The Right to Vote

by Alexander Keyssar

  Senator John Sherman of Ohio, acknowledging that his own views had shifted over time, echoed Wilson’s words, recognizing the uniqueness of the historical moment while looking to the future of the nation and the Republican Party.

  I believe that since we are compelled by our position to adopt an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, since public opinion requires it, since the necessity for protecting four millions of freed people in the southern States compels us to treat with this question, we ought to deal with it with all the lights of our modern civilization, with all the lights of our modern constitutions, and plant our work upon the solid basis of impartial, and you may say, universal suffrage.

  It seems to me, as the Republican party are about to lay the foundation for a political creed, that the broadest and safest and best foundation for it is universal suffrage.33

  Other supporters pointed to more specific benefits that would result from ending nearly all barriers to voting. Simon Cameron of Pennsylvania, with the Know-Nothing agitation clearly in mind, favored Wilson’s amendment “because it invites into our country everybody; the negro, the Irishman, the German, the Frenchman, the Scotch-man, the Englishman, and the Chinaman. I will welcome every man, whatever may be the country from which he comes, who by his industry can add to our national wealth.” Senator Oliver P. Morton of Indiana also viewed a broad amendment “as a safeguard against any future Know-Nothing excitements.” In addition, Morton explicitly invoked the language of natural rights to attack property and literacy qualifications for voting.

  I think there is no more principle, there is no more justice in requiring a man to have a certain amount of property before he shall be allowed to exercise this right that is indispensable to the protection of his life, liberty, and happiness than there is in requiring him to have a white skin. If the right of suffrage is a natural right, if it belongs to all men because they have a right to have a voice in the Government that controls their action . . . how can you make it depend upon property?

  He continued:The same may be said in regard to educational tests. I believe all educational tests in this country are humbugs. . . . When you come to consider the question of voting as a natural right, what right have you to take it from a man because he cannot read and write? . . . He has his rights to defend and preserve just like other men, and the right of suffrage is just as important to him as it is to anybody else.

  Morton also argued that an amendment dealing exclusively with race would imply that the federal government sanctioned other restrictions on voting. Such an amendment would say to the states:“While you shall not disfranchise a man on account of color, you may disfranchise him because he has not got property.” Are we willing to place ourselves as a Senate, and are my Republican friends willing to place themselves as a party, before the country on that ground?

  In regard to nativity . . . we say to the States, “You cannot exclude men because of their color, but you are still left at liberty to exclude them because of their nativity.” Are we prepared to say that? I am aware that the question of colored suffrage has brought the subject before Congress; but, now that it is here, we are bound . . . to consider and to guard against all the abuses that may arise upon that subject.34

  Morton and his fellow advocates of the Wilson amendment were, in effect, turning the tables on those critics of suffrage expansion, going back to John Adams, who had long claimed that “rights” arguments in behalf of any particular suffrage extension opened up a Pandora’s box—because the same arguments could justify anyone’s enfranchisement. Morton and Wilson acknowledged that enfranchising blacks on the grounds that voting was a right or natural right carried the implication that all adult male citizens should be enfranchised. Unlike most of their predecessors, however, they embraced rather than dodged that implication: to be consistent and to set the matter to rest, once and for all, the franchise indeed should be further extended rather than limited. To be sure, most Republicans—even most Radical Republicans—remained reluctant to let women out of the Pandora’s box, but these advocates of a broad constitutional amendment nonetheless were staking out new ground in public debate for the cause of universal suffrage.

  The Wilson amendment did not go unchallenged. Vehement criticism of the proposal came from several different quarters. Many Senate Democrats remained hostile to black suffrage (and thus to any amendment) on substantive grounds. James Doolittle of Wisconsin maintained that African Americans were “incompetent to vote” and that Congress should not try to “enforce this unnatural equality.” James Bayard of Delaware voiced at great length the fear that conferring “political power on an inferior race” would lead both to racial conflict and the destructive commingling of “the negro and the Caucasian.” Blacks, according to Bayard, were “more animal” and “indolent” than whites, and any “crossing” of the two races would lead to a degeneration of the “moral nature” and life expectancy of their offspring. That the Wilson amendment sanctioned black office-holding, as well as suffrage, only intensified the opposition.35

  Some moderate Republicans also objected to the office-holding provisions, while others opposed the Wilson amendment precisely because it would eliminate a range of barriers to the franchise. Senators from the West were apprehensive that it would enfranchise the Chinese. Several northeastern Republicans wanted states to retain the power to circumscribe the voting rights of immigrants. Roscoe Conkling of New York, a powerful figure in the Senate, maintained that municipalities and states ought to be able to impose property requirements in elections dealing with taxes and financial matters. As two bellwethers of Republican opinion, the New York Times and the Nation, pointed out, many Republicans in fact favored literacy or educational tests and saw no reason to jettison them with a constitutional amendment. For all of these reasons, key Republicans, such as Stewart, insisted that the Wilson amendment would have no chance of being ratified and that protecting the rights of blacks in the South depended on congressional passage of a narrowly constructed amendment.36

