Despite the breadth and intensity of opposition, however, the political dynamics of Reconstruction led to a pathbreaking series of steps by the federal government to override state control of the franchise and grant political rights to African-American men. At the center of these dynamics were conflicts that unfolded between Republicans in Congress and President Andrew Johnson and his (generally) Democratic supporters after the end of the Civil War. Johnson’s approach to the task of Reconstruction, begun in 1865, was to offer lenient terms to southern states so that they could be restored quickly to the Union. Despite some early vengeful rhetoric, Johnson’s program demanded few reforms and virtually guaranteed that political and economic power in the South would remain in the hands of whites, including those who had supported the rebellion. Alarmed at this prospect and at the resistance of many southern leaders to policies emanating from Washington, the Republican-controlled Congress began to formulate its own program in 1866. Although relatively few Republicans at that juncture advocated black enfranchisement, they did seek to guarantee the civil rights of blacks and promote greater racial equality in southern society.22
To further that end, the moderate majority of Republicans in Congress negotiated the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in June 1866. A compromise measure, the amendment was designed to punish Confederate political leaders (by preventing them from holding office), to affirm the South’s responsibility for a share of the national debt, and to protect southern blacks without arousing the racial fears of northern whites. Although denounced by some (but not all) Radical Republicans as too tepid, the amendment nonetheless altered the constitutional landscape. By declaring that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” were “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the amendment at long last offered a national definition of citizenship and confirmed that blacks were indeed citizens. The amendment also prohibited states from passing laws that would “abridge the privileges or immunities” of citizens or deny them “the equal protection of the laws.”23
In its direct references to suffrage, the Fourteenth Amendment was a double-edged sword. Since most congressional Republicans—whatever their personal beliefs—were convinced that northern whites would not support the outright enfranchisement of blacks, the amendment took an oblique approach: any state that denied the right to vote to a portion of its male citizens would have its representation in Congress (and thus the Electoral College) reduced in proportion to the percentage of citizens excluded. The clause would serve to penalize any southern state that prevented blacks from voting without imposing comparable sanctions on similar practices in the North, where blacks constituted a tiny percentage of the population. Although this section of the amendment amounted to a clear constitutional frown at racial discrimination, and Congress hoped that it would protect black voting rights in the South, the amendment, as critics pointed out, tacitly recognized the right of individual states to erect racial barriers. Wendell Phillips sharply attacked the amendment for this very reason, calling it a “fatal and total surrender.” Of equal importance to many, the use of the word male constituted a de facto recognition of the legitimacy of excluding women from electoral politics.24
However tepid or double-edged the Fourteenth Amendment may have been, it was fiercely opposed by President Johnson, white Southerners, and northern Democrats who argued that it would create “mongrel” governments and was an intolerable intrusion of the federal government into an arena constitutionally reserved to the states. Both Johnson and the Democrats campaigned vigorously against ratification. Meanwhile, the state governments that Johnson had sponsored in the South legally codified various forms of racial discrimination while doing little to stop campaigns of violence against blacks and white Republicans who tried to vote or run for office. In New Orleans, one of the most flagrant incidents of violence left thirty-four blacks and four whites dead, with scores of others wounded, when they attempted to hold a convention favoring black suffrage. Deeply disturbed by such developments and emboldened by substantial electoral victories in the fall of 1866, congressional Republicans approached the issue more aggressively in the winter of 1866-1867. To more and more Republicans, many of whom were changing their views in the cauldron of circumstance, black enfranchisement began to appear essential to protect the freedmen, provide the Republican Party with an electoral base in the South, and make it possible for loyal governments to be elected in the once-rebellious states.25
Congress first signaled its shift in perspective by passing a law ending racial qualifications for voting in the District of Columbia. Republicans, such as Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Frederick Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, justified such action with potentially far-reaching arguments that echoed those of Reverend Beecher: the franchise was a right that belonged to all citizens, and black sacrifices on the battlefield had to be recognized and rewarded with enfranchisement. President Johnson vetoed the legislation, maintaining that it was wrong to enfranchise “a new class, wholly unprepared” for democracy “by previous habits and opportunities.” Congress overrode the veto and weeks later passed a bill prohibiting racial bars in any existing or future federal territories. Going a step further, Congress then proceeded to insist that Nebraska and Colorado adopt impartial suffrage as a prerequisite for admission to statehood. Even some Republicans (as well as the president) balked at this, insisting that Congress lacked the power to set voting requirements for new states. Radical Republicans, however, defended the unprecedented step by arguing both that new states were the creations of the federal government and that imposing suffrage rules was sanctioned by article 4 of the Constitution, which authorized the United States to “guarantee to every state in this union a republican form of government.” Sumner acknowledged that the founding fathers had tolerated discrimination and that racial bars to voting “may be ‘republican’ according to the imperfect notions of an earlier period,” but he insisted that in post-Civil War America impartial suffrage was a necessary ingredient of republican government.26
