Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908

Struggle for Mastery

The Fred W. Morrison Series in Southern Studies

Struggle for Mastery

Disfranchisement in the South, 1888–1908

Michael Perman

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill and London

© 2001 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Designed by April Leidig-Higgins

Set in Minion by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Perman, Michael. Struggle for mastery : disfranchisement

in the South, 1888–1908 / Michael Perman.

p. cm.—(The Fred W. Morrison series in Southern studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8078-2593-X (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 0-8078-4909-X (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Afro-Americans—Suffrage—Southern States—History. 2. Afro-Americans—Segregation—Southern States—History. 3. Southern States—Politics and government—

1865–1950. I. Title. II. Series.

JK1929.A2 P47 2001 324.6′2′097509034—dc21 00-041773

05 04 03 02 01 5 4 3 2 1

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Disfranchisement in History

1 Devising Disfranchisement: The Great Problem in Its Final Phase

2 Supervising the South: Federal Election Laws, 1890–1894

3 Embarking on Disfranchisement: Tennessee and Arkansas, 1889–1892

4 Harmonizing Rival Factions I: Mississippi, 1890

5 Harmonizing Rival Factions II: South Carolina, 1895

6 Conciliating the South: McKinley Administration, 1896–1901

7 Defeating Fusion I: Louisiana, 1898

8 Defeating Fusion II: North Carolina, 1898–1900

9 Reforming the Black Belt I: Alabama, 1901

10 Reforming the Black Belt II: Virginia, 1901–1902

11 Exonerating the South: Congress, 1901–1906

12 Reinforcing Disfranchisement: The Rise of Segregation

13 Forging a Reform Coalition: Texas and Georgia, 1901–1908

14 Finishing Disfranchisement: The Direct Primary and the Eviscerated Electorate

Conclusion: Disfranchisement in Context

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

James Z. George 76

Benjamin R. Tillman 97

Robert Smalls 112

Murphy J. Foster 133

Ernest B. Kruttschnitt 139

Marion Butler 155

Furnifold Simmons 158

Under Which Flag? 160

The Simmons Machine at Work 169

Joseph F. Johnston 176

Alfred P. Thom 209

A. C. Braxton 216

Alexander W. Terrell 278

Tom Watson 284

Maps

1 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of Tennessee, by Counties, 1910 52

2 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of Arkansas, by Counties, 1910 60

3 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of Mississippi, by Counties, 1910 71

4 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of South Carolina, by Counties, 1910 95

5 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of Louisiana, by Parishes, 1910 126

6 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of North Carolina, by Counties, 1910 151

7 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of Alabama, by Counties, 1910 175

8 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of Virginia, by Counties, 1910 197

9 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of Texas, by Counties, 1910 272

10 Percentage of African Americans in Total Population of Georgia, by Counties, 1910 282

Acknowledgments

This book examines the political crisis in the South around the turn of the century when the southern states became embroiled in debates over disfranchisement and then mounted electoral campaigns to implement it. This episode was the last crisis in a century that southerners experienced as one of constant crisis. In its aftermath, a period of relative political calm and racial stability was ushered in that would continue for about fifty years.

Until I began investigating the phenomenon of disfranchisement while preparing the Charles Moffat Lecture at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia, in 1990, I had regarded disfranchisement as little more than the rounding out of a gradual process of suffrage restriction that had been unfolding during the post-Reconstruction decades. But if the African American and Republican vote had already been so effectively curtailed, why was there any need to embark on such a risky and tumultuous undertaking as disfranchisement by means of a constitutional convention or constitutional amendment? There had to be more to disfranchisement than met the eye and more than historians had been saying about it since 1950 when it had first attracted scholarly attention. So I decided to look into the matter further, and the result is this book.

The book’s title comes from an editorial in the Arkansas Gazette in 1890. It captures precisely the purpose behind the disfranchisement movement as well as the notion of asserting dominance over a subordinate social group, as in the relationship between master and slave. In addition to its aptness, the phrase has a particular significance for me. When I was an undergraduate at Oxford University in the early 1960s, one book I encountered impressed me more perhaps than any other; this was A. J. P. Taylor’s brilliant work, The Struggle forMastery in Europe, 1868–1918, which I thought represented historical writing at its most scintillating and provocative. Thus the phrase struggle for mastery has a meaning that is both interpretative and personal.

My attempt to understand disfranchisement has taken me to a number of libraries and archives. Among the staff members at the many repositories I visited, several were particularly helpful: Norwood Kerr and Ed Bridges, director, at the Alabama Department of Archives and History; Henry Fullmer and Allan Stokes, director, at the South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina at Columbia; Richard Shrader, John White, and David Moltke-Hansen, director, at the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; and Mary Herbert at the Maryland Historical Society. I did much of my newspaper reading in the microfilm reading room of the University of Chicago’s Regenstein Library, where Ray Gadke was always on hand to provide me with the dozens of reels I needed. At the University of Illinois at Chicago’s interlibrary loan office, Kathy Kilian was extremely resourceful in tracking down newspapers on microfilm for me. When I was searching for state maps to show racial distribution county by county, my colleague in economics at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Joe Persky, told me about the Statistical Atlas of the United States; this proved to be a most welcome and valuable tip.