  The most frequently voiced reason for opposing the Wilson amendment was not that it would empower an “inferior” people but rather that it would produce a “radical and revolutionary” transformation of the relationship between the federal government and the states. As Senator James Dixon of Connecticut pointed out, at issue was not simply who voted but “who shall create . . . the voter.” The Wilson amendment would vest that power in the federal government and in so doing alter the Constitution while undermining the autonomy and authority of the states. Wilson and other Radicals replied that the “republican guarantee” clause of article 4 already gave the federal government the power to regulate the franchise. Nonetheless, the New York Times, which endorsed the House version of the amendment, claimed that Wilson’s proposal “travels over new ground, dictates terms for which the country is not prepared, and goes far toward extinguishing the vital forces of State authority.” Democrats, of course, were broadly committed to preserving the power of the states, but even moderate Republicans, in the Senate and the House, worried that the Wilson amendment would upset the balance of state and federal authority enshrined in the Constitution. To be sure, such arguments offered critics of the amendment a convenient, apparently principled means of opposing franchise extension without sounding undemocratic or racist, but they also reflected a (probably unrealistic) desire to shore up federalism in an era when the exigencies of war and the economic program of the Republican Party were shifting power toward Washington.37

  Congressional debate about the breadth of the Fifteenth Amendment unfolded in the course of a Byzantine legislative process. After several weeks of discussion, the Senate first rejected the Wilson amendment and then, shortly later, approved a slightly revised version. The Senate’s resolution was rejected overwhelmingly by the House, which asked for a conference committee to resolve the differences between the House and Senate versions. The Senate declined a conference and instead passed a narrower variant of the amendment, similar to S
tewart’s original draft. In response, the House, led by Representative John Bingham of Ohio, darted in the opposite direction: it approved language very close to that of the Wilson amendment, leaving out only the ban on education or literacy tests. The reasons for the House’s change of direction are unclear, but its new proposal was supported by some Democrats who may have been hoping to kill the amendment altogether by making it unacceptably broad. Faced with a second round of conflict between the two chambers, the congressional leadership then appointed a conference committee that included Boutwell, Conkling, and Stewart among its members.38

  The conference committee startled everyone, particularly Wilson and his supporters, by agreeing on a draft very close to Boutwell’s and Stewart’s original propositions: a narrow amendment that made no mention of office-holding or suffrage issues other than race. The committee was roundly denounced for having exceeded its authority and betrayed the Republican cause: instead of shaving the differences between the two chambers (the customary charge of conference committees), it had come forth with language far narrower in scope than each had already approved. One member of the conference committee, Senator George Edmunds of Vermont, shared this outrage and refused to sign the committee’s report.

  Yet time was becoming short. Congress would remain in session for only a few days longer, and procedural rules demanded that conference reports be voted up or down, without substantive amendments. There was too little time to thrash out a new text, and there were risks in holding the matter over until the next congress. Faced, thus, with a choice between a narrowly phrased amendment and the possibility of no amendment at all, advocates of broad-gauged democratization surrendered. Wilson declared that he would vote reluctantly for the “lame and halting” conference report because “at this late hour” it was “the best I can get.” Morton, still fuming at the conference committee, announced he would take “half a loaf when I cannot get a whole one; but nevertheless I want to say that it is pretty hard to accept the half loaf when a whole one or almost a whole one has been offered.” With several disheartened senators, including Edmunds and Sumner, declining to vote at all, on February 26, 1869, Congress passed the Fifteenth Amendment. It read simply:The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude—

  The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.39

  That the Wilson amendment (or some variant thereof) came so close to passage is a remarkable fact, testifying to the ways in which the Civil War and Reconstruction invigorated and extended (in some quarters, at least) the democratic convictions that had flourished at midcentury. The extraordinary circumstances surrounding the war propelled many Americans to support black suffrage, and as happened repeatedly in American history, contending with the issue of race provoked new thinking about democratic rights in general. By the late 1860s, large segments of the nation’s citizenry and political leadership were prepared to embrace universal male suffrage, and some men were even ready to endorse women’s suffrage (see Chapter 6). Such views, held primarily by Republicans, certainly were consistent with the party’s “free labor” ideology and its vision of a nation populated by autonomous, independent citizens. Nonetheless, the embrace of universal male suffrage was notable, given the Republican Party’s all-too-recent association with nativism and the Know-Nothings, as well as its links to a Whig Party that often had opposed extensions of the franchise. As had been true during the era of the American Revolution, people were changing their minds, and ideologies were being retailored. It was fitting that Henry Wilson, a self-educated shoemaker, first elected to the Senate by a Know-Nothing legislature and known more as a practical politician than an ideologue, became the late 1860s standard bearer of universal suffrage.

