Free negroes could vote in North Carolina until 1835, when a Constitutional Convention, not without division of sentiment, abolished negroid franchise on the ground that it was an evil. Thereafter, negroes first voted in the South in 1866, when the “Prince of Carpet-Baggers,” Henry C. Warmouth, who had been dismissed from the Federal Army, conferred the privilege in a bogus election; he had a charity-box attachment to every ballot-box and a negro dropping a ballot into one had to drop fifty cents into the other, contributions paying Warmouth’s expenses as special delegate to Washington, where Congress refused to recognize him. He returned to Louisiana and in two years was governor and in three was worth a quarter of a million dollars and a profitable autograph. “It cost me more,” said W. S. Scott, “to get his signature to a bill than to get the bill through the Legislature”—a striking comparison, for to get a bill through this Legislature of which Warmouth said, “there is but one honest man in it,” was costly process. Warmouth said of himself, “I don’t pretend to be honest, but only as honest as anybody in politics.”
Between the attitude of the army and the politicians on the negro question, General Sherman drew this comparison: “We all felt sympathy for the negroes, but of a different kind from that of Mr. Stanton, which was not of pure humanity but of politics.... I did not dream that the former slaves would be suddenly, without preparation, manufactured into voters.... I doubted the wisdom of at once clothing them with the elective franchise ... and realised the national loss in the death of Mr. Lincoln, who had long pondered over the difficult questions involved.”
April Fool’s Day, 1870, a crowd clustered around General Grant in the White House; a stroke of his pen was to proclaim four millions of people, literate or illiterate, civilised or uncivilised, ready or unready, voters. When the soldier had signed the instrument politicians had prepared for him, the proclamation announcing that the Fifteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution of the United States by the ratification of twenty-nine, some one begged for the historic pen, and he silently handed it over. One who was present relates: “Somebody exclaimed, ‘Now negroes can vote anywhere!’, and a venerable old gentleman in the crowd cried out, ‘Well, gentlemen, you will all be d—d sorry for this!’ The President’s father-in-law, Dent, Sr., was said to be the speaker.” In Richmond, the Dent family had seen a good deal of freedmen. Negroes voted in 1867, over two years prior to this, Congress by arbitrary act vesting them with a right not conferred by Federal or State Constitutions. They voted for delegates to frame the new State Constitutions; then on their own right to vote!—this right forming a plank in said Constitutions.
The Southern ballot-box was the new toy of the Ward of the Nation; the vexation of housekeepers and farmers, the despair of statesmen, patriots, and honest men generally. Elections were preceded by political meetings, often incendiary in character, which all one’s servants must attend. With election day, every voting precinct became a picnic-ground, to say no worse. Negroes went to precincts overnight and camped out. Morning revealed reinforcements arriving. All sexes and ages came afoot, in carts, in wagons, as to a fair or circus. Old women set up tables and spread out ginger-cakes and set forth buckets of lemonade. One famous campaign manager had all-night picnics in the woods, with bonfires, barrels of liquor, darkeys sitting around drinking, fiddling, playing the banjo, dancing. The instant polls opened they were marched up and voted. Negroes almost always voted in companies. A leader, standing on a box, handed out tickets as they filed past. All were warned at Loyal Leagues to vote no ticket other than that given by the leader, usually a local coloured preacher who could no more read the ballots he distributed than could the recipients. Fights were plentiful as ginger-cakes. The all-day picnic ended only with closing of polls, and not always then, darkeys hanging around and carrying scrapping and jollification into the night.
How their white friends would talk and talk the day before election to butlers, coachmen, hoers and plowers, on the back porch or at the woodpile or the stables; and how darkeys would promise, “Yessuh, I gwi vote lak you say.” And how their old masters would return from the polls next day with heads hung down, and the young ex-masters would return mad, and saying, “This country is obliged to go to the devil!”
There were a great many trying phases of the situation. As for example: Conservatives were running General Eppa Hunton for Congress. Among the General’s coloured friends was an old negro, Julian, his ward of pity, who had no want that he did not bring to the General. Election day, he sought the General at the polls, saying: “Mars Eppie, I want some shingles fuh my roof.” “You voted for me, Julian?” “Naw, naw, Mars Eppie, I voted de straight Publikin ticket, suh.” He got the shingles. When “Mars Eppie” was elected, Julian came smiling: “Now, Mars Eppie, bein’ how as you’s goin’ to Congress, I ’lowed you mought have a leetle suppin tuh gimme.” A party of young lawyers tried to persuade their negro servant to vote with them. “Naw, naw,” he said. “De debbul mought git me. Dar ain’t but two parties named in de Bible—de Publikins an’ Sinners. I gwi vote wid de Publikins.”
In everything but politics, the negro still reposed trust in “Ole Marster;” his aches, pains, “mis’ries,” family and business troubles, were all for “Ole Marster,” not for the carpet-baggers. The latter feared he would take “Ole Marster’s” advice when he went to the polls, so they wrought in him hatred and distrust. The negro is not to blame for his political blunders. It would never have occurred to him to ask for the ballot; as greatness upon some, so was the franchise untimely thrust upon him, and he has much to live down that would never have been charged against him else.
“Brownlow’s armed cohorts, negroes principally,” one of my father’s friends wrote from Tennessee in 1867, “surround our polls. All the unlettered blacks go up, voting on questions of State interest which they do not in the least understand, while intelligent, tax-paying whites, who must carry the consequences of their acts, are not allowed to vote. I stayed on my plantation on election day and my negroes went to the polls. So it was all around me—white men at home, darkeys off running the government. Negro women went, too; my wife was her own cook and chambermaid—and butler, for the butler went.”
Educated, able, patriotic men, eager to heal the breaches of war, anxious to restore the war-wrecked fortunes of impoverished States, would have to stand idly by, themselves disfranchised, and see their old and faithful negroes marched up to the polls like sheep to the shambles and voted by, and for the personal advancement of, political sharpers who had no solid interest in the State or its people, white or black. It would be no less trying when, instead of this meek, good-natured line, they would find masses of insolent, armed blacks keeping whites from the polls, or receive tragic evidence that ambushed guards were commanding with Winchesters all avenues to the ballot-box. Not only “Secesh” were turned back, but Union men, respectable Republicans, also; as in Big Creek, Missouri, when a citizen who had lost four sons in the Union Army was denied right to vote. “Kill him! kill him!” cried negroes when at Hudson Station, Virginia, a negro cast a Conservative ticket.
“This county,” says a Southerner now occupying a prominent place in educational work for the negro, “had about 1,600 negro majority at the time the tissue ballot came into vogue. It was a war measure. The character and actions of the men who rode to power on the negro ballot compelled us to devise means of protection and defense. Even the negroes wanting to vote with us dared not. One of my old servants, who sincerely desired to follow my advice and example in the casting of his ballot, came to me on the eve of election and sadly told me he could not. ‘Marster,’ he said, ‘I been tol’ dat I’ll be drummed outer de chu’ch ef I votes de Conserv’tive ticket.’ A negro preacher said: ‘Marse Clay, dee’ll take away my license tuh preach ef I votes de white folks’ ticket.’ I did not cease to reproach myself for inducing one negro to vote with me when I learned that on the death of his child soon afterwards, his people showed no sympathy, gave no help, and that he had to make the coffin and dig the grave himself. I would have gone to his relief had I known, but he was too terrorised to come to me. I did not seek to influence negro votes at the next election; I adopted other means to effect the issue desired.”