While working on this project, I gave lectures or seminars at Harvard University, Ohio State University, the University of Illinois at Urbana, the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, and my own university, as well as a session at the Organization of American Historians’ 1994 convention in Atlanta. These generated questions and comments that were both helpful and challenging. I am also grateful to the University of Illinois at Chicago for a fellowship at the Institute for the Humanities in 1987–88 that enabled me to read widely in southern history and develop the idea of a study of disfranchisement. A semester of sabbatical leave in the fall of 1996 gave me the time to write most of the manuscript. This leave was followed by a three-year term as chair of the History Department that, although most enjoyable and satisfying, delayed considerably the completion of the book.

My experience with the University of North Carolina Press has again been very gratifying. Lew Bateman, who was involved with my previous book, was very supportive of this one. And Paula Wald did a superb job of copyediting the manuscript; I am indebted to her for the remarkable care and insight she brought to the task.

Finally, I thank Ed Ayers, Vernon Burton, Eric Foner, John Hope Franklin, George Fredrickson, my colleague Richard John, and Mills Thornton for their encouragement and advice. One of the two historians who reviewed the manuscript for the press gave it a particularly careful reading, offering many thoughtful suggestions. The book has benefited considerably from these comments, and I am most grateful for them. My deepest thanks go to G. V. Ramanathan for being such a wonderful friend and to Ben and Sarah, both now in their twenties, for making their father so proud.

Struggle for Mastery

Introduction

Disfranchisement in History

The negro must retire as a competitive factor in politics, in order to ensure peace and harmony between the races. . . . The rugged issue cannot be dodged. It is a struggle for mastery in which the strongest arm must win.

—Arkansas Gazette, editorial, 11 January 1890

The campaign for disfranchisement at the turn of the century was quite possibly one of the most dramatic and decisive episodes in American history. One by one, over a period of two decades, each state in the former Confederacy set in motion complicated and hazardous electoral movements aimed at removing large numbers of its eligible voters. These ruthless acts of political surgery preoccupied the region’s citizenry and dominated its political life as constitutional conventions were summoned into existence and constitutional amendments were formulated and then ratified. This drastic remedy created a watershed in the history of the South between, on the one hand, the political and social turbulence of the sectional conflict and its aftermath and, on the other, the relative stability and calm that ensued during the first half of the twentieth century.

Disfranchisement, like the imposition of segregation that occurred around the same time, was a historical event of fundamental importance and impact. Consequently, it has figured prominently in the historical literature ever since, whether in histories of particular states, the South as a region, or the entire country. Topical historical studies dealing with such matters as government and politics, race relations, or constitutional development have also examined disfranchisement in the South in many different ways. The subject therefore does not suffer from oversight or neglect. It is perhaps surprising, then, to discover that only one study has been devoted exclusively to disfranchisement in all of the states involved. Written in the 1930s, it has never been published as a book. As a result, Struggle for Mastery will be the first book-length study that focuses on disfranchisement alone in every southern state, while also placing each instance in a comparative context across the entire region.

All the same, a great deal has been written on this subject and a historiography has emerged. It begins with William A. Mabry’s dissertation at Duke University, The Disfranchisement of the Negro in the South. Completed in 1933, it appeared piecemeal as a series of journal articles offering accounts of disfranchisement in Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, Alabama, and North Carolina. Because his study was primarily descriptive rather than analytical, Mabry was not concerned with making generalizations or identifying patterns among the states. He did indicate that the perpetrators were usually the political leaders [of the Democratic Party] who saw their positions endangered by the opposition’s use of the Negro vote and that the devices employed to disfranchise (that is, the voting tests and qualifications) as well as the objective sought (namely, elimination of all African Americans from voting) were common to all of the states.¹ Mabry also concluded that, for the most part, these disfranchising initiatives succeeded in achieving their aim.² In giving priority to description over explanation, Mabry was no doubt reflecting the assumptions of other historians who wrote about this episode in the half century after it occurred, for they did not feel compelled to account for a development that seemed self-explanatory, even natural or desirable.

A break in this trend came in 1949 with the publication of Southern Politics in State and Nation by V. O. Key Jr. and in 1951 with the publication of Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 by C. Vann Woodward. Perhaps the most admired and authoritative students of the South in their respective disciplines of political science and history, Key and Woodward injected into the study of disfranchisement several interpretative notions that have affected all subsequent approaches to the subject.

In Southern Politics, Key suggested that the disfranchising campaigns of the 1890s amounted to a Bourbon coup d’état, for the forces in the drive for disfranchisement were the conservative or Bourbon element of the Democratic Party. In most southern states, he claimed, the leadership came from the conservative Democratic faction and its center of strength, at least outside the towns and cities, was in the black-belt counties.³ But only a few pages later, Key backed off when he realized that Mississippi and South Carolina did not quite fit this generalization. In its place, he rather hesitantly pitched a weaker explanation. Perhaps the sounder generalization, he conceded, is that the groups on top at the moment, whatever their political orientation, feared that their opponents might recruit Negro support and thus launched the move for disfranchisement.⁴ Key had shifted his position from the assertion that the conservative Democratic faction, located in the black belt and the towns, led the movement to the suggestion that the groups on top, whatever their political stance or geographical location, acted out of fear that rival parties like the Populists and Republicans or rival groups within their own Democratic Party, or even both, might use the black vote against them. But he left both generalizations, the weak as well as the strong, undeveloped and did not indicate which he preferred.

