III

“Up to January 1, 1898, all male persons of voting age applying for registration, who can read any section of this constitution submitted to them,or understand and explain itwhen read to them by the registration officer, shall be entitled to registration and become electors.”

It will be observed that the understanding and interpreting clause of the foregoing operates the reverse of that of the Constitution of Mississippi. The South Carolina provision was limited to cease after January 1, 1898, while that of Mississippi was limited to begin January 1, 1892 and to continue thereafter without ceasing.

Subdivision (d) of the above mentioned section of the South Carolina Constitution provides as follows:

“Any person who shall apply for registration after January 1, 1898, if otherwise qualified, shall be registered:Providedthat he can both read and write any section of the constitution submitted to him by the registration officer or can show that he owns and has paid taxes collectible during the previous year on property in this state assessed at three hundred dollars ($300) or more.”

Subdivision (c) of the South Carolina law effected the disfranchisement of more than one hundred thousand electors who had passed the legal age of attending school. But for this fact, the provision of subdivision (d) if fairly applied could meet with no objection. However, it cannot be absolutely fair as long as South Carolina expends less money per capita in the education of its Negro population than in the education of its white population. The report of the Superintendent of Education of South Carolina shows that it has cost $4.23 per capita to educate the white children of the state and only $1.35 per capita to educate the colored children.

When the present Constitution of South Carolina was in process of construction, the Supreme Court of the United States had not passed upon the legality of the so-called educational provision of the Mississippi Constitution, and the possibility that it might in the near future declare all such enactments repugnant to the Constitution of the United States deterred the members of the South Carolina constitutional convention from going the full length of the Mississippi plan. Although they had assembled for no other purpose than to disfranchise the Negro, yet out of fear of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, they failed to do all they purposed.

George L. Tillman, the brother of the present United States Senator from that state, spoke in the convention the following significant and pathetic words:

“Mr. President, we can all hope a great deal from the constitution we have adopted. It is not such an instrument as we would have made had we been a free people. We are not a free people; we have not been since the war. I fear it will be some time before we can call ourselves free. I have had that fact very painfully impressed upon me for several years.If we were free, instead of having Negro suffrage we would have Negro slavery; instead of having the United States Government we would have the Confederate States Government; instead of paying $300,000 pension tribute we would be receiving it.”[12]

The Constitution of Louisiana, in its attempt to disfranchise the Negro and enfranchise, so to speak, every other class of men, the ignorant scum of Europe, as well as the intelligent and illiterate native born whites, outdoes both Mississippi and South Carolina. It adopts practically the same educational and property qualifications as are contained in the Mississippi and South Carolina instruments. The fifth section of it furnishes a true index to the spirit which is behind all of these disfranchising enactments. With vindictive memory, the framers of the Louisiana Constitution qualified as electors all who were entitled to vote on January 1, 1867 or at any date prior thereto as well as the sons and grandsons of such persons, whether or not they possess intelligence or property. Herein they display the same spirit which refused to accord to the Negro the right to vote previous to 1867.

What has been the attitude of the Courts towards these enactments which in the interest of oligarchy have set aside republican governments in the South and nullified the Constitution of the United States?

Naturally, the state courts have upheld them. The mostremarkblejudicial utterance since the famous Dred Scott decision is that of the supreme court of Mississippi in the case of Ratliff vs. Beale, predicated upon the constitution of Mississippi respecting the elective franchise. The Court said:

“Within the field of permissible action, under the limitations imposed by the Federal Constitution, the convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the Negro race. By reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence, this race had acquired or accentuated certain peculiarities of habit, of temperament, and character, which clearly distinguished it as a race from that of the whites—a patient, docile people, careless, landless, and migratory within narrow limits, without forethought, and its criminal members given rather to furtive offenses than to the robust crimes of the whites.Restrained by the Federal Constitution from discriminating against the Negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which itsweaker members were prone.”[13]

Thus a court created by this new constitution of Mississippi declares that it, in spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, discriminates against the Negro race “by reason of its previous condition of servitude and dependence,” and at the same time upholds that instrument.

