The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

It may be well, at the outset of the discussion of this matter, to call attention to a fact somewhat generally overlooked: that the right to vote is not an inherent right. It is a privilege conferred by positive enactment on those citizens possessed of certain specified qualifications.

Further, the right to determine the qualification for the suffrage—that is, to declare on what condition a citizen shall exercise the suffrage—rests with the several States; the only limitation to this being the express restrictions contained in the Constitution of the United States bearing on the subject. Where a State duly enacts a law it stands until it is changed by law or is declared invalid by the proper court of competent jurisdiction. Its provisions are until then the law.

It is not necessary to go largely into the history of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They were the offspring of ignorance and passion. They were adopted partly to punish the South, partly to arm the Negroes with a weapon which would enable them to hold their own against the whites, and partly to perpetuate the ascendancy of the radical wing of the Republican Party.

Prior to, and even for some time subsequent to the war, the idea of endowing the Negro race generally with the ballot had not been seriously entertained by any considerable portion of the American people.

Mr. Lincoln again and again, during his debates with Douglas, declared his opposition to the idea. He said in one of his speeches: “I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office or intermarry with the white people; and I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which, I believe, will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

This declaration he reiterated in a speech delivered at Columbus. The furthest he ever went in favor of admitting any Negroes to the privilege of the ballot was when, on March 13, 1864, in his letter to his provisional governor in Louisiana, Governor Hahn, he said: “I barely suggest, for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in: as, for instance, the very intelligent and especially those who have fought so gallantly in our ranks.”

Of the thirty-four States which formed the Union in January, 1861, thirty excluded Negroes from the franchise by constitutional provision; while in the four States whose constitutions contained no such provision—New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire—owing to the small number of Negroes among their population, and the property and educational qualifications, the Negro vote was so small as to be a negligible quantity.[51]

The opposition to universal Negro suffrage was so great throughout the North during the agitation of the question which was subsequently embodied in the Fifteenth Amendment, that, excluding the enforced acquiescence of the Southern States, it was when submitted to the people defeated in every State except Iowa and Minnesota.[52] After the adoption of the Amendment other States voted for it.

It is probable that, had the South not been so intractable in matters relating to the Negroes, the admission of the Negroes to the suffrage would have been along the line suggested by Mr. Lincoln to Governor Hahn. But at that time it was deemed necessary to quell the South though the heavens fell. Moreover, there was grave danger that the South might again hold the balance of power in the National Assembly. With stern and reckless determination the implacable leaders of the radical wing of the dominant party created what one of them termed a force of “perpetual allies.”

Having been drilled by years of slavery to follow the lead of their masters, and being reasonably apt at imitation, these allies followed slavishly the direction of their new leaders. It was perfectly natural that they should at that time have given themselves unreservedly to the representatives of the agencies which had emancipated them, which stood for them, and which held out to them such glittering rewards as complete equality with, and finally domination over, their former masters. Possibly, it was not unnatural that they should have followed with unexampled credulity the most unprincipled among those representatives who steadily held out to them greater and greater rewards.