications of a gentle, submissive, ease-loving heart, than of active intelligence or ambitious disposition.
“Whatever the natural aptitudes of the African may be, a hundred years of slavery in Alabama have not added anything attractive to his phrenological development. That many of them are very ignorant of the scope and meaning of citizenship, is as plain as their determination to learn more about it. The hunger to have the same chances as the white man, they feel and comprehend as clearly as they understand a physical craving. That is what brings them here, and not the expectation of getting free lands, free rations, and free mules. Your Conservative friend may tell you that they look for such windfalls; but talk to as many on the subject as I have, and you will accumulate the strongest sort of rebutting evidence. The last one I sounded looked at me with a shade of rebuke, and said: ‘No, sah. I spect to git nuffin but what I works hard for, and when I’se sick I’ll get docked.’
“Enter the first voter. He takes off his hat, and nervously gives his name to the judges. They run over the registration list. So do the Conservative challengers, who, as you see, are afforded every facility to contest and analyze. If the negro has a smooth face they demand that he swear to his age, and he is accordingly sworn. If his name be found, the judges announce the column in which it stands, and the challengers check it off. In vain the voter, seeing his vote glide into the box, and making his own way out, strives to choke down the delight that fills him. If ever you saw an amateur gamester win a heavy stake (which I trust you never have unless it was at charming Baden-Baden, or some place in New York where they go with a clergyman to study vice the better to preach against it—ahem), you watched the same sort of a smile on his face, as on the homely countenance of this happy freedman.
“Enter the second. This middle-aged negro deliberately takes off his mittens, removes his hat, runs one hand under his vest, produces a little package, unwraps the rag around it, and at last hands in the paper treasure.
“’Oh, the devil! be quick,’ says the Judge, rapping irately on the window. ‘Put on your hat, uncle—that humility’s played out,’ says one of the challengers, with a laugh. But the voter has his own views as to the hat. Perhaps he stands uncovered to the ballot and not to men. His ticket drops into the box, and he stumps off, irradiated. The third! ‘Another George Washington.’ Another vote, too, and another chuckle. The fourth! The name of this one cannot be found. ‘Go to head-quarters of registration,’ says the Judge; ‘if your name is there, they will give you a certificate enabling you to vote.’ ‘I’ve been thar,’ sorrowfully rejoins the applicant. ‘’Taint thar.’ ‘Sorry,’ says the Judge; ‘make room, make room.’ Now I ask you to watch this poor fellow. He comes out looking sick at heart. A bright mulatto takes him aside, and inquires into his case. It is hopeless—name not registered at all. The disappointed darkey wanders around for ten minutes, then he quietly falls again into the rear of the line, to be repulsed again and again when he reaches the window. Hope that his name may have been overlooked dies out at last, and not without the sharpest pang his simple, but emotional nature can feel.
“Enter the fifth. ‘My name is Henry Clay.’ ‘All right, Henry, you can vote; you’re registered. But, Henry, where were you born?’ ‘In Kentucky, sir; Henry Clay, of Ashland, was my father.’ And the tall, handsome mulatto, bows and makes his way out. The sixth! This is another of the persevering kind. He gives his name. ‘Be off,’ says the Judge. ‘You have been here already half a dozen times. You say you are not registered.’ ‘Well, sah,’ replies the sorrowful negro, ‘I’se been hyah evah since Tuesday trying to vote at one place or nuther, and I hasn’t had a bite to eat, and I can’t vote, and I’se got to walk twelve miles to git home.’ The red-nosed, cross-looking Judge takes a biscuit from his pocket and hands it to the negro, with ‘Here, make room, now.’ One of the challengers says: ‘Boys, the Conservatives have the name of being generous. Let’s give this hungry nigger a dinner.’ The speaker draws his pocket-book and transfers some currency to the object of this kindly impulse, who takes it with a ‘tankee,’ but a vacant look. It is a vote he wants, not a meal.
“So the strange procession moves slowly on. If you wish to determine how much the negro’s heart is in this election, watch his face as he comes away from that little window. His vote once in, every feature blazes with joy; but his vote rejected, sorrow and dismay are expressed even in his attitudes. Watch the anxious but resolute sooty faces in those waiting their turns. Is all this emotion due to the duplicity of Yankee adventurers? Can the ‘carpet-bagger’ thus sway the very soul of the black man to reach his own selfish ends? Is it for a possible mule and forty acres of land that the negro is thus profoundly stirred; that he braves hardship, the ill-will of his employers, and, may be, starvation itself? No, friend Conservative. The slave you once owned, ignorant as he is still, and lowly in social rank, feels, as he casts that ballot, the throes that liberty awakened, and which, unchecked by renewed oppression, will give his manhood a rapid and generous growth. I do not seek to conceal his ignorance about the technical duties of citizenship. An old black fellow came, as I stood near one of the polls, and proffered me his vote, asking: ‘Are you de boss?’ The question is, Does the lack of such technical knowledge unfit him for useful and honest citizenship? There have been periods in the history of our country when a loyal heart, an honest, incorruptible nature, were worth more than ten thousand of the most choicely cultivated intellects on the national roll of the rich, the powerful, and the gifted.”
The question has been often asked, and sometimes in a tone of triumph, as if it were unanswerable, Is it not tyrannical, on the part of the majority in Congress, to insist on giving the ballot to the negro in the desolated States, when the party which they represent refuses to permit the negro to vote in the Northern States? Is it not a positive violation of the golden rule—a placing of burdens upon the South which they themselves will not bear?
We answer both inquiries with a decided negative. Without stopping to discuss the question of negro suffrage at the North, farther than to say, that a large majority of the Republican party throughout the North are in favor of it, and have carried it in some of the States, and have been defeated in others only by the coalition of Democrats and weak-kneed Republicans, we take the ground that the condition of the two sections is entirely different. At the North the negro citizens had no special claims on us; they had manifested an interest in the war, and some of them had volunteered to serve in the ranks against the South, though hardly so many in proportion to their number as the whites. We should prefer to have them vote, for we do not believe in taxation without representation; but, at the South, the negroes had been our friends throughout the war; they had been steadily and persistently loyal, when very few of the whites were so, and many thousands of them had laid down their lives for the national cause. We had emancipated them, both as a military necessity, and as an act of justice to an oppressed race. But the close of the war, and the reinstating of their former disloyal masters in power, as was done often by the pardons of the President, left them like sheep in the midst of wolves. Their old masters hated them for their loyalty, and proceeded at once, under Mr. Johnson’s provisional governments, to oppress them, to refuse them land, education, or employment, except at wages which would not sustain life, and to endeavor to reduce them back to slavery.