CHAPTER XVII

ENFRANCHISED OR DISFRANCHISED.

WHETHER the negro ever should have been enfranchised, or, having received this weighty honor, whether he should be disfranchised, are problems that statesmen and philanthropists have grappled with in the by-gone years, and on it they have expended their best strength. L. Q. C. Lamar, Wade Hampton, Alexander H. Stephens, Wendell Phillips, James A. Garfield, Montgomery Blair, and troops of other giants upon either side have done valiant service for their respective views, but none of them has sounded a clearer note, nor struck it more forcefully than James G. Blaine.

Questions of this character owe their origin not to any cooling of philanthropic interest, not to any novel or radical views about universal suffrage, but to the fact that, in the judgment of many of those hitherto accounted wisest, negro suffrage has failed to attain the ends hoped for when the franchise was conferred; failed as a means of more completely securing the negro's civil rights; failed to bring him the consideration which generally attaches to power; failed, indeed,

to achieve anything except to increase the political weight and influence of those against whom, and in spite of whom, his enfranchisement was secured. For these reasons it has been thought that the enfranchisement of the negro was premature, and that even now it needs modification. There are not wanting those, too, who, on the ground of the alleged inferiority of the negro, will clamor against his right of franchise as it now exists, and would strip him of it wholly. On the situation as thus outlined, Mr. Blaine has delivered himself as follows:

First. The two classes I have named, contemplating the possible or desirable disfranchisement of the negro from entirely different standpoints, and with entirely different aims, are both and equally in the wrong. The first is radically in error in supposing that a disfranchisement of the negro would put him in the way of any development or progress that would in time fit him for the suffrage. He would instead grow more and more unfit for it every day from the time the first backward step should be taken, and he would relapse, if not into actual chattel slavery, yet into such a dependent and defenseless condition as would result in only another form of servitude.

The second class is wrong in anticipating even the remote possibility of securing the legal disfranchisement of the negro without a reduction of

representation. Both sides have fenced for position on this question.. *

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"Second. But, while discussing the question of the disfranchisement of the negro, and settling its justice or expediency according to our discretion, it may be worth while to look at its impracticability, or, to state it still more strongly, its impossibility. Logicians attach weight to arguments drawn ab inconvenienti. The negro is

secure against disfranchisement by two constitutional amendments, and he can not be remanded to the non-voting class until both these amendments are annulled. And these amendments can not be annulled until two-thirds of the Senate and two-thirds of the House of Representatives of the United States shall propose, and a majority in the Legislatures or conventions of twenty-nine States shall, by affirmative vote, approve the annulment. In other words, the negro can not be disfranchised so long as one vote more than one-third . in the United States Senate, or one vote more than one-third in the House of Representatives, shall be recorded against it; and if these securities and safeguards should give way, then the disfranchisement could not be effected so long as a majority in one branch in the Legislatures of only ten States should refuse to assent to it, and refuse to assent to a convention to which it might be referred. No human right on this continent is more completely guaranteed than the right against

disfranchisement on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude, as embodied in the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.

"Third. In enforcement and elucidation of my second point, it is of interest to observe the rapid advance and development of popular sentiment in regard to the rights of the negro as expressed in the last three amendments to the constitution of the United States. In 1865 Congress submitted the Thirteenth Amendment, which merely gave the negro freedom, without suffrage, civil rights, or citizenship. In 1866 the Fourteenth Amendment was submitted, declaring the negro to be a citizen, but not forbidding the States to withhold suffrage from him-yet inducing them to grant it by the provision that representation in Congress should be reduced in proportion to the exclusion of male citizens twenty-one years of age from the right to vote, except for rebellion or other crime. In 1869 the decisive step was taken of declaring that 'the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.' A most important provision in this amendment is the inhibition upon the United States' as well as upon any State ;' for it would not be among the impossible results of a great political revolution, resting on prejudice and grasping for power, that, in the absence

of this express negation, the United States might assume or usurp the right to deprive the negro of suffrage, and then the States would not be subjected to the forfeiture of representation provided in the Fourteenth Amendment as the result of the denial or abridgement of suffrage by State authority. In this stately progression of organic enactments the will of a great people is embodied, and its reversal would be one of those revolutions which would convulse social order and endanger the authority of law. There will be no step backward, but under the provision which specifically confers on Congress the power to enforce each amendment by 'appropriate legislation' there will be applied from time to time, fitfully perhaps and yet certainly, the restraining and correcting edicts of national authority.

"Fourth. As I have already hinted, there will be no attempt made in the Southern States to disfranchise the negro by any of those methods which would still be within the power of the State. There is no Southern State that would dare venture on an educational qualification, because by the last census [1870] there were more than one million white persons over fifteen years of age, in the states lately slave-holding, who could not read a word, and a still larger number who could not write their names. There was, of courre, a still greater number of negroes of the same ages who could not read or write; but, in the nine years