Woodward’s interpretative approach in Origins of the New South was similar to Key’s strong generalization. He too claimed that the black belt Democrats initiated the state campaigns for disfranchisement, but he gave less credence to Key’s inclusion of a town-based element of this conservative faction. Behind the ‘White Supremacy’ slogans and the front of racial solidarity there raged a struggle between Southern white men that is usually overlooked—the longstanding rivalry between the Black Belt and the Hill Country.⁵ So pivotal was this contest between the black-majority counties and those that were predominantly white that the Negro, supposedly the primary concern of the white-supremacy conventions, was forgotten in the struggle of white men for supremacy over white men.⁶ In effect, the black vote became the bone of contention in a contest that revolved around competing political and class interests among whites. But, like Key, Woodward believed that the Democrats in the black districts initiated disfranchisement as a way of depriving their opponents of the electoral advantage they derived from the black vote.

Like Key, Woodward also shifted position. In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, published a few years later in 1955, he gave greater emphasis to lower-class whites as the initiators of disfranchisement. In this study of the history of segregation, he put forth what has been called the Woodward thesis on the origins of segregation. After a decade or so in which some degree of fluidity and imprecision characterized the South’s race relations in the wake of Reconstruction, Woodward argued, in the 1890s, the region repudiated these forgotten alternatives and embraced instead a capitulation to racism as pressures arose to sharpen the line of demarcation between the races. Woodward did not identify the source of this pressure, but it seemed to be coming from the lower levels of the social structure because the conservatives who were in the ascendant capitulated to the demand for a radical solution to replace the existing, more moderate system. In effect, Woodward observed, the Negro was now pressed into service as a sectional scapegoat in the reconciliation of estranged white classes and the reunion of the Solid South.⁷ Although the book’s subject matter was the origins and subsequent course of segregation, Woodward’s interpretation of how race relations became hardened in the 1890s could well apply to the more stringent measures being taken against black voting. Woodward was not categorical about the similarities between the processes of disfranchisement and segregation, but the notion that pressures for disfranchisement came from below and were part of a capitulation to racism and a reunion of the Solid South began to be taken seriously. After all, as Albert D. Kirwan had pointed out in Revolt of the Rednecks (1951), a study of Mississippi politics in the half century since Reconstruction, disfranchisement produced a political environment in which a new breed of rabble-rousing politician arose, including such demagogues as Mississippi’s James K. Vardaman, as well as Jeff Davis in Arkansas and Cole Blease in South Carolina.⁸ So it was quite conceivable that the revolt of lower-class whites contributed significantly to the upward pressure for disfranchisement.

Within the span of a few years, disfranchisement had become a contentious topic attracting considerable attention. Yet the interpretations that had generated this new interest were actually quite speculative. Key’s two generalizations about the identity of the disfranchisers came almost as an afterthought in the fifth and final chapter on restrictions on voting of a book whose subject matter was not disfranchisement but the one-party South in the mid-twentieth century. Similarly, Woodward’s interpretative statements came first from a broad-ranging examination of a fifty-year period of southern history and then from a stimulating but not exhaustively researched study of segregation’s sixty-year history. Thus, the theories that reinvigorated the study of disfranchisement and permeated the subsequent literature possessed impressive authorial pedigrees but lacked a convincing or exhaustive grounding in the documentary historical evidence.

The question of who the disfranchisers were and what their aims had been obviously needed closer examination in order to settle the existing contradictions and uncertainties within these provocative interpretations. In The Shaping of Southern Politics, published in 1974, J. Morgan Kousser, one of Woodward’s students at Yale University, sought to bring order to the confusion. Based on considerable research in newspapers and the legislative and electoral records of southern states and employing the new techniques of computer-based statistical analysis, Kousser’s study provided the thorough archival and quantitative research so long overdue. As a result, he was able to refute several of the propositions formulated by Key and Woodward about suffrage restriction and disfranchisement in the late nineteenth century. First, Kousser found that the movement was not initiated by lower-class whites or the Populist or Republican opposition—it came neither from below nor from outside the Democratic Party. Second, he discovered that the forces behind suffrage restriction had a very definite interest and identity and were not just whatever groups happened to be in power when the black vote became a burning issue. Having rejected the ancillary generalizations proposed by Key and Woodward, Kousser reaffirmed their primary thesis that the conservative Democrats, mainly located in the black belt, were the prime movers. Within the Democratic party, he concluded, the chief impetus for restriction came from the black belt members.⁹ A few pages earlier, he had noted that they were always socioeconomically privileged.¹⁰ Self-consciously, this group shaped the new electoral system and stood to benefit from it most.¹¹ As members of a privileged elite, Kousser maintained, these men also expressed contempt and hostility toward the lower-class and uneducated whites whose votes they could not control and whose right to suffrage they questioned. They disfranchised these whites as willingly as they deprived blacks of the vote.¹² Thus, the conflict among whites that Woodward had emphasized was still very much in evidence in Kousser’s interpretation, although it was based more on class differences than on rivalry between the upcountry and the black belt.

Another important aspect of the debate over the views of Key and Woodward centered on the question of whether disfranchisement merely ratified and legitimized a drastic reduction in the southern electorate already accomplished by other means. Employing another French term besides Bourbon coup d’état, Key had claimed that disfranchisement legalized a fait accompli engineered by violence, intimidation, vote fraud, and so on. Kousser found this distinction between de facto and de jure suffrage restriction to be inaccurate, for the vote was reduced and restricted very effectively during the 1880s and into the 1890s by laws—election laws and registration laws in particular. The law was therefore instrumental before and during the episode of disfranchisement at the turn of the century. Independently of Kousser, two leading political scientists, Jerrold G. Rusk and John J. Stucker, also examined the role of the law in reducing the southern electorate in the late nineteenth century and found it as ubiquitous and effective an instrument as Kousser had.¹³ Since legislation was used to restrict suffrage before the 1890s, disfranchisement during and after that decade did not simply give a legal veneer to a system already achieved by nonlegal means.