The constitutionality of these disfranchising enactments has not been made a direct issue in the Supreme Court of the United States. The case of Williams vs. State of Mississippi[14], the decision of which is commonly supposed to have sustained their constitutionality, only brought the question up collaterally without proper allegations or sufficient proof. From an intimation made by the Court in this case, it is not improbable that when a direct issue upon their constitutionality is properly presented, it may render a decision consonant with that which it rendered in the case of Yick Wo vs. Hopkins, wherein the Court said:

“Though the law in itself be fair on its face and impartial in appearance, yet, if it be applied and administered by public authority with an evil eye and an unequal hand, so as to practically make unjust and illegal discriminations between persons in similar circumstances, material to their rights, the denial of equal justice is still within the prohibition of the Constitution.”[15]

There are other grounds for the belief that the Federal Supreme Court will refuse to sustain these instruments of disfranchisement, even though it has not of recent years acted in a manner to inspire faith.

These enactments have never received the approval of the people of the states. Of a total of 235,604 male citizens of voting age in South Carolina in 1890, more than 102,000 of whom were white men, only 60,925 participated in the election of November 6, 1894, at which the members of the constitutional convention were elected. Of the number thus voting only 31,402 were counted in favor of holding the convention. Thus one-seventh of the citizens called a convention and enacted a constitution which disfranchised more than one hundred thousand electors. The constitutions of Mississippi and Louisiana were adopted in the same way.

These so called constitutions, besides being repugnant to the spirit and purpose of the Fifteenth Amendment are also violative of the acts of Congress restoring the rebellious states to the Union, which actsthe Federal Supreme Court has on several occasions declared constitutional.[16]

Pursuant to the reconstruction legislation, these states adopted constitutions admitting the Negro to the ballot and then asked to be readmitted to representation in Congress. Congress, having approved of their constitutions, enacted that they be entitled to representation in Congress, “upon the followingfundamentalconditions: That the constitutions of neither of said states shall ever be so amended or changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of the United States of the right to vote in said states, who are entitled to vote by the constitution thereof herein recognized.”[17]

These states accepted these fundamental conditions and are consequently bound by them.[18]

What effect have these disfranchising enactments had upon the status of the Negro? Has he lost nothing more than the bare right to vote? Has he been deprived of nothing but an abstract right to a voice in the affairs of government and of no other privilege than the possibility of a share of political power?

Surely the loss of any one of the foregoing is not unimportant in a democratic form of government. But he has lost much more, and the probabilities are that, if these obvious discriminations are allowed to continue, he will be brought to his deepest humiliation. The law which deprives him of the badge of citizenship, changes at once his legal status and cuts him off from respect. His disqualification as an elector shuts him out of the jury box in courts where what few rights he has left are adjudicated and his grievances redressed. His disqualification as an elector and as a juror discredits him as a witness. In the states which have adopted these disfranchising constitutions, more than three hundred thousand citizens have been thereby disqualified as jurors. This is all the more outrageous, because in the same states advantage has been taken in criminal legislation of what the Supreme Court of Mississippi has termed “certain peculiarities of habit and character of the Negro” whereby “furtive offenses,” which in other communities are treated as mere misdemeanors, are made felonies and are usually visited with greater punishment than are the “robust crimes” of the whites. In South Carolina, for instance, the breach of a labor contract has been made a crime, the object being to reduce the Negro to a state of serfdom.

Not only has the legal status of the Negro been gravely affected by these disfranchising enactments; his economic status has also been lowered. A Mississippian states the following as the reason for disfranchising the Negro in his state:

“It is a question of political economy which the people of the North can not realize nor understandand which they have no right to discuss as they have no power to determine. If the Negro is permitted to engage in politics his usefulness as a laborer is at an end.He can no longer be controlled or utilized.The South has to deal with him as an industrial and economic factor andis forced to assert its control over him in sheer self-defense.”[19]

Thus Negro labor must be managed, and control must be asserted over him. His possession of the ballot would make him a free laborer and would enable him to demand the wages of free labor. It is truly an “economic problem,” in which not only the Negro of the South is concerned, but also the interests of free labor in every section of this country.

These disfranchising enactments in that they lower the legal and economic status of the black man, also tend to lower his educational and social status. The political and economic supremacy of the southern oligarchy is dependent upon the ignorance and the social degradation of the Negro. It is, therefore, not surprising that the politicians now dominant in the South assert that education disqualifies him as a field hand,—as a manageable factor,—and that consequently there must be a decrease in the amount of money expended for his education or that his education must be directed along lines which will make him more adaptable to management as an economic factor for their sole benefit. The educated Negro is not more desirable now than he was fifty years ago. It is a marvel how the great body of southern white people, a great many of whom are favorable to the advancement of the Negro, will permit men of the type of the average politicians who now exercise control among them to stand thus in the way of the true progress of the South.