  Why Congress failed to pass a broader version of the Fifteenth Amendment is a question that might well take a book to answer satisfactorily. Yet even without a detailed study of the maneuvering, politicking, and happenstance that must have been present behind the scenes, certain things seem clear. One is that the narrow version of the Fifteenth Amendment probably represented the center point of American politics, the consensus view even within the Republican Party. Most Republicans—and most Americans—did not travel the same ideological road as Henry Wilson and Oliver Morton. They accepted black suffrage but were not prepared to let loose the other inhabitants of the Pandora’s box. As the New York Times noted approvingly, the changes in suffrage law “have sprung not from any conviction of injustice or unfairness . . . but from the new emergencies created in the progress and by the results of the civil war.” Indeed, the debates in Congress revealed the limits, the jagged edges, of democratic thought and political practice among Republicans as well as Democrats. The primary hindrances to further democratization were concerns about ethnicity and class (as well as sex) that had been so prominent in the 1850s and that still shaped the thinking of many political leaders. What opponents of a broad amendment rejected in the end was the abolition of discrimination based on nativity, religion, property, and education. They wanted to retain the power to limit the political participation of the Irish and Chinese, Native Americans, and the increasingly visible clusters of illiterate and semiliterate workers massing in the nation’s cities. As Henry Adams astutely observed, the Fifteenth Amendment was “more remarkable for what it does not than for what it does contain.”40

  Ethnic and class issues remained prominent during the ratification process. On the West Coast, especially in California, opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment was fueled by the anti-Chinese furor that would sour the region’s politics for decades: whites, including many working-class whites, feared that the amendment would enfranchise the Chinese, encourage further Chinese immigration, and lower the wages and living standards of white workers. (That the Chinese could not become citizens in the late 1860s did little to extinguish such fears.) Consequently, state legislatures in the western states (excepting Nevada) refused to ratify the amendment—despite the tiny African-American presence in the region.41

  An even more baroque drama was played out in Rhode Island. The state’s Republican middle class was divided over the amendment owing to a widely bruitedabout claim that the Irish could be considered a race and that the Commonwealth’s property qualification for the foreign-born therefore would be construed as racial discrimination. The Democrats also were split, with one faction ready to override the national party’s opposition to the amendment in the hope that it might indeed enfranchise propertyless immigrant workers. In the end, Rhode Island did ratify the amendment, but only in 1870, long after other New England states had acted and only when it appeared that the state’s vote might be critical to passage. What made this political conflict particularly curious—and revealing of the complex linkages between class and race—was the fact that blacks had been enfranchised in Rhode Island since the 1840s.42

  For these reasons, among others, ratification did not appear to be a sure thing. Although the moment was as propitious as it ever would be (Republicans controlled most state legislatures and President Grant actively supported the measure), opposition to the amendment was widespread and intense; it was passed easily only in New England, where blacks already voted, and in the South, where the federal government had already intervened to compel black enfranchisement. (Ratification of the amendment was made a condition for readmission to the Union for four southern states.) Elsewhere, battles over ratification were closely fought and heavily partisan. Democrats argued that the amendment violated states’ rights, debased democracy by enfranchising an “illiterate and inferior” people, and promised to spawn an unholy (and contradictory) mixture of intermarriage and race war. Republican legislators replied that black men had earned the franchise through their heroism as soldiers and that the amendment was needed to finally put the issue of black rights to rest; given the narrow boundaries of the amendment, they often avoided claiming
suffrage as a universal right. What neither party mentioned much was that partisan interests were at stake, particularly in the border, midwestern, and mid-Atlantic states, where the black population could boost the fortunes of the Republicans. In the end, most of these close contests were won by the Republicans, and the Fifteenth Amendment became part of the Constitution in February 1870.43

  African Americans jubilantly celebrated the amendment’s ratification. Thousands of black voters, including military veterans with their wives and children, marched in triumphant parades throughout the country. Frederick Douglass, speaking in Albany in late April, declared that the amendment “means that we are placed upon an equal footing with all other men . . . that liberty is to be the right of all.” Longtime abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips were no less enthusiastic: the amendment, according to Phillips, was “the grandest and most Christian act ever contemplated or accomplished by any Nation.” Among less engaged and activist citizens, feelings were more muted, evoking the satisfied but fatigued sentiment that the New York Times had voiced in March 1869. “The adoption of this amendment will put an end to further agitation of the subject,” editorialized the Times, “and thus leave the Government of the country free to deal with its material interests and with . . . more pressing questions.” As Congressman and later President James Garfield noted, now that they were enfranchised, “the fortunes” of African Americans were “in their own hands.”44

  The Fifteenth Amendment was certainly a landmark in the history of the right to vote. Spurred by pressure from blacks, deeply felt ideological convictions, partisan competition, and extraordinary conditions created by an internecine war, the federal government enfranchised more than a million men who only a decade earlier had been slaves. Moving with a speed reflecting rapidly shifting circumstances, Congress and state legislatures had created laws that would have been unthinkable in 1860 or even 1865. In the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the words right to vote were penned into the nation’s Constitution for the first time, announcing a new, active role for the federal government in defining democracy. Yet momentous as these achievements may have been, the limitations of the Fifteenth Amendment were, as Henry Adams pointed out, as significant as its contents: the celebrations of the black community would soon prove to be premature, and the unresolved tension between federal and state authorities would vibrate for another century. Contrary to the optimistic conclusion of the New York Times, the nation had not finished with the issue of black suffrage.