OCCASIONAL PAPERS No. 6.

The American Negro Academy.

Rev. ALEXANDER CRUMMELL, Founder.

The Disfranchisement of the Negro.

By JOHN L. LOVE.

Price 15 cents.

WASHINGTON, D. C.
Published by the Academy,
1899.

The Disfranchisement of the Negro.

The assault, under the forms of law, which is being made upon the political rights of the Negro is the symptom of an animus which has its roots imbedded in the past. It does not mark a revival, but rather the supreme desperate effort of the spirit of tyranny to compass the political subjection and consequent social degradation of the black man. Its provocation does not consist in any abnormal or perilous condition in southern communities arising from a numerical preponderance of Negroes. It is not made to meet a merely temporary emergency with the intent to return to the principles of republican government upon the advent of intelligence and wealth to the Negro. Indeed, the very intent and purpose of the assault is to prevent such an advent, in so far as human ingenuity and tyrannical violence can do so.

It can not find its justification in a necessity of averting by radical measures any imagined perils to social order which might arise from the political domination of ignorance; for the spirit which prompts the assault has ever fostered ignorance and endeavored to perpetuate it. In fact, the assault is so iniquitous in its conception and is being executed with such wicked and violent disregard of political morals and human rights, as by comparison to render almost beneficent the realization of the perils which the imagination of the assailants pretends to fancy.

There may be those who see in this assault nothing more than a supreme effort of a benign civilization to save itself from utter ruin. It is, however, to be borne in mind that the apostles of this civilization which is of a peculiarly local type, have ever asserted that its maintenance and future glory are inseparably connected with the subjection of the Negro. Always they have spoken the language of tyranny, which, in spite of its embellishments and jugglings, amounts to this: the social well-being and political privileges of the Negro are inconsistent with the economic interests and political ambitions of a few southern white men. Into this language all of the feigned social perils and political nightmares of southern planters and politicians easily resolve themselves.

There may be those who indulge the hope that the final triumph of this assault will have a salutary effect upon the social status of the Negro. Their hope is due in no small measure to their ignorance of the history of the character, spirit, and dominant purpose of the assailants. That history furnishes the best key to an understanding of the present assault upon the political rights of the Negro.

Forty years ago the slave power plunged this nation into war for the avowed purpose of perpetuating Negro slavery. Alexander Stevens, on his return from the convention which had erected the Southern Confederacy, addressing a large assembly at Savannah, uttered the following significant words:

Referring to the ideas of Thomas Jefferson and the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the Federal Constitution, that Negro Slavery was in violation of the laws of Nature, wrong in “principle, socially, morally and politically,” he continued thus:

“Those ideas were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. Our constitution (the Confederate Constitution,) is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas. Its foundations are laid, its corner stone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”[1]

It has become the rule to frown upon any and all references to the circumstances and causes that produced the Civil War. This is true especially of the men and women who upheld the cause of the Union as against Secession. Naturally magnanimous, they have been at great pains to avoid in their public utterances any references to the “late unpleasantness” which might in any way wound the sensibilities of the excessively sensitive South. Certainly, nothing can be more sincerely desired than the utter eradication of the passions and animosities that were evoked by armed conflict. But to ignore the fundamental cause and motive which led the South to precipitate the war, with a view to seeming not to be influenced by sectional prejudices is pushing magnanimity to the verge of vapid sentimentality—a folly in which the South, in so far as its attitude toward the Negro is concerned, has in no sense shared.

The doctrine of “the proper status of the Negro,” is as consistently maintained by the South in eighteen hundred and ninety-nine as in eighteen hundred and sixty, when it was made the shibboleth of the Slavery Party and the tocsin of war; and there can be no proper consideration of our present Negro Problem without regard to this historical doctrine.

The Southern Confederacy is now a political myth. In its attempt to make Negro Slavery its corner stone, it carved the gravestones of more than a million men. Upon the proclamation of peace and universal freedom, the nation’s joy was without bounds. In the intense enthusiasm of the moment over the “new birth of freedom,” and the overthrow of the slave power, the doctrine of the “proper status of the Negro” seemed to be eternally repudiated and the agitations relating to it seemed indeed “forever settled.” But in the throes of its joy, there suddenly dawned upon the nation the fact that the problems pertaining to the Negro had, because of freedom, become more stupendous than even the question of slavery had been. Henceforth the Negro Problem was to test severely the integrity of republican principles.

This was the critical period of the history of the Negro in America. Within almost the twinkling of an eye, by an exigency of one of the world’s greatest wars, his status had been suddenly changed. The slave became a free man by the dispensation of Providence and against the will of his master.

A free man, yet penniless and homeless. A man of toil, but one whose own and whose ancestral toil had created a material and social grandeur which now mocked at his poverty and arrogantly denied him a share in its blessings. A free man, but ignorant, the greatest curse imposed by his former status which had contributed to the enlightenment of others. A freeman, but helpless in the face of an impending persecution. He, whose labor had contributed to the comfort and social happiness of others,—who, while they were testing on scores of battle fields their power to rob him of his freedom, was caring for and protecting their wives and daughters and furnishing the sinews of the unholy war—was now at the