Harpers+20

Harper's Weekly, May 27, 1865, page 322 (Editorial)
 * THE MAIN QUESTION **

The late Chief Justice of the United States, Roger B. Taney, will be forever infamous for endeavoring, under the solemn sanction of the highest court in the land, to work that utter demoralization of public opinion which would have Jefferson Davis’s crimes unnecessary, even for his own purposes. The present Chief Justice, Salmon P. Chase, will be forever honored as the first eminent public man who has proposed that policy which will render all future crimes like Davis’s abortive. In a letter read at the twelfth American Congregational Reunion in Brooklyn Chief Justice Chase writes: "I would like to say to the Christians who shall assemble at your reunion an earnest word on the present great national duty of granting to the freedmen of the South the right of self-protection by the ballot."

President Johnson also, in a speech delivered in Baltimore before the death of Mr. Lincoln, after saying that to save the Union he would be willing to sink the whole African race, was interrupted by a voice in the crowd which said, "Don’t do that, Governor, give them the ballot;" to which Mr. Johnson instantly replied, "Yes, and I would do that, too!" Last week, when a deputation of colored men waited upon him, the President said, in his reply, that he had always maintained that the slaves had as much right to be free as those who claimed them as property, and that freedom means liberty to work and enjoy the fruit of your own toil, "in its most extensive sense." That is to say, freedom is the right to be protected in the fulfillment of all the relations of citizens exactly as other men are. For no man has the liberty to work and enjoy the fruits of work, in its most extensive sense, who is the victim of disabilities which are not imposed upon other free men.

In this country, where the Government rightfully exists by the consent of the governed, every man has an equal right to a share in political power. Suffrage for colored Americans is, therefore, not a privilege for which we plead—it is a right which, as American citizens, we consistently demand. Nor is the claim of this right vitiated by any traditional and uniform exclusion of colored citizens from the ballot-box. Mr. Justice Curtis, in his masterly opinion dissenting from that of Chief Justice Taney in the DRED SCOTT case, distinctly declares that, in his opinion, it is untrue that the Continental Congress intended to say that the white race exclusively were endowed with the natural rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence. It is from these rights that our political rights spring. And that there may be no doubt that the fathers did not mean to make color a political disqualification, it is enough to cite the action of Congress on the 25th of June, 1778, when, in discussing the articles of Confederation, South Carolina, always Tory and aristocratic, proposed the insertion of the word "white" as a condition of general citizenship. Eight states voted against it, two for it, and one was divided. The Constitution of the United States was subsequently adopted by the voters in the several States, and South Carolina was the only one in which color was a disability.

The conditions of suffrage in the States at the beginning were either of age, personal freedom, property, or residence, except in South Carolina. North Carolina, Virginia, Georgia, Maryland, Delaware, all admitted colored voters if they were old enough, had lived long enough in the State and county, owned sufficient property, or had paid the proper taxes. The disability of color has crept into the State constitutions in exact correspondence with increasing demoralization of the public mind produced by slavery. White citizens at the North sacrificed the political rights of their colored fellow-citizens to propitiate the Southern slave interest. The most abject submission was the price of the Southern political alliance. Thus in the State of New York, by the first Constitution, "every male inhabitant of full age," who had lived six months in the county, who had a small free-hold, or who had paid a certain rent or taxes was a voter. It was only in 1820 that New York condescended to tarnish her fame by making a man’s complexion vitiate his natural rights; and the provision in her present Constitution of 1846, which decrees that "no man of color" shall vote unless he has lived in the State three times longer than is required of any other citizen and has paid a tax which others are not obliged to pay, is as absolute and arbitrary a violation of the principle of our Government as if it declared that no man between the ages of forty and forty-five should have the right of voting. Complexion is no more an actual disability than red hair. Habitual drunkenness is a disability; yet it does not disqualify.

We may add that slavery was not satisfied with restricting or destroying the political equality of colored citizens in the free States. But the laws passed in some of these States to protect the personal liberty of colored men, to prevent the native free inhabitants of Wisconsin and Massachusetts from being kidnapped by James M. Mason and his confederates and sold in Virginia and elsewhere as slaves, was among the pretenses for rebellion which Mason and his party put forth, at the South, and which were alleged in extenuation of treason by Mason’s political allies at the North. The political franchise of colored citizens is no new thing. It is older than the Constitution of the United States. If we are startled by the suggestion now, our surprise is only an evidence of the terrible thralldom in which we have been held by the slave power.

But aside from the undoubted original right, it is enough to urge the voting of the blacks at the South upon President Johnson’s own ground. Political enfranchisement is indispensable in order to secure to the late slaves the liberty to work and live, "in its most extensive sense." The white population at the South have been educated in a contempt for colored men of every degree as an inferior race. Mr. Johnson undoubtedly expressed exactly the general Border State feeling about them in his Baltimore speech, to which we have alluded. He was willing either to exterminate them or to enfranchise the, as a means of conquering the rebellion. We do not mean, however, in these days, when we grow ten years in ten hours, to hold public men too precisely to words or even to opinion; and Frederick Douglass is doubtless right in saying that it was only Mr. Johnson’ way of expressing a preference for his own color. We merely mention the fact to illustrate the universal feeling of men who have been educated amidst the influences of slavery.