First, it is asserted that the right to vote destroys his usefulness as a laborer; then, that education turns his head and makes him discontented with the plantation where wages reach the high water mark of six dollars a month, which may or may not be paid according to the whim of his employer; and finally that the privilege of respectable accommodations furnished by common carriers which enjoy unusual public franchises makes him impudent, noisy and self-respecting, the proper remedy for which is a system of “Jim CrowCars.” Thus with the passing away of the Negro’s right to vote, begins the reappearance of the odious system of Black Laws which are designed to degrade the womanhood and manhood of the Negro race. The whole trend of southern legislation is to fix what has been termed the “proper status of the Negro—subordination to the superior race.” Not a single line has been written upon the statute books of a single southern state within the last decade in recognition of the Negro as a man entitled to respect, or fair and just consideration.

In 1857, Mr. Lincoln uttered the following words in reference to slavery, which are not wanting in significance in their bearing upon the present assault upon the Negro:

“To aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it (the Declaration of Independence) is assailed and sneered at, construed and hawked at and torn, till, if the framers could rise from their graves, they would hardly recognize it. All the powers of earth seem combined against him. Ambition follows, philosophy follows, and the theology of the day is fast joining in the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person and left no prying instrument with him; and now they have him as it were bolted with a lock of a hundred keys which can never be unlocked, except by the concurrence of every key in the hands of a hundred different men and they scattered to a hundred different places. And now they stand musing as to what invention in all the domain of mind and matter can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.”

The nation can not put up with many more of these instruments of disfranchisement. It can not endure the present ones very much longer. The question is ceasing to be one of interest merely to the Negro; it is rapidly becoming one of national moment. It is becoming a contest between democracy and oligarchy in which the stability and integrity of republican institutions are involved. Already a few thousand minions of oligarchy are exerting a larger influence in the national government than do millions of freemen who are obeying the Federal Constitution by maintaining a republican form of government. The election returns from the three states of Louisiana, South Carolina and Mississippi show how startling is the power which they exercise in Congress by reason of these disfranchising instruments. The following shows the number of votes polled in these states for members of Congress in 1898 and in the case of Louisiana the votes polled may be compared with the returns of 1896 when the old constitution was in force:

The total congressional vote of Louisiana which elected six members to Congress is less by nearly 500 votes than the average for one district in Iowa.One elector in Louisiana exercises about seven times as much power in Congress as one in Ohio.The average congressional vote of Mississippi for seven districts is nearly 35,000 votes less than the average for twenty-one districts in Ohio, while the total congressional vote of South Carolina for seven Congressmen is more than seven thousand below the total vote of a single congressional district in North Carolina. The total vote cast in the twenty congressional districts of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi in the election of 1898 was 91,184; while that polled in the ten congressional districts of Wisconsin was 332,204. Thus, although these states cast nearly two hundred and fifty thousand votes less than the state of Wisconsin, they control twice as much power as that state in the national legislature.

The southern people themselves can not permit these violent infringements of the principles of republican government to continue without irrevocable detriment to their best and highest interests. In the degree that they stand by in silence and see the Negro stripped of his civil and political rights by a band of unscrupulous men whoseek no higher end than their personal aggrandizement, they compromise their own civil and political freedom, and put in jeopardy the industrial progress of the south. The bane of the South today is her selfish and misguided political leadership, the men who will not scruple to sacrifice upon the altars of their insatiable ambition for power every interest linked with her economicprosperityand all consideration for civic virtue by which alone the greatness of a people is measured.

Her misfortune lies not in any danger from Negro domination, for of all the classes of her population the Negro is the least capable of working her injury and the least disposed to do so. Her real danger lies in the pernicious activity of her dominant political leaders who perpetuate their control by overriding local and national authority to the diminution of both public and private security. Law has been dethroned and the respectable and industrious portion of the people must witness the spectacle and endure the humiliation of riot, bloodshed, and assassination with impunity of innocent and unoffending citizens by the beneficiaries under these disfranchising constitutions.

