The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

However it was, this was the history of the exercise of the suffrage. With the weapon of the ballot, the Negro soon exceeded the expectation of the most sanguine advocate of Negro suffrage. Only the supreme constancy of the Southern whites saved the Southern States.

From this beginning, every question became a race question, until to-day no question can arise which is not regarded by the Negroes generally from a racial standpoint. It may be asserted that this was quite natural. But the fact that it is so is the best argument for the Southern view.

It is a somewhat curious if not pertinent fact that in the place where Negro suffrage was first established by Act of Congress, the District of Columbia (where it was established by the Act of January 8, 1867), which has always been under the direct control of National Government, subsequent conditions became so insupportable that it was deemed necessary to do away with the ballot altogether.

In all the years that have passed the same unhappy condition has continued. The Negroes remained solidly banded against the whites. This solidarity effectually prevented the whites from dividing on any of the great economic questions of the time. To meet this condition, one method after another was essayed. At times force was openly resorted to to prevent the recurrence of conditions that rendered life unbearable; at times shifts came into vogue that no one pretended to excuse except by the argument of necessity—such, for example, as the system of having separate ballot-boxes for each candidate, with a view to shifting them about; the system of “understanding-clauses” unequally applied; the system of ballot-box stuffing; the system of bribery, whether of leaders or of individuals.

In some places the question was seriously debated whether it was worse to use force or fraud, the necessity for one or the other being simply assumed. In others, some Negroes substantially auctioned off their votes.[53]

The result of such conditions was the retirement of many of the best men in the South from all part in public affairs, the withdrawal of the South from due participation in all other questions of the national life, the menace of the debauchery of public morals.

In this wretched state of affairs the Southern people resolved to eliminate by law, as far as possible, the ignorant Negro vote. How universal the conviction was of its necessity may be judged from the fact that it has been attempted in nearly every State in the South. How legal it may be is a question for the Supreme Court of the United States.

The new movement is being followed by stringent laws striking at all debauchery of the ballot.

As absolutely necessary, however, as the South has deemed this movement, perhaps nothing of late has done more to arouse feeling in the North, than the small vote cast in the latter section. It would appear as though the North deemed itself discriminated against and consequently injured by this action. The charge is constantly made that owing to this disfranchisement, the South has a larger representation than the North.

This idea has recently been set forth in a paper in one of the leading magazines, which, admitting that the law has not been contravened, has yet gone so far as to suggest that a sixteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States should be adopted to rectify this inequality. This suggestion would appear to be based on a false conception of the fundamental law. Representation is apportioned by law according to the number of the population, not of the voting population, and each State has the absolute right to make its qualification for the suffrage high or otherwise, subject only to the restrictions contained in the amendments to the Constitution.