Key’s fait accompli thesis may have been refuted convincingly, but some of the other interpretative matters that Kousser attempted to settle have not been so easily disposed of. Four in particular demand further investigation. First, erasing the distinction between legal and nonlegal methods of restricting the vote overlooks another difference—that between statutory and constitutional law. This difference has to be recognized when trying to understand disfranchisement, for disfranchisement always involved constitutional revision, unlike reducing the vote through laws governing how elections are conducted, which are acts of legislation and therefore statutory in form. Furthermore, disfranchisement around 1900 was aimed specifically at redefining the qualifications for voting and taking away the right to vote, both of which occur in and through constitutions, not statutes.

Second, elision of the difference between disfranchisement and suffrage restriction gives the impression that reducing the southern electorate from Reconstruction until about 1910, the period covered by Kousser’s book, was a continuous process throughout which the law, whether statutory or constitutional, was employed with only minor shifts in degree.¹⁴ In actuality, the period should be divided into two phases. In the first phase, the vote was manipulated by election laws of various levels of ingenuity and Democratic election officials of varying degrees of criminality. This stage, which was characterized by manipulation of the vote, lasted from 1880 through the early 1890s. In the second phase, the vote was eliminated by constitutional means rather than being manipulated and controlled as before. Disfranchisement, as this phase spanning the early 1890s through 1908 is accurately designated, marked the final stage of a campaign for suffrage reduction aimed primarily at African Americans that had begun at the end of Reconstruction. To distinguish it from the preceding phase of vote manipulation, disfranchisement can be described as voter elimination.

Third, the identification of the disfranchisers as wealthy and privileged Democrats overlooks a number of other elements in the struggle over disfranchisement. For example, the black belt Democrats were not always at the forefront of each state’s campaign. Their role and significance varied from state to state, and on occasion, they either initially opposed the initiative or were reluctant to support it. Furthermore, the dualism of upcountry and black belt that has pervaded all interpretations of disfranchisement obscures the role of other independent organizations and groups within the Democratic Party, or even outside it, as was the case in Georgia. For example, suffrage reformers like the New Orleans Citizens’ League or reform factions and antimachine insurgents within the Democratic Party that became identified as progressives after 1900 sometimes played a vital, even primary, role in initiating disfranchisement.¹⁵ The proponents of disfranchisement operated within a more complex and diverse Democratic Party than the anachronistic black county–white county dichotomy allowed for.

Fourth, there is still considerable disagreement about the identity of the intended victims of disfranchisement. Was the elimination of white voters as important as the removal of blacks? Or perhaps their removal was less important but they were nevertheless targeted for eradication. Or was their obliteration the real objective, with the removal of blacks merely secondary? Alternatively, were blacks the real quarry, with the loss of white voters an unintended or at least acceptable consequence? Since these questions seek to reveal motive and intention, they are difficult to answer. But surely in campaigns undertaken in full public view, as these were, the motives of the protagonists could not have been obscured entirely.

These four issues are the central aspects of disfranchisement still in need of clarification and resolution that this study attempts to address.

A number of books dealing with disfranchisement have appeared in recent years. Among them are John W. Cell’s The Highest Stage of White Supremacy: The Origins of Segregation in South Africa and the American South (1982); Joel Williamson’s The Crucible of Race: Black-White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (1984); Edward L. Ayers’s The Promise of the New South: Life after Reconstruction (1992); Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore’s Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896–1920 (1996); and Grace Elizabeth Hale’s Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890–1940 (1998). These studies mark a revival of interest in the South at the turn of the century, a welcome development that has been accompanied by a shift of emphasis toward social and cultural history and the introduction of newer methods and approaches employed by historians.

Although they are insightful and intriguing, these works have not really addressed the issues and concerns raised by earlier historians of disfranchisement, nor have they offered convincing explanations of why and how disfranchisement occurred. Instead, their focus has been directed elsewhere. They have either turned their attention to the broader social and cultural context in which disfranchisement took place or injected into the story of disfranchisement elements overlooked or unimagined by earlier historians. An example of the former is Williamson’s depiction of disfranchisement as the outcome of an ideological conflict between two theories of race relations, radicalism and conservatism, which he presents as disembodied notions without identifying particular individuals or groups that supported them. The latter approach is best represented by Gilmore’s examination of the instrumental role played by women during the white supremacy and disfranchisement campaigns in North Carolina around 1900 and their subsequent influence within the restricted electorate created by disfranchisement as they pressed for women’s right to vote. But neither approach contributes significantly to an explanation of why disfranchisement was undertaken or how it was carried out successfully and by whom.

A common feature in these more recent studies has been the view that the political and racial system that emerged with disfranchisement and segregation was something new. Williamson refers to the new orthodoxy and Gilmore to a new racism for a new order.¹⁶ Hale concludes that by the early twentieth century, whites were constructing modern racial identity, and Ayers states that disfranchisement and segregation established a new order in the turn-of-the-century South that came with heavy costs.¹⁷ The innovation and change that characterized the system of race relations emerging around 1900 cannot be denied. Moreover, this change was occurring in a society in which progressive reform was becoming a political and social force. Nevertheless, the newness and modernity of the racial system were far from unqualified. Both imposed heavy burdens not only on the system’s victims but also on the economy and polity as a whole. The basic thrust and purpose of the rearranged racial order was to ensure the subordination of African Americans and the dominance of the political and economic elite of the Democratic Party. Although it may have assumed new forms and addressed new conditions, the system was intended to reassert a white supremacy that had proved elusive since the end of the war with a firmness and rigor unattainable since slavery. Thus, the newness of the form should not be confused with the enduring substance of the South’s system of racial domination.