This surge of activity, fed by continued southern intransigence, culminated in the passage of the Reconstruction Act of March 1867. The act, the legal centerpiece of Radical Reconstruction, denied recognition to the existing state governments of the South and authorized continued military rule of the region under the control of Congress. In order to terminate such rule and be fully readmitted to the Union, each southern state was required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment and to approve, by manhood suffrage, a state constitution that permitted blacks to vote on the same terms as whites. President Johnson vetoed the bill, but his veto was quickly overridden. To rejoin the political nation, the states of the Confederacy were now compelled to permit blacks to vote.27
Under the protective umbrella of the Reconstruction Act, politics in the South were transformed. In 1867 and 1868, African Americans, working with white Unionists and Republicans—most of whom came from poor or modest circumstances—elected new state governments, wrote progressive constitutions that included manhood suffrage provisions, and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment; black enthusiasm for political participation was so great that freedmen often put down their tools and ceased working when elections or conventions were being held. (The progressive nature of these constitutions is evident in the details of the suffrage laws—on issues ranging from taxpaying qualifications to residency—contained in Tables A.10 to A.15.) By June 1868, seven states, with manhood suffrage, had been readmitted to the Union, and the process was well under way elsewhere. All this was achieved despite fierce opposition from upper-class whites, who feared that a biracial alliance of blacks and nonelite whites would superintend the erection of a new and inhospitable economic and political order. The intensity of white hostility was manifested in a petition that conservatives in Alabama sent to Congress, denouncing the enfranchisement of “negroes,”in the main, ignorant generally, wholly unacquainted with the principles of free Governments, improvident, disinclined to work, credulo
us yet suspicious, dishonest, untruthful, incapable of self-restraint, and easily impelled . . . into folly and crime . . . how can it be otherwise than that they will bring, to the great injury of themselves as well as of us and our children, blight, crime, ruin and barbarism on this fair land? . . . do not, we implore you, abdicate your own rule over us, by transferring us to the blighting, brutalizing and unnatural dominion of an alien and inferior race.
Nor was southern opposition purely rhetorical: antiblack and anti-Republican violence flared up throughout the region, often spearheaded by the rapidly growing Ku Klux Klan.28
Republican achievements in the South, however, were accompanied by a succession of electoral defeats in the North. Not only were impartial suffrage referenda defeated in a handful of states, but the Republicans suffered sharp losses in the elections of 1867. The Democrats gained ground from the Atlantic to the Pacific, winning in New York and California and electing mayors in three of the largest cities in Ohio. Interpreted by both parties as the consequence of Republican support for black suffrage, this electoral swing led the Republicans to seek more moderate ground—in part out of fear that they could lose the 1868 presidential election and thereby bring a premature end to Reconstruction. Accordingly, the party nominated the uncontroversial General Ulysses Grant for the presidency and adopted a platform that supported black suffrage for the South while advocating state control of electoral rules in the North. Despite this tilt toward moderation, the Republicans did not fare well in the 1868 elections: although Grant was victorious, the winning margin was surprisingly slim, and the Democrats continued to gain ground in Republican strongholds.29
The Strange Odyssey of the Fifteenth Amendment
Within days of the 1868 election, the Republicans shifted course, as Radicals, in and out of Congress, announced that they would press forward with a constitutional amendment to enfranchise African Americans. The elections had created a quandary for supporters of impartial suffrage. On the one hand, the decline in support for the Republican Party, as well as the referenda outcomes in 1867 and 1868, underscored the strength and breadth of opposition to black enfranchisement. On the other hand, Republicans sensed that control of the national government might be slipping from their grasp, that white Southerners were intensifying their opposition to black equality, and that something had to be done soon to guarantee black political rights, particularly in the event that the Democrats returned to power in the South or nationally.
Election results also indicated that black voters might be important to the fortunes of the Republican Party in northern as well as southern states. As Senator Charles Sumner declared to his fellow Republicans, In addition to such pragmatic considerations, many Republicans were uncomfortable with the glaring inconsistencies in the party’s posture toward black suffrage in the North and in the South. A constitutional amendment, then, had several perceived virtues: it would end the party’s hypocrisy, benefit its candidates, and firmly cement the political rights and power of blacks in the South. Moreover, as a federal amendment, rather than an act of Congress, it could avoid constitutional adjudication in the courts and would be easier to enact than a long series of state constitutional referenda: once it left Congress, an amendment would be subject to ratification only by state legislatures, most of which were in the hands of Republicans.30
You need votes in Connecticut, do you not? There are three thousand fellow-citizens in that state ready at the call of Congress to take their place at the ballot box. You need them also in Pennsylvania, do you not? There are at least fifteen thousand in that great state waiting for your summons . . . be assured they will all vote for those who stand by them in the assertion of Equal Rights.
