The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

The feeling seems to be that in some way the South without violating the amendments, has, by proving that they do not cover the case, secured an undue advantage over the North. It is, however, difficult to understand how it should be an advantage when a State, by acting within the law, simply cuts down its suffrage list. How was North Carolina, which in 1880 cast a vote equal to 81 per cent. of its voting population injured by the fact that Massachusetts in that election cast only 56 per cent. of its voting population; or how was South Carolina, which, that year, cast 82 per cent. of its entire vote, injured by Rhode Island’s casting only 37 per cent.? How would Delaware, which requires no qualification for the suffrage, except that a resident voter shall have paid a registration fee of $1, be discriminated against by the fact that California provides that only those may vote who can read the Constitution in English and can write his name; or, how are the people of Colorado, where women, as well as men vote, injured by the fact that only men vote in Massachusetts and Virginia?

Yet, as plain as this would have seemed, the action of the Southern States has undoubtedly aroused a feeling in the North that the Northern people have, in some way, been injured thereby.

It has been proposed to cut down the representation of the Southern States in Congress, and resolutions have been introduced in Congress to carry out this idea. Possibly the movement has not been as serious as it has appeared. However, it has been already serious enough in its consequences to excite the Negroes into a state of renewed aggressiveness.

This proposition, which is intended to be partly monitory and partly punitive, is warmly advocated by most if not all of the Negro leaders and their doctrinaire friends.

It would undoubtedly be strongly opposed by the majority of the white people of the South, and possibly by some of the more far-sighted friends of the Negro race outside of the South, who, looking a little beyond the immediate disfranchisement of ignorant Negroes, see that the ultimate effect will be to establish a general and impartial electoral system, based on the disfranchisement of ignorance and vice.

Before the proposal is carried into effect, it might be well for its advocates to consider certain facts.

In the first place, it is a grave question whether the section of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Federal Constitution on which such action must be based is now valid or whether it was not repealed by the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits disfranchisement on account of race, color, etc. The latter view was taken and was ably argued in the recent notable address delivered in Albany in June, 1903, by Charles A. Gardiner, Esq., of New York, before the Forty-first Annual Convocation of the University of the State of New York. He maintains that “a State can discriminate against Negro suffrage only by an organic or statutory law,” and that before Congress can penalize a State such a law must be adopted and it must be a valid law. But (he argues) since the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, no law which violated its provision could be valid. It would not merely be voidable, but void ab initio. “And a void law is no law.”[54]

But even assuming that the Congress might have the authority to cut down the representation under the present law, it is a question whether the disfranchising clauses of the New Constitution in the Southern States afford any basis for such an attempt at reduction in their representation.

The qualifications for voting in the various States of the South would not seem to be in any way improper on the face of their constitutions. The impropriety charged against them is based wholly on the fact that they disfranchise more of one class of citizens than of others.

According to the tabulation of the “Qualifications for Voting in each State in the Union,” published in the World Almanac for 1904, and “communicated to it” and corrected to date “by the Attorneys-General of the respective States,” all the States except the two Carolinas have the “Australian Ballot Law,” or a modification of it, in force, and all the States require that the “Voters shall be citizens of the State or of the United States, or an alien who has declared intention to become naturalized”; and all the States except Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, and Vermont exclude from the right of suffrage those convicted of felony or infamous crime, unless pardoned.