Besides differentiating between the form and substance of southern race relations, historians need to distinguish between the context in which disfranchisement occurred and the process of disfranchisement itself. This study emphasizes the latter. So its objective is to examine the movement, or campaign, for disfranchisement and thereby to identify the political and social forces that initiated it, the ways in which they achieved their purpose, and the similarities and connections among the states as they engaged in the struggle for disfranchisement. Recent scholarship does not take such an approach. Instead, it focuses on particular aspects of the disfranchising episode and the social and cultural context in which it happened. Although these perspectives are often valuable and revealing, they do not concentrate on the mode of disfranchisement or the deployment of political power within it. The questions of who did what to whom, how, and why are perhaps old ones, but they are still essential. It is my view that these questions about disfranchisement have yet to be answered convincingly and conclusively.

This brief overview of the historical writing on disfranchisement suggests that generalization of the sort that historians like to produce, indeed are required to produce, may prove difficult in this case. Reflecting this elusiveness perhaps, the historiography on disfranchisement has been characterized by speculation and uncertainty. Part of the problem is the lack of a single exhaustive study of disfranchisement in its entirety, a deficiency that this volume is intended to rectify. But much of the difficulty lies in the failure to recognize that disfranchisement occurred on two levels. The first is regionwide. The movement that spread across all of the southern states in the decades before and after 1900 was generated by conditions and attitudes common to all of them. General statements about this regional context can be made, and they are presented in chapters 1, 12, and 14. Less easily encompassed by a generalization are the events that occurred over two decades in ten or so states, each with a very different demography, economy, and geography. Each time disfranchisement happened, it did so within a very distinctive set of political circumstances. This second level is local, and it focuses on the process of disfranchisement rather than the conditions for it. Although generalization about these particular instances is difficult, one of the primary objectives of this study is to develop just such an inclusive formulation through a comparison of the process in each of the disfranchising states.

1 Devising Disfranchisement

The Great Problem in Its Final Phase

There is something deeper and more far-reaching in what is before us than the mere question of whether we can carry an election. I see underneath it the fundamental problem of what is to be the relation of these two unequal races.

—Alfred P. Thom, Virginia constitutional convention, 1 April 1901

In the mid-1870s, Republican control of the South was brought to an end. With the defeat and removal from office of the Republican-dominated governments, Reconstruction was over. The Democrats returned to power, and the South was redeemed. So decisive and dramatic was this Redemption, as historians have called it, that the change of administration, in which one party took the reins of government from its competitor, has been described as the overthrow of Reconstruction. Indeed, Redemption not only constituted a major political change but also marked the end of the Civil War era.

As definitive as this episode seems to have been, continuities remained. The attempt to reorganize and reconstruct the South may have failed, but fundamental changes had been introduced that would continue to resonate throughout society. For this reason, Eric Foner has characterized the experiment or revolution ushered in by Reconstruction as unfinished.¹ Less noticed but also unfinished or incomplete was the counterrevolution undertaken by the opponents of Reconstruction. Despite the seeming finality of the overthrow and dispersion of the federally installed Republican governments, the Democrats’ counteroffensive stopped short of fulfillment. At first glance, they seemed to have accomplished everything they sought. The governments of all of the former Confederate states had changed hands decisively, and the Democrats had regained political control. But they soon realized that a change in government did not mean a change in regime.

Reconstruction had introduced not merely a new political party, the Republicans, but also a new electorate and a new electoral system. Universal male suffrage had enfranchised about a million African Americans, most of them recently released from bondage, and had mobilized thousands of whites who had been politically dormant during the Confederacy and earlier in the 1850s.² These new voting rights were guaranteed by the federal government under the Fifteenth Amendment, as were civil rights under the Fourteenth Amendment. Furthermore, these rights had been confirmed at the state level by constitutional provision and by statute. With this constituency as its base, the Republican Party had been able during Reconstruction to vie with the region’s economic and political elite, which had reconstituted itself and reorganized in the Democratic Party.

Even though the Republicans no longer controlled any of the state governments in the South after 1877, their party was still part of the electoral system, as were the newly created and mobilized voters. Moreover, the Republican-controlled federal government that had failed to prevent the collapse of its Reconstruction initiative was not likely to permit the elimination of the party and the electorate it had brought into being in the South. Thus, Reconstruction was over and the Reconstruction governments had been overthrown, but its electoral system, its regime, remained. What was still lacking, then, was restoration of the status quo before Reconstruction. Redemption had overthrown governments; Restoration would attempt to remove all traces of the political and electoral system created during Reconstruction.³

Disfranchisement as Restoration

For fifteen to twenty years after Redemption, the victorious Democrats had to acknowledge the continuing existence of the electoral system established during Reconstruction and somehow work within it. But they never accepted it or accorded it legitimacy, just as they had never sanctioned the governments run by the Republicans during Reconstruction. Instead, they manipulated and subverted the system without actually eliminating it. The two post-Reconstruction decades constituted a distinct phase in the history of the late-nineteenth-century South. Viewed from the turn of the century, these twenty years, located between Reconstruction and disfranchisement or Restoration, comprise the second of three discrete periods in the region’s political history from the end of the Civil War until the first decade of the twentieth century.

