Knowing that few citizens realize the restrictions on suffrage during the early years of the republic and the difficulty with which the right of franchise has been extended during the last half century, the author has undertaken a scientific study in this field. How the franchise was at first limited to persons owning considerable property, and how some of the most popular statesmen of that day endeavored to keep it thus restricted, and how this aristocratic test gradually ceased, constitute the interesting portion of the book. The author's aim, however, is to "present a panoramic picture of the whole United States and to carry the reader rapidly on from decade to decade without getting lost in the detailed history."
The author himself raises the question as to whether he has placed undue stress on the Civil War and the Reconstruction periods; "but the intention," says he, "was to pick out of Civil War history the events and circumstances that had to do directly with suffrage and to lay them before the reader who is not necessarily familiar with that history. This decision to emphasize these two periods was determined to some extent by the fact that the study of suffrage during the colonial period has been covered by C. F. Bishop's History of Elections in the American Colonies and A. V. McKinley's Suffrage Franchise in the Colonies. One of the aims of the book is to clear up the problems of suffrage so far as the Negro is concerned.
Taking up the question of the extension of suffrage to Negroes upon the passing of the property qualifications, the author gives some valuable information, showing the restriction of Negro suffrage culminating with their disfranchisement in Pennsylvania but falls into the attitude of a biased writer in making such remarks as "New York was not a State that suffered greatly from the presence of the Negro" to account for its action on the question. Again on page 87 he says: "Up to about this time the Negroes had not been a serious problem." No large group of Negroes have ever made a State suffer, but communities living up to the expensive requirements of race prejudice have paid high costs for which the Negroes have not been responsible. Because of this bias the writer betrays throughout his treatment his feeling that Negro suffrage was justly restricted, when white persons not better qualified were permitted to vote.
After briefly discussing the extension of the franchise to aliens and the beginnings of woman suffrage the author directs his attention to the question as it developed during the Civil War and the Reconstruction. Into this he brings so many impertinent matters concerning reconstruction that he almost wanders afield. In the discussion, however, he makes clear his position that Congress in its plan for reconstruction had no right to require the seceded States to make provision for Negro suffrage. As these States, moreover, were not qualified for representation in Congress they could not be for ratification of an amendment. It is not surprising then that the author blamed the Negro for his own recent disfranchisement. He says: "The Negro must have failed to make himself an intelligent dominant political factor in the South or such constitutions as have been renewed here would be utterly impossible." The author has evidently ignored the forces making history.
A Social History of the American Family. By Arthur W. Calhoun, Ph.D. Volumes II and III. The Arthur A. Clark Company, Cleveland, Ohio.
This work, the first volume of which with these two completes the treatise, appeared in 1917 when it was reviewed in this publication. The second volume covers the period from our independence through the Civil War. Carrying forward this treatment the author considers marriage and fecundity in the new nation, the unsettling of foundations, the emancipation of childhood, the social subordination of woman, the emergence of woman, the family and the home, sex morals in the opening continent, the struggle for the west, the new industrial order, the reign of self indulgence, Negro sex and family relations in the ante-bellum South, racial associations in the old South, the white family in the old South, and the effects of the Civil War.
Discussing Negro sex the author says (II, 243): "If the blacks were gross and bestial, so would our race be under a like bondage; so it is now when driven by capitalism to the lower levels of misery. The allegedly superior morality of the master race or class is not an inherent trait but merely a function of economic ease and ethical tradition." He then discusses slave breeding, which was so degrading as to force sexual relations between healthy Negroes and even that of orphan white girls with Negroes to produce desirable looking offspring for purposes of concubinage. Such a case happened in Virginia near the end of the eighteenth century. After long litigation she and her children were declared free. Under these conditions sexual relations among Negroes became loose. The attachment of husband to wife was not strong and ties of blood were often ignored in sexual relations. There appears, on the other hand, much evidence that a high sense of morality obtained among the Negroes. Women of color would not yield to the lust of their masters, and the forced separation by sale of the wife from the husband caused heartaches and sometimes suicide.
Racial associations of the slaves with their masters' children, the author contends, was generally harmful in that white children learned from the most degraded class of the population. Yet the fact that the whites often admitted the blacks to great intimacy indicates that there must have been many whites who did not believe it. Slaves thus associated soon learned the ways of their master's family, but white children remaining and even sleeping promiscuously among slaves early formed the habit of fornication. The extent to which this custom prevailed is well established by numerous instances of the concubinage of white men with women of color, the offspring of which served for the same purpose as an article of commerce for similar use throughout the South. In this respect the author has not brought out anything new.
Continuing the discussion further he says (II, 305): "Southerners maintained heatedly that at all events the virtue of the southern woman was unspotted." "Doubtless," says he, "their contention was largely warranted but it could not be maintained absolutely." To prove the assertion he quotes Neilson, who during the six years he spent in the United States prior to 1830 found in Virginia a case of a Negro with whom a planter's daughter had not only fallen in love but had actually seduced him. In North Carolina a white woman drank some of her Negro's blood that she might swear that she had Negro blood in her and marry him. They reared a family. The author quotes also from Reverend Mr. Rankin, who "could refer you to several instances of slaves actually seducing the daughters of their masters! Such seductions sometimes happened even in the most respectable slaveholding families." The author agrees with Pickett, however, that most white women in the South were pure, and questions Bennett's remark that perhaps ladies are not immaculate, as may be inferred from the occasional quadroon aspect of their progeny. He gives some weight, however, to this remark of a southerner (II, 305-306): "It is impossible that we should not always have a class of free colored people, because of the fundamental law partris sequitur ventrum. There must always be women among the lower class of whites, so poor that their favors can be purchased by slaves. "The Richmond Enquirer of 1855," says the author, "contains the news of a woman's winning freedom for herself and five children by proving that her mother was a white woman." While Lyell found scarcely any instances of mulattoes born of a black father and a white mother, Olmsted, another traveler who observed that white men sometimes married rich colored girls, heard of a case of a colored man who married a white girl.