The leading paper of the state of Louisiana, which threw the weight of its influence in favor of the constitutional convention which was held for the sole and avowed purpose of disfranchising the Negro, has recently made the following important confession:

“Assassination is still the order of the day and night in Tangipahoa Parish. William McGee, a white man, employed at a saw mill was the victim. He was waylaid yesterday morning and fired upon, with the result that he was badly hurt. A posse turned out with dogs to find the murderers, but to no purpose, although the posse was fired on several times out of ambush. The authorities in that parish seem incapable of making arrests of the perpetrators of these numerous assassinations that occur among them, but when by some chance an arrest is made, no jury is found that will convict. The result is that outlaws have everything their own way, while the peaceable people have no assurance that at any moment they will not be murdered by cowardly assassins.”[20]

Thus it is that the southern white people, by permitting a few desperate politicians to outlaw the Negro, find themselves at the mercy of an oligarchy which has everything its own way.

According to the census of 1890, there are 102,657 white male citizens of voting age in South Carolina and 132,947 colored male citizens of voting age, making a total of 253,604 male citizens who were entitled to vote in that year. The election returns from that state for November 1898 show that the highest total vote polled forany office was only 28,258, averaging less than eight hundred votes to each county, thus showing that less than one eighth of the male citizens have it in their power to control the administration and policies of the state.

If by a mere technicality one class of citizens can be deprived of the rights and immunities guaranteed by the organic law of the nation, what is to prevent any other class from sharing the same fate? If less than one fourth of the male citizens of Mississippi can usurp the right to exclusively manage the local government, what is to prevent a smaller proportion from doing the same? If it is possible for a minority of the people of Alabama to disfranchise one class of citizens on account of race without the consent of the majority, what is to prevent the disfranchisement of any other class on account ofpoliticalviews? Southern white men who view withapprehensionthese untoward political tendencies, who are alarmed at the passing away of the last vestiges of a republican form of government from that section of our Union, and who silently condemn and deplore the outrageous and inexcusable manner in which the black man is being divested of his political and civil rights for mere party advantage, must seriously and actively face the situation, if they would save the south from the shame and the humiliation with which she is threatened, and which she has already too keenly experienced at the hands of a profligate leadership.

There is a dormant statesmanship in the south that must and will exert itself mightily, “a moral and intellectual intelligence which is not going to be much longer beguiled out of its moral right of way by questions of political punctilio, but will seek that plane of universal justice and equity which it is every people’s duty before God to seek.”

But the question is not a sectional one. The whole American people are deeply concerned in it. Nullification in South Carolina is as great a national menace today as it proved to be half a century ago. Republican institutions and the national welfare can have no guarantee or protection against the evil consequences threatened by defiant trampling upon constitutional authority. Not in its most palmy days did the slave system possess such power as is aimed at by these latter day nullifiers. Having shorn the Negro of his political rights and brought him into industrial subjection, thereby usurping power both in state and national government, they now threaten to dominate the economic and industrial policies of the nation.

This government can not long continue half republican in form and half oligarchic.

John L. Love.

Footnotes:

[1]Greeley’s American Conflict, Vol. I, p. 417.

[2]Blaine, “Twenty Years of Congress,” II., 94.

[3]McPherson, “History of Reconstruction,” p. 40.

[4]Ibid p. 36.

[5]McPherson, History of Reconstruction p. 35.

[6]Blaine, “Twenty Years of Congress,” II., 101.

[7]16 Wall, p. 70.

[8]Blaine, “Twenty Years of Congress,” II., 266.

[9]Prof. Kelley Miller, article in “Washington Star,” Nov. 14, 1898.

[10]Chicago Weekly “Inter Ocean,” Dec. 26, 1890.

[11]I 20 So Rep, 869, also Mississippi Code (1892) Sec. 3802.

[12]Journal of S. C. Constitutional Convention. 1731.

[13]20 So. Rep. 865.

[14]170 U. S. 213.

[15]118, U. S. 373.

[16]16, Wall., 70-73; 92 U. S., 214.

[17]15 Stat. at Large. 73. Also 16 Stat. 67.

[18]Art. 6 Const. U. S., 2. Story on Const., Secs. 1836-1843.

[19]Chicago Inter Ocean, Nov. 4, 1890.

[20]New Orleans Picayune, April 4, 1899.

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