If this be so, and the political power in the late insurrectionary States be entrusted exclusively to the whites, the colored population will be left entirely at the mercy of those who have always regarded them with contempt, and who doubtless feel bitterly toward them as the real cause of the war which has desolated the South. If colored men are not to be enfranchised, it may be made a penal offense in the reorganized States to teach them to read. They may be deprived of the right to testify in courts of law, and any villain may enter the house of a colored man, may commit what atrocity he will, if only in presence of the family, and go unscathed. The colored men may be forbidden to bear arms; to attend church; to sit upon juries. Their wages may be restricted. There is no enormity whatever of which they may not be made the victims, if they are not to be enfranchised. If the sole, final law in the State is to be the will of those who are unfriendly to them, it is doubtful whether mere emancipation is an advantage. And as men of practical wisdom, knowing history and human nature, we have no right to refuse, while we have the power, to secure to the Southern freedmen the right to work and enjoy, "in its most extensive sense."

Is it said that it is foolish to suppose the white citizens would lay the black under disabilities? Why so? Are those who were perfectly willing to sell other men’s children likely to shrink from forbidding those men to learn to read or to bear arms? Are those who were willing that others should be made to work for nothing too humane to say that they shall have only a shilling a day? Or, again, will it be urged that palpable self-interest will prevent such legislation? But the same reason should have abolished Slavery at the South long ago; and the people who were too ignorant to see that can not be supposed to have learned suddenly that justice is the truest policy. Why should we expect of the whites of North Carolina and Georgia, even when they are loyal, what we do not find in the intelligent Empire State? When the gilded clubs of the Fifth Avenue in New York refuse to recognize free colored men as equal citizens, how can we ask the hovels of Alabama and Mississippi to acknowledge the equal rights of those who have been always despised slaves? Five years ago the white citizens of the State of New York contemptuously declared that color should be a political disability, and that ignorance and drunkenness should not. Would it be very wonderful that the white citizens of Louisiana should declare that color shall be a bar to knowledge or to high wages?

If we are asked whether it is probable that the people of New York would wish to do in South Carolina what they refused to do at home, we reply that five years have undoubtedly opened their eyes and hearts, and they will do it at home whenever the opportunity is offered. And even if we thought otherwise we should have no doubt what they ought to do; for the same principle that makes it right in one State justifies it in all. The opportunity is not now given to us to decide the question in New York; but it is in the late rebel States, through our Senators and Representatives. The colored citizens at the South are more than half the governed. In South Carolina a large majority of the population is colored. We have no more right to abandon them to the will of the whites because their color has been a badge of servility than we have arbitrarily to disfranchise the whites because their color has been a sign of treason. And if the representatives of a State organization in South Carolina, which disfranchised any citizen of the State because of his color, should claim seats in Congress, it would be the plainest duty of Congress to refuse to receive them until a republican form of government should be established in South Carolina.

If any opponent of this view should retreat upon the assertion that the United States have nothing to do with suffrage in a State—that the national Government cannot even prescribe the qualifications of voters at the national elections—we remind him of the simple fact that none of the insurrectionary States will ever again be organized except upon the terms that the United States ordain. Not a man will vote in Virginia or Carolina by any other authority than that of the United States. According to a doctrine which was proclaimed rather truculently at one time, whenever what was called active rebellion ceased in a State, the State was at once restored with all its privileges to the Union. Active rebellion has cease in Virginia, in Georgian, in South Carolina. Does any sane man propose that the forces of the United States shall be immediately withdrawn, and the voters under the Constitutions of those States be invited to send Representatives to Congress? No. The United States will withdraw their hand when they are satisfied that peace is secure. They cannot believe it to be secure until the State Constitution shall forbid the State imperatively and forever to allow any legal disability upon the grounds of color or race. And that result should be secured by an amendment to the Constitution of the United States, making every native and properly naturalized citizen, if unconvicted of crime a voter. After that the "Negro question" will take care of itself.

When more than half the adult male population of the late rebel States are enfranchised they will instantly appear to be as good as anybody. The "natural antipathy" will vanish. They will be courted as much as they are now condemned. Their most sweet voices will be wooed by demagogues as obsequiously as those of ignorant foreigners are now. We shall hear Fernando Wood assert that his life-long aim has been the restoration of his fellow-citizens of African descent to the rights so long and wickedly withheld; and the Honorable August Belmont declare that, as a free-born American, he has cherished no hope so dear as the enfranchisement of his fellow-countrymen of every color.

President Johnson says that freedom is the right to work and enjoy the fruits of toil in the most extensive sense. That means political as well as personal liberty.


 * 1. Why is the right of African Americans so important to this author? **
 * 2. Why, does he say, should the Southern states be forced to open voting to Blacks when New York hasn’t? **
 * 3. Near the end, twice, he suggests that the right to vote will take care of the bigger issues. Why do you think he feels that way? **