354 FREEDOM A CURSE TO THE NEGRO. except by the Caucasian race and that, after eight hundred years of work, his race was not yet qualified to possess the privileges of a citizen. Wherever he had tried self-government, the experiment had ended in crime and anarchy. Even the Republic of Hayti, established by mulattoes and runaway slaves from the South, became the most corrupt of petty empires under Soulouque and the yet more bloody Geffrard.1 Slavery had been a curse to the whites, but freedom would prove a curse to the black race. Deprived of the protection of the white man, his guardian and friend, the negro was destined only to sink lower in misery and degradation. That he was not a citizen was evident from the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, one of whose principal purposes was to declare him a citizen. Even if he possessed the elective franchise in Arkansas, he would not thereby have the right to vote in other States. Massachusetts excluded him, unless he could read. What right had Congress to force universal suffrage upon the State? Arkansas, as a State, had already rejected the amendment, and Congress had recognized the rejection as a State act.2 The constitution and State government of 1864 had been framed under the direction of Abraham Lincoln; had been acknowledged by the various departments of the general government, and the State had invested funds in United States bonds and held them as a recognized State government. This violation of principle by Congress was continued by the presence of the army. The new principle of the right of Congress, to interfere in the domestic government of a State, was not the principle for which Union men of the South had fought. They protested against this attempt to dictate to the people of a 1 Journal, 115-117. * Debates, 125-126. 8 Debates, 141-153. • Debates, 75-86, 231, 734-760. State what manner of Constitution they should form; but, yielding to military power, they recognized that the Fourteenth Amendment must be adopted and also a constitution which would give the negro the right of suffrage.1 But no less hostile was the feeling of the minority to the disqualifying clauses of the restriction acts and the proposed amendment; however, they could do no more than freely express their opinions.2 Clearly was it not the sole motive of Congress, in giving the negro the right to vote, to control those lately in rebellion ?3 Why should it ask the State of Arkansas to do that which the States of New York, Michigan and Ohio had refused to do? In these States the negro was better educated than in Arkansas, yet on a distinct issue their people had lately refused to extend the suffrage to him. But the disqualifying clause was even more harmful to the South than the extension of the suffrage, for it excluded intelligence from the public service. At this point, a radical member called the attention of his colleagues to a fact, well known to every loyal man in the country, that the elective franchise could not safely be restored to those disqualified under the acts of Congress without danger of undoing all that the war had done. Exclusion was simply a matter of safety. Congress, acting on behalf of the freedmen and the loyal whites, could not, in justice, permit the disloyal, however intelligent, to return to office and to control public affairs. Yet, to distrust a man is to make him an enemy, and to enforce the disqualification prescribed by the reconstruction acts and the proposed amendment, was to convert every intelligent white man in the South, who had been in any way identified with the rebellion, into a dangerous and implacable 1 Debates, 128. 2 Debates, 237 et seq. 147. 3 Debates, 356 THE COUNTER-REVOLUTION. foe to the General Government. This ominous fact the minority again and again pointed out. As in every other southern State, they declared that these men were anxious to heal over the terrible wounds of war, to accept the political situation, and to give their unqualified allegiance to the United States. If it would trust them freely, they would become the most efficient agency in restoring the South to its old-time federal relations. They asked no more than the opportunity to prove their loyalty. Therefore, let Congress recall the ban against them; and allow them, as it did their equals in the North, to participate in State affairs, and the South would speedily prove the peer of the North in loyalty, domestic peace and prosperity. Though the war was over, the counter-revolution which followed it was not, and the radical members of this convention, as in those of other southern States, were not persuaded that the men, who were the objects of political disqualifications, could not be trusted. The article on the elective franchise which they reported fully reflected this distrust. It granted manhood suffrage and incorporated the disqualifying provision of the reconstruction acts and of the Fourteenth Amendment.1 It was reported on the sixth of February, and, on that day, the minority filed a protest in a report which more completely sets forth the feelings of the majority of the white men of the South at this time on the subject than any other on record. The negro, they said, was not the equal of the white man. The differences between the two races in body and mind were numerous, striking and insurmountable. The negro had not changed in four thousand years. All history demonstrated his incapacity for self-government, and his utter want of appreciation of every institution. To this dreadful conclusion the teaching of history and especially the 1 Journal, 512, experience of the white people of the South pointed inexorably. To invest an inferior race with social and political equality would be but a stepping-stone to miscegenation, and the consequent utter deterioration and degeneracy of the race. The equity which must result from the indiscriminate exercise of the elective franchise must result in social equality unless, in the throes and conflicts which would inevitably precede the new order of things, one or the other of the races did not perish from the earth. So marked and odious a change could be effected only after the natural and God-given prejudices of the white race had ceased to exist. Peace and prosperity could never result from measures so utterly at war with the instincts and fears of the white people. To invest the negro with the elective franchise would not shield him from oppression or wrong, but would "only aggravate and increase the prejudices of race and precipitate a civil and social war. It was a slander to assert that the whites would not accord impartial justice to the negro, or that he would not enjoy the requisite protection for person, property and reputation unless invested with the elective franchise. The whites sincerely desired his social, intellectual and religious improvement. If, in the course of a few years, he should demonstrate his fitness for the exercise of the right, which in many highly civilized and well-governed countries was denied to a large class of citizens, it would then be time enough to discuss the propriety of putting the ballot into his hands. To give it to him now would only fit him to be "the facile tool of wicked and designing speculators" and to suffer him to embark on the stormy sea of politics would only retard his progress in civilization. For these reasons the right to vote should be limited to 1 A large part of the discussion in this convention was on the intermarriage of the races. white citizens.1 But by a vote of nearly four to one the convention rejected the proposition.2 The constitution finally adopted, by a vote of more than two to one,3 contained several provisions which were innovations in Southern policy. No change was more radical than the statement in its Bill of Rights of the doctrine of paramount allegiance to the Federal Government and of the constitutional right of the United States to employ armed force in compelling obedience to its authority, provisions transcribed almost literally from the constitution of Nevada, and first promulgated, it will be remembered, by the Republican party when it renominated Abraham Lincoln at Baltimore in 1864. Liberal provision was made for a system of free public schools open to all the children of the State alike, though the article on education was adopted after most bitter opposition. The minority, whose hostility to the new constitution did not cease with its adoption, filed their protest in various resolutions. The constitution, they declared, was not republican in form; it was proscriptive and would destroy the dearest rights of the people of the State; it disfranchised a large number of the best white citizens and enfranchised a class, totally incapable of selfgovernment; if ratified, it would deliver the political control of the State to stolid and brutish ignorance; it encouraged the social equality of the two races; it compelled the white citizens to contribute by taxation to the support of public schools from which their children would be effectually excluded, and yet it relieved from taxation almost the entire negro population. The acts of Congress under which the convention had been held, they asserted fur 1 Debates, 514-517. 250 to 13, Debates, 517. 3 45 to 21, Debates, 656-657. |