History of the Thirty-Ninth Congress of the United States

by William Horatio Barnes

Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, though having "fifteen times as much respect for the opinions of the Committee on Reconstruction" as for his own, yet suggested the following as objections to their report:

"1. It contemplates and provides for, and in that way, taken by itself, authorizes the States to wholly disfranchise entire races of its people, and that, too, whether that race be white or black, Saxon, Celtic, or Caucasian, and without regard to their numbers or proportion to the entire population of the State.

"2. It is a declaration made in the Constitution of the only great and free republic in the world, that it is permissible and right to deny to the races of men all their political rights, and that it is permissible to make them the hewers of wood and drawers of water, the mud-sills of society, provided only you do not ask to have these disfranchised races represented in that Government, provided you wholly ignore them in the State. The moral teaching of the clause offends the free and just spirit of the age, violates the foundation principles of our own Government, and is intrinsically wrong.

"3. The clause, by being inserted into the Constitution, and being made the companion of its other clauses, thereby construes and gives new meanings to those other clauses; and it thus lets down and spoils the free spirit and sense of the Constitution. Associated with that clause relating to the States being 'republican,' it makes it read thus: 'The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government;' provided, however, that a government shall be deemed to be republican when whole races of its people are wholly disfranchised, unrepresented, and ignored.

"4. The report of the committee imposes no adequate restraint upon this disfranchisement of races and creation of oligarchies in the States, because after a race is disfranchised in a State it gives to one vote cast in such State by the ruling race just the same power as a vote has in a State where no one is disfranchised.

"5. These words of the amendment, to-wit, 'denied or abridged on account of color,' admit of dangerous construction, and also of an evasion of the avowed intent of the committee. Thus, for example, the African race may, in fact, be disfranchised in the States, and yet enumerated as part of the basis of representation, by means of a provision disfranchising all who were slaves, or all whose ancestors were slaves.

"6. The pending proposition of the committee is a radical departure from the principles of representative republican government, in this, that it does not provide for nor secure the absolute political equality of the people, or, relatively, of the States. It does not secure to each vote throughout the Government absolute equality in its governing force. It, for example, permits twenty-five thousand votes in New York city to elect two members of Congress, provided one-half of its population should happen to be foreigners unnaturalized, and not electors of the State, whom the law deems unfit to vote; whereas, twenty-five thousand votes in Ohio would elect but one member of Congress, provided her citizens were all Americans instead of foreigners."

Mr. Eliot submitted an amendment to the effect that population should be the basis of representation, and that "the elective franchise shall not be denied or abridged in any State on account of race or color." He stated the following grounds of objection to the resolution offered by the committee: "First, the amendment as it is now reported from the committee is objectionable, to my mind, because it admits by implication that a State has the right to disfranchise large masses of its citizens. No man can show that in that Constitution which the fathers made, and under which we have lived, the right is recognized in any State to disfranchise large masses of its citizens because of race. And I do not want now, at this day, that the Congress of the United States, for the purpose of effecting a practical good, shall put into the Constitution of the land any language which would seem to recognize that right.

"The next objection I have to the amendment is this: that it enables a State, consistently with its provisions, by making the right to vote depend upon a property qualification, to exclude large classes of men of both races. A State may legislate in such a way as to be, in fact, an oligarchy, and not a republican State. South Carolina may legislate so as to provide that no man shall have the right to vote unless he possesses an annual income of $1,000, and holds real estate to the amount of five hundred acres. Every one sees that that would exclude multitudes of all classes of citizens, making the State no longer republican, but oligarchical. Yet gentlemen say that under the Constitution Congress is bound to see to it that each State shall have a republican form of government.

"The third objection I have to this amendment is, that it controls by implication that power; because, while the Constitution now says that Congress shall guarantee to every State a republican form of government, this amendment, as reported by the committee, admits by implication that, although a State may so legislate as to exclude these multitudes of men, not on account of race or color, but on account of property, yet, nevertheless, she would have a republican form of government, and that Congress will not and ought not to interfere."