This sequence or periodization was first formally proposed in three articles that appeared around 1900. In 1899, Walter C. Hamm published The Three Phases of Colored Suffrage in the North American Review. Two years later, the respected Columbia University historian William A. Dunning wrote The Undoing of Reconstruction for the Atlantic Monthly. And in 1902, Clarence H. Poe, a North Carolinian who edited the Progressive Farmer, published Suffrage Restriction in the South: Its Causes and Consequences in the North American Review.⁴ All three commentators concurred that the quarter century after the introduction of universal suffrage in the South under the Reconstruction Act of 1867, later nationalized by the Fifteenth Amendment, should, like Caesar’s Gaul, be divided into three parts. The first period, Reconstruction, was characterized by Poe as the era of unrestricted suffrage; it came to an end in the mid-1870s.⁵ The methods employed to overthrow the Reconstruction governments, all three observers agreed, were violence and fraud, as the Democrats, in Dunning’s words, vowed to carry their point at all hazards.⁶ In the second phase, the ascendant Democrats used a variety of means to limit black voting and keep the Republican Party at bay. Violence continued, but the Democrats primarily focused their efforts on the electoral system, employing various methods such as gerrymandering election districts, rigging the balloting system, controlling the supervision of elections, and, not least, engaging in outright fraud at the ballot box. Dunning contrasted this phase with the first since it relied on legislation and fraud as opposed to force alone.⁷ Moreover, it was successful because the black vote slowly disappeared.⁸

By the 1890s, the third and final phase commenced as the Democrats shifted strategy yet again. The task at this stage was, in Dunning’s view, the termination of equal rights in law as well as in fact.⁹ As Poe described the process, the era of disfranchisement by state laws had begun.¹⁰ By 1901, Dunning was announcing that the undoing of Reconstruction is nearing completion.¹¹ Instead of manipulating and undermining the Reconstruction system of black voting, as they had done in the second phase, the Democrats proposed to undo it. In effect, they were bringing to fulfillment the elimination, the abolition, of black suffrage.

Despite some hesitancy about the accuracy of their speculations and minor discrepancies in the way each author depicted the three phases, these turn-of-the-century observers seemed convinced that the third phase was distinct from the second and that it provided not just an alternative approach but the solution to the racial problem at the root of the region’s political difficulties. An awareness that the suffrage question in the South was moving to a new stage, even a resolution, had been evident in the early 1890s, almost a decade earlier. This perception had arisen when Congress was debating whether to repeal the federal election laws of 1870–72, which were intended to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment. A number of Republican congressmen expressed this notion, but none as clearly as two Iowans, William P. Hepburn, who would achieve fame through the railroad regulation act of 1907 that bears his name, and Jonathan P. Dolliver.

Addressing the congressmen from Mississippi, a state that a few years earlier had called a constitutional convention to amend its suffrage requirements, Hepburn exclaimed angrily: Tired of the murders that took place at first, when the first Mississippi plan was adopted [in 1875]; tired of the frauds that were substituted for the murders and the violence; fearful of the consequences of these continual annual frauds, [you] resorted to this wholesale method, and undoubtedly you congratulate yourselves upon your success.¹² The chronological sequence of methods employed by the Democrats—violence during Reconstruction, electoral fraud in the 1880s, and the wholesale method in 1890—had also been suggested by Dolliver a few days earlier. He had asserted that before the year 1880, [the anti-Reconstruction ‘revolution’] had changed the weapons of violence for the cheaper but no less effective weapons of fraud, and these have [now] developed in States like Mississippi into legal machinery . . . which has in a gentlemanly way abolished the republican form of government altogether.¹³ Not content with castigating the southern Democrats alone, Dolliver turned his guns on his fellow Republicans, charging them with twenty years of cowardice turned first into indifference, then into aversion and at last into treachery.¹⁴ It seemed that northern Republicans’ weakness and irresponsibility, like the southerners’ campaign against the electoral innovations of Reconstruction, proceeded through three stages. Once the third stage was reached with the adoption of the wholesale method, the Article 4 guarantee of a republican form of government, not to mention free citizenship itself, was subverted. Consequently, Dolliver believed his own party was complicit in an outcome tantamount to treason.¹⁵

In the South, the Democrats’ opposition to black suffrage increased in intensity as they embarked upon the third phase. By comparison with the preceding phase of electoral manipulation and fraud, the decision to disfranchise required a change aimed at achieving a solution since disfranchisement was intended to settle a problem that had smoldered for a quarter of a century. The chairman of the Democratic Party in North Carolina and the architect of its disfranchisement campaign, Furnifold Simmons, publicly acknowledged in 1899 that we have temporized with the race question in politics long enough.¹⁶ Finality was also evident in the pronouncement of the party’s newspaper organ in North Carolina, the Raleigh News and Observer, that passage of the amendment would settle this irritating race question and remove this ever recurring and festering sore on the body politic. Even more emphatically, the paper insisted that settled and SETTLED FOREVER it MUST be.¹⁷ In Alabama, Frank S. White, a Birmingham lawyer who was permanent chair of the Democratic state convention of 1900, told the cheering delegates that now the great question of the Elective Franchise must be settled. The white line was formed in 1874 and swept the white men of Alabama into power. The white line has been re-formed in 1900 to keep them in power forever.¹⁸

