The question of negro suffrage being thus reduced to a question of expediency, to be decided on its own merits, the first argument brought against it is based on the proposition, that it is inexpedient to give the privilege of voting to the ignorant and unintelligent. This sounds well; but a moment's reflection shows us that the objection is directed simply against deficiencies of education and intelligence which happen to be accompanied with a black skin. Three fifths or three fourths of the poor whites of the South cannot read or write; and they are cruelly belied, if they do not add to their ignorance that more important disqualification for good citizenship,—indisposition or incapacity for work. In general, the American system proceeds on the idea that the best way of qualifying men to vote is voting, as the best way of teaching boys to swim is to let them go into the water. "Our national experience," says Chief-Justice Chase, in a letter to the New Orleans freedmen, "has demonstrated that public order reposes most securely on the broad base of Universal Suffrage. It has proved, also, that universal suffrage is the surest guaranty and most powerful stimulus of individual, social, and political progress." But even if we take the ground, that education and suffrage, though not actually, should properly be, identical, the argument would not apply to the case of the freedmen. What we need primarily at the South is loyal citizens of the United States, and treason there is in inverse proportion to ignorance. If, in reconstructing the Rebel communities, we make suffrage depend on education, we inevitably put the local governments into the hands of a small minority of prominent Confederates whom we have recently defeated; of men physically subdued, but morally rebellious; of men who have used their education simply to destroy the prosperity created by the industry of the ignorant and enslaved, and who, however skilful they may be as "architects of ruin," have shown no capacity for the nobler art which repairs and rebuilds. If, on the other hand, we make suffrage depend on color, we disfranchise the only portion of the population on whose allegiance we can thoroughly rely, and give the States over to white ignorance and idleness led by white intrigue and disloyalty. We are placed by events in that strange condition in which the safety of that "republican form of government" we desire to insure the Southern States has more safeguards in the instincts of the ignorant than in the intelligence of the educated. The right of the freedmen, not merely to the common privileges of citizens, but to own themselves, depends on the connection of the States in which they live with the United States being preserved. They must know that Secession and State Independence mean their reënslavement. Saulsbury of Delaware, and Willey of West Virginia, declared in the Senate, in 1862, that the Rebel States, when they came back into the Union, would have the legal power to reënslave any blacks whom the National government might emancipate; and it is only the plighted faith of the United States to the freedmen, which such a proceeding would violate, which can prevent the crime from being perpetrated. It is as citizens of the United States, and not as inhabitants of North Carolina or Mississippi, that their freedom is secure. Their instincts, their interests, and their position will thus be their teachers in the duties of citizenship. They are as sure to vote in accordance with the most advanced ideas of the time as most of the embittered aristocracy are to vote for the most retrograde. They will, though at first ignorant, necessarily be in political sympathy with the most educated voters of New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts; if they were as low in the scale of being as their bitterest revilers assert, they would still be forced by their instincts into intuitions of their interests; and their interests are identical with those of civilization and progress. We suppose that those who think them most degraded would be willing to concede to them the possession of a little selfish cunning; and a little selfish cunning is enough to bring them into harmony with the purposes, if not the spirit, of the largest-minded philanthropy and statesmanship of the North.
It is claimed, we know, by some of the hardiest dealers in assertion, that the freedmen will vote as their former masters shall direct; but as this argument is generally put forward by those whose sympathies are with the former masters rather than with the emancipated bondmen, one finds it difficult to understand why they should object to a policy which will increase the power of those whom they wish to be dominant. The circumstances, however, under which credulous ignorance becomes the prey of unscrupulous intelligence are familiar to all who have observed our elections. An ignorant Irish Catholic may be the victim of a pro-slavery demagogue, because the latter flatters his prejudices; but can he be deceived by a bigoted Know-Nothing, who is the object of them? The only demagogue who could control the negro would be an abolition demagogue, and he could control him to his harm only when the negro was deprived of his rights. The slave-masters were wont to pay considerable attention to zoölogy,—not because they were interested in science, but because in that science they thought they could obtain arguments for expelling blacks from the human species. In their zoölogical studies, did they ever learn that mice instinctively seek the protection of the cat, or that the deer speeds to, instead of from, the hunter? The persons whose votes the late masters would be most likely to control would palpably be those whose votes they always have controlled, namely, the poor whites; for, in the late Slave States, white aristocrat is still bound to white democrat by the strong tie of a common contempt of "the nigger." Meanwhile it is not difficult to believe, that, among four millions of black people, there are enough plantation Hampdens and Adamses to give political organization to their brethren, and make their votes efficient for the protection of their interests.