What ensued was a prolonged debate in January and February 1869 about the contents and passage of a suffrage amendment. The debate, unfolding in a Republican-controlled Congress, was dramatic and extraordinary: members of Congress were well aware that the subject was momentous and that it marked the first time since the constitutional convention in Philadelphia that the national government of the United States had grappled directly and extensively with the issue of voting rights. Both chambers of Congress echoed with eloquent speeches, deeply felt idealism, and carefully nuanced historical and theoretical arguments—as well as intense political maneuvering and sharp rivalry between the two houses. The debate began with a strategic focus on the rights of African Americans, particularly in the South, but it soon broadened into a far-reaching consideration of the meaning of democracy and the power of the national government. For several months, the outcome was very much in doubt.
The first version of the amendment to be placed on the table was authored by Representative George S. Boutwell, an influential Massachusetts Republican who had long been a defender of black rights. The amendment stated simply that “the right of any citizen of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of race, color, or previous condition of slavery of any citizens or class of citizens of the United States.” Criticism of Boutwell’s draft came from two directions. Democrats and a few conservative Republicans opposed such an amendment because they did not believe blacks were qualified to vote and because they regarded the amendment as an infringement of states’ rights; they cited the Federalist papers and the debates in Philadelphia as proof that the wisdom of the founding fathers was being fatally ignored. At the same time, some Radicals wanted a more sweeping and comprehensive amendment, such as the one proposed by Ohio Republican Samuel Shellabarger. Shellabarger’s amendment prohibited the states from denying or abridging the voting rights of any adult male of “sound mind,” except those who had engaged in rebellion against the United States or committed other “infamous” crimes. Although Shellabarger’s version, like Boutwell’s, was phrased negatively—it did not actively confer suffrage but rather prevented states from denying suffrage—it implicitly would have ended not only racial discrimination but also property, tax, nativity, and literacy requirements. In so doing, this version of the amendment would have taken a giant step toward a nationally mandated and nationally uniform suffrage. Shellabarger’s amendment was rejected decisively by the House; Boutwell’s then was passed by a large and partisan majority.31
In the Senate, a draft very similar to Boutwell’s was introduced by moderate Republican Senator William M. Stewart of Nevada. Although Democrats opposed the amendment, they had only twelve votes in the Senate, and early in the deliberations it was clear that debate would center on the choice between a narrow amendment such as Stewart’s or broader language that would ban various kinds of discrimination in voting and office holding. A proposal embodying the second approach was put forward by Massachusetts Senator Henry Wilson, a shoemaker by trade, a longtime foe of slavery, and later vice president of the United States. Wilson’s amendment prohibited discrimination “among the citizens of the United States in the exercise of the elective franchise or in the right to hold office in any State on account of race, color, nativity, property, education or creed.” This version avoided some of the criticism leveled at Shellabarger’s by tacitly permitting suffrage qualifications based on age and residence.32
Wilson and his allies, many from the Midwest, mounted a powerful array of arguments in favor of a broadly phrased amendment. They voiced a prescient fear (as had Shellabarger) that an amendment such as Stewart’s or Boutwell’s would end up being circumvented by southern states that could disfranchise blacks through literacy, tax, or property requirements. In addition, Wilson maintained shrewdly that his proposal might have the best chance of being ratified by the states because it effectively would enfranchise everyone (including many immigrant supporters of the Democrats) and not appear to be granting special privileges to African Americans. At the heart of the argument, however, were beliefs and principles, some long held, some shaped by the tumultuous events of the previous decade. Wilson himself had been a Know-Nothing and an opportunistic nativist whose views had changed in the course of the war and the
early years of Reconstruction. Wilson insisted that he supported an amendment, despite the unpopularity of black suffrage, because “it is right, absolutely right”—and there is little reason, under the circumstances, to doubt his sincerity. Wilson also pointed out that broadening the amendment to erase all discrimination (other than by age, residence, and gender) was a logical outgrowth of the reasoning that sanctioned the enfranchisement of blacks. A broad amendment would institutionalize the very principles the nation claimed to embody:Let us give to all citizens equal rights, and then protect everybody in the United States in the exercise of those rights. When we attain that position we shall have carried out logically the ideas that lie at the foundation of our institutions; we shall be in harmony with our professions; we shall have acted like a truly republican and Christian people. Until we do that we are in a false position, an illogical position—a position that cannot be defended; a position that I believe is dishonorable to the nation with the lights we have before us.
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