The disfranchisers’ belief that this third phase was to be final and permanent was accompanied by a similarly decisive and radical view of the remedy they had chosen. Elimination was the term they invariably employed, suggesting that attempts merely to curb, limit, or restrict black voting were to be rejected in favor of measures that were sweeping and thorough. Trifling with halfway qualifications of the suffrage will help us but for a few years at the most, the Charleston News and Courier warned during South Carolina’s constitutional convention in 1895. Instead, strong measures were needed to reduce the colored vote to insignificance in every county in the State. A few months earlier, the paper had announced that a frank declaration . . . that [South Carolina] does not desire or intend ever to include black and colored men among its ‘citizens’ was the only honest and right plan for the final settlement of our peculiar social and political troubles.¹⁹ In accepting the presidency of the Louisiana constitutional convention in February 1898, Ernest B. Kruttschnitt, who was also chairman of the state Democratic Party, used the same term to describe disfranchisement: We know that this convention has been called together by the people of the state to eliminate from the electorate the mass of corrupt and illiterate voters who have during the last quarter of a century degraded our politics.²⁰ Clearly, these Democratic leaders saw their task in heroic terms. As instruments for ending a problem that had persisted for several decades, they resolved to achieve their objective not by temporizing and equivocating, as in the past, but by the more drastic antidote of removal.

This decisive remedy was described at the time as disfranchisement. Interestingly, the word disenfranchisement, which most dictionaries consider an equivalent, was apparently never uttered or written by those involved in this episode during the twenty or so years in which it took place. However the word was pronounced or spelled, its meaning was clear. It simply meant to deprive a person of the vote, an objective that could be achieved in several different ways. First, a voter could be prevented from casting a vote by physical or verbal intimidation or the placement of obstacles in the way of the voter’s reaching the polls or depositing a ballot. Even if the voter cast his ballot for a candidate as intended, he could still be disfranchised in a second way. After his vote was cast, election officials might destroy the ballot, thereby disfranchising the voter without his knowledge. A third device was to disfranchise a voter by tallying his vote for a different candidate from the one he actually voted for. These last two maneuvers enabled unscrupulous election officials to count out votes cast for the opposition. In effect, the votes were taken or, in the vernacular, stolen. Another way for officials to count out their rivals was by filling the ballot boxes of their own party’s candidates with phony ballots. Ballot box stuffing, as this ruse was called, did not disfranchise a voter directly. His ballot was not tampered with or taken away since it was not cast in the first place. Instead, it was given to a candidate the voter did not support. Once again, the voter was unaware that this had happened. No matter when these methods were used or how they were employed, the outcome was the same. The voter’s ability to cast an effective ballot was denied. The voter, in effect, was deprived of the vote, or disfranchised.²¹

This kind of disfranchisement was not, however, what the Democrats who initiated the campaigns at the turn of the century had in mind. They rejected this weaker version as insufficient because it did nothing more than deny a voter the ability to vote as he wished and have his vote counted as he intended. Since the voter already possessed the ballot, his vote would have to be manipulated and rendered ineffective every time an election was held. This was an uninviting and never-ending prospect. A more satisfactory course of action that contained even the promise of a solution was to deprive the voter of the right to vote. In that case, the deprivation or loss of the vote would occur not at the ballot box at every election but at the point of registration and probably only once. The shift in focus away from manipulating and denying the vote at elections and toward eliminating it at registration had been noticed in 1893 by two Republicans, M. N. Johnson of North Dakota and Eugene J. Hainer of Nebraska, who were members of the House committee to investigate the federal election laws that the Democrats intended to repeal. They both opposed repeal and filed a minority report in which they noted that in state election laws recently enacted in Arkansas, Tennessee, and Alabama, more particular attention has been paid to registration than in the older laws. This part of the statutes has been reduced to a fine art.²² These two Republicans had discerned the shape of things to come. By 1893, the third phase was about to commence.

The distinction between the weaker form of disfranchisement and the stronger, between deprivation of the ability to vote at elections and deprivation of the right to vote at registration, was not lost on contemporaries in the South as well. They commented on it frequently and unashamedly. Indeed, most considered removal of the right to vote a distinct improvement. In December 1898, the Richmond Times stated that it backed the move for disfranchisement in Virginia because it would relieve the Democrats of the need to continue to practice trickery. If we disfranchise the great body of Negroes, the Times suggested, let us do it openly and above board and let there be an end of all sorts of jugglery.²³ Observing that the Times was complimenting its party on discovering a cleaner and more decorous way of denying blacks the vote than electoral fraud, the Richmond Planet, a hard-hitting African American newspaper, charged that the Times gives its influence and support to robbery in preference to thievery. It advocates boldness in preference to cowardice. Whereas theft was a misdemeanor punishable by a jail sentence, the Planet’s editor, John Mitchell, noted slyly, robbery was a felony punishable by either a jail sentence or death. Both were wrongdoing, he pointed out, and he was shocked that the Times’s editors would have [the Democratic officials] perpetrate the greater of the two.²⁴ Also parodying the Democrats’ substitution of one act of robbery for countless lesser instances of election trickery and theft was the editor of the Southwestern Christian Advocate, an African American Methodist paper from New Orleans. The question before the Louisiana constitutional convention was: ‘How can we perpetrate one big steal in favor of the Democratic party . . ., so that we may have no more fraudulent work to do hereafter?’ The challenge was therefore to ‘steal all we wish at once and then stop.’²⁵ Echoing these sharp barbs was an aphorism coined by an Alabamian from Scottsboro. Writing to the Birmingham Age-Herald to protest his state’s proposed new constitution, L. C. Coulson observed that under the law as it now stands, white men steal the vote; if we adopt the new constitution, white men will steal the voter.²⁶

By prohibiting the voter from registering, the Alabama disfranchisers had resorted to extreme measures and devices. They intended to change their approach, and the change was qualitative in nature. Coulson pointed out that their decision to locate the remedy in the state constitution fixes the theft in the organic law, while the vote stealing is merely legislative.²⁷ Indeed, the Democrats’ dissatisfaction with the manipulation of elections and their determination to find a permanent solution to the problem they considered so vexing forced them to seek relief not in statutes but in their constitutions since constitutional revision was a more drastic remedy and lasted much longer, perhaps forever. Although permanent and more decisive, constitutional disfranchisement was unfortunately a far more complicated and risky maneuver, the success of which was far from certain.