We think, then, it may be taken for granted, that, while ignorant, the freedmen will vote right by the force of their instincts, and that the education they require will be the result of their possessing the political power to demand it. Free schools are not the creations of private benevolence, but of public taxation; it is useless to expect a system of universal education in a community which does not rest on universal suffrage; and the children of the poor freeman are educated at the public expense, not so much by the pleading of the children's needs as by the power of the father's ballot. To take the ground, that the "superior" race will educate the "inferior" race it has but just held in bondage, that it will humanely set to work to prepare and qualify the "niggers" to be voters, only escapes from being considered the artifice of the knave by charitably referring it to the credulity of the simpleton. We do not send, as Mr. Sumner has happily said, "the child to be nursed by the wolf"; and he might have added, that the only precedent for such a proceeding, the case of Romulus and Remus, has lost all the little force it may once have had by the criticism of Niebuhr.
If the negroes do not get the power of political self-protection in the conventions of the people which are now to be called, it is not reasonable to expect they will ever get it by the consent of the whites. Legal State conventions are called by previous law. There is no previous State law applicable to the Rebel communities, because, revolutionized by rebellion, the very persons who are qualified by the old State laws to call conventions are disqualified by the laws of the United States. The result is, that the people are an unorganized mass, to be reorganized under the lead of the Federal government; and of this mass of people—literally, in this case, "the masses"—the free blacks are as much a part as the free whites. As soon, however, as the machinery of State governments is set in motion by these conventions,—as soon as these governments are recognized by the President and Congress,—no conventions to alter the constitutions agreed upon can be called, except by previous State laws. If negro suffrage is not granted in the election of members to the present conventions, the power will pass permanently into the hands of the whites, and the only opportunity for a peaceful settlement of the question will be lost. At the very time when, abstractly, no party has legal rights, and only one party has claims, we propose to deliberately sacrifice the party that has claims to the party which will soon acquire legal rights to oppress the claimants. For, disguise it as we may, the United States government really holds and exercises the power which gives vitality to the preliminaries of reconstruction, and it is therefore responsible for all evils in the future which shall spring from its neglect or injustice in the present.
The addition, too, of four millions of persons to the people of the South, without any corresponding addition of voters, will increase the political power of the ruling whites to an alarming extent, while it will remove all checks on its mischievous exercise. The constitution declares that "representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States, which may be included in this Union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons." The unanswerable argument presented at the time against the clause relating to the slaves did not prevent its adoption. "If," it was said, "the negroes are property, why is other property not represented? if men, why three fifths?" Still the South has always enjoyed the double privilege of treating the negro as an article of merchandise and of using three fifths of him as political capital. He has thus added to the power by which he was enslaved, and has been represented in Congress by persons who regarded him either as a beast or as "a descendant of Ham." In 1860, when the ratio of representation was about one hundred and twenty-seven thousand, the South had, by the three-fifths rule, the right to eighteen more representatives in Congress, and eighteen more electoral votes, than it would have had, if only free persons had been counted. The emancipation of the slaves will give it twelve more; for the blacks will now no longer be constitutional fractions, but constitutional units. The three-fifths arrangement was a monstrous anomaly; but the five-fifths will be worse, if negro suffrage be denied. Four millions of free people will, by the mere fact of being inhabitants of Southern territory, confer a political power equal to thirty members of Congress, and yet have no voice in their election. It has been computed by the Hon. Robert Dale Owen, in a paper on the subject, published in the New York "Tribune," that in some States, where the blacks and whites are about equal in number, and where two thirds of the whites shall "qualify" as voters, this new condition of things will give the Southern white voter, in a Presidential or Congressional election, three times as much political influence as a Northern voter. And on whom shall we, in many localities, confer this immense privilege? Here is Mr. Owen's description of a specimen of the class of Southern "poor whites" we propose thus to exalt.
"I have often encountered this class. I saw many of them last year, while visiting, as member of a Government commission, some of the Southern States. Labor degraded before their eyes has extinguished within them all respect for industry, all ambition, all honorable exertion to improve their condition. When last I had the pleasure of seeing you at Nashville, I met there, in the office of a gentleman charged with the duty of issuing transportation and rations to indigent persons, black and white, a notable example of this strange class. He was a Rebel deserter,—a rough, dirty, uncouth specimen of humanity,—tall, stout, and wiry-looking, rude and abrupt in speech and bearing, and clothed in tattered homespun. In no civil tone, he demanded rations. When informed that all rations applicable to such a purpose were exhausted, he broke forth,—
"What am I to do, then? How am I to get home?'
"'You can have no difficulty,' was the reply. 'It is but fifteen or eighteen hours down the river' (the Cumberland) 'by steamboat to where you live. I furnished you transportation; you can work your way.'
"'Work my way!' (with a scowl of angry contempt.) 'I never did a stroke of work since I was born; and I never expect to, till my dying day.'
"The agent replied, quietly,—