Under the Fifteenth Amendment, which had been ratified in 1870 during Reconstruction, the federal government was responsible for protecting the right of suffrage, a right that could not be denied or abridged on the grounds of race, color or previous condition of servitude. But the states were responsible for determining the specific qualifications for voting. This right was defined not in statute law but in state constitutions. Therefore, any alteration of existing provisions for the franchise necessitated revision of the state constitution, which could only be done by the process of amendment or by calling a convention to rewrite the fundamental law. Either of these two methods was complicated and cumbersome since constitutions were not supposed to be altered or redesigned with ease. Interestingly, the states of the former Confederacy had rewritten their constitutions more often than states in the rest of the United States in the century since the founding of the Republic. This resulted directly from the experience of defeat and Reconstruction. After the war, the former Confederate states had been compelled to call constitutional conventions, first in 1865 to abolish slavery and nullify their secession ordinances, then between 1868 and 1870 to incorporate universal male suffrage. Finally, in the 1870s, all of the former Confederate states except Florida, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia once again called conventions. This time, their purpose was either to redefine voting and officeholding rights so as to clear the way for Redemption or to reduce the scope and size of state government in the wake of Redemption.²⁸ Holding conventions to overhaul constitutions was therefore more familiar to late-nineteenth-century southerners than to any other generation of Americans before or since. The procedure was nevertheless complex and full of danger, and the disfranchisers knew it.

Revising a state constitution by the process of amendment involved two steps. First, a two-thirds majority in both houses of the legislature had to formulate and pass the amendment. Then the proposal had to be submitted to the electorate for ratification, and the voters had to approve it. Revision by convention was a good deal more difficult. A bill providing for the calling of a convention—and stipulating the size of its membership and how it was to be chosen—had to be passed by a plurality in both houses of the legislature. The call then had to be approved by the electorate by a plurality. Next, delegates had to be selected, some running in the state at large, others in specified districts. (Often the call and delegate selection were combined.) Once the convention was approved and delegates were selected, the convention assembled and, usually after much deliberation and debate, framed a new constitution. Finally, the proposed document had to be ratified by a majority of the voters.

At any stage in this sequence, the scheme might come unstuck. Not only was the entire procedure quite lengthy, often taking more than a year to complete, but the electorate as a whole participated two or three times and on any of these occasions could undermine or abort the entire process. Since the elimination of voters and voting rights was the reason for the initiative in the first place, those who were targeted might naturally be determined to derail it. Also skeptical were political leaders who believed their constituents’ welfare was threatened by disfranchisement or some other action the convention might take. Certainly opposition parties would question the desirability of a plan hatched by Democrats. Lastly, a process as public and lengthy as constitutional revision could not be executed without attracting the attention of officials of the federal government. Since restriction of suffrage rights was involved, in obvious defiance of the provisions of the Fifteenth Amendment, the federal authorities might do more than just take notice; they might take action. Therefore, from inside as well as outside the state, vigorous opposition was to be expected. Of course, the disfranchisers were fully aware of these obstacles and dangers. Nevertheless, they persisted in their drive to produce a decisive and final solution to the suffrage problem.

This solution meant nothing less than removing the black vote altogether and restoring the electorate to its pre-Reconstruction form and composition. In other words, the objective in this third phase, when the southern Democrats embarked on disfranchisement, was restoration of the status quo prior to the introduction of black suffrage during Reconstruction.

Vote Manipulation and Southern Election Laws

The significance of the identification of a third phase in the southern Democrats’ counteroffensive against black suffrage lies in its interpretative impact. Historians have rarely posited a third stage. Instead, they have considered the constitutional conventions and amendments at the turn of the century just one element, although admittedly the most dramatic, in an undifferentiated process of limiting black voting undertaken since Reconstruction. Usually referring to it as suffrage restriction, they have seen this process as spanning the entire period from Reconstruction until 1910, when black voting was all but extinguished.²⁹ Furthermore, historians have assumed that suffrage restriction encompassed deprivation of the vote by violence and statute as well as by constitutional revision. Finally, little or no distinction has been made between denying the ability to vote at elections and removing the right to vote at registration. In effect, disfranchisement and suffrage restriction have often been considered virtually interchangeable, or disfranchisement has been regarded as merely another method of restricting the vote. Yet in fact disfranchisement superseded suffrage restriction. It moved the campaign against black voting to a more radical stage in which elimination of the black vote rather than its manipulation or limitation was the objective.

Related to this crucial question of definition is another interpretative issue, namely, the role of law in limiting suffrage in the late-nineteenth-century South. In The Shaping of Southern Politics, J. Morgan Kousser found that law played a crucial part in depressing the vote. Obstruction, intimidation, and violence were not the only or even the most effective ways to keep