mercy of those who had gone forth to battle with the cry that, “slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”

The Thirteenth Amendment became the law of the land through the travail of war. But the war had sapped the Nation’s strength, had cost nearly a million lives and created a debt of three billions. Weary of strife and vexation, the nation was fain to leave the settlement of the problems, to which the new status of the Negro had given rise, to those among whom he was to live, i.e., to his former masters.

This was indeed a critical period in the history of the Negro race in the United States and the lessons of this period are exceedingly important in the light of the present attack upon the political rights of the black man.

In recent discussions of the merits and wisdom of Negro suffrage, this period is as a rule strangely overlooked. The assertion so commonly made, that the conferring of the right to vote upon the Negro was a colossal blunder, evinces the extent to which this period has been ignored by those who make it, or else their remarkable ignorance of the history of Negro suffrage. Political prejudices and the blind zeal and opportunism of those who have discovered some “sure cure,” for the Negro’s ills have aided much in the work of discrediting Negro suffrage. Some have ignored the facts to such an extent as to assert that Negro suffrage was the result of vindictiveness on the part of the Northerners, who wished both to humiliate the South and to perpetuate the power of the Republican Party. The trouble with this assertion is that it imputes too much to Northern sagacity. What the nation, through the agency of the Republican party, did was to enact the Thirteenth Amendment and thus to make President Lincoln’s conditional proclamation of freedom an unconditioned part of the organic law. The extent of its revenge was to insist upon the incorporation of this principle of freedom into the old Slave Constitutions of the South. This was the terms of surrender and having accepted this, the South was left alone (the boon it has always craved) with full power to deal with the Negro as tenderly as it saw fit. The Negro was left a “sojourner on sufferance” in the great republic which he had assisted in saving, and to the sweet charity of those who had sought to destroy it for the purpose of binding him with unbreakable chains.

By the acceptance of the terms imposed, the rebellious states placed themselves in a position of great responsibility and great opportunity. The responsibility of the old South, the South of slavery and rebellion, was to properly adjust itself to the new conditions of freedom and inseparable union, its opportunity was to prove to the nation the claim it so often and so boastfully makes that it is the Negro’s best friend and is disposed to treat him fairly.

Did the South rise to its opportunity? Did it treat liberally and kindly those freedmen who as slaves had created its material wealth and many of whom as soldiers had with the irony of fate helped to keep it from separating from the Union of which it is now proud of being an integral part? Did it hold out to them the promise of gradual citizenship, and, in order that this citizenship should be intelligent, establish schools for their education? Was it jealous or in any way solicitous about the economic and industrial freedom of these people? In its bearing upon the present disfranchising enactments of the South, the answer to these questions is important.

Unaccustomed to free schools, trained to despise and punish the intellectual aspirations of the slave, these recently rebellious states not only refused to educate the freedmen, but actually burned many schools that were built by men and women of the North, who in obedience to genuine Christian charity followed in the wake of the armies of freedom. Then as now, it proceeded to fix the Negro’s status by hostile legislation in the shape of Black codes. These laws reveal the deliberate purpose of the South to reduce the freedmen to a state of serfdom more bitter and degrading than slavery had been, and violated the most sacred of the inherent rights of human nature.

The civilized state of Alabama, which is now preparing to disfranchise the Negro, declared that “stubborn and refractory servants, and servants who loiter away their time,” were to be treated as vagrants, fined fifty dollars and “in default of payment might be hired out at public auction for a period of six months.”[2] Thus the Thirteenth Amendment did not destroy the auction block.

Florida declared that “it shall not be lawful for any Negro or person of color to own, use, or keep any bowie knife, dirk, sword or fire arms or ammunition of any kind” without license, to be granted only upon the recommendation of two “respectable” white men. For violating this law the Negro was to stand in the pillory for one hour and then be whipped with thirty-nine lashes on the bare back.[3] South Carolina, always bold to reveal its purpose, declared that “no person of color shall pursue the practice, art, trade or business of an artisan, mechanic, shopkeeper or any other employment besides that of husbandry or that of a servant under contract for labor”[4] without a license, which was good for one year only; and she supplemented this with the following:

Louisiana, which has recently outlawed the Negro by Constitutional enactment, declared:

Failing to do so, such persons were to be hired out at public auction for the rest of the year.

Let it be borne in mind that these laws were not enactments of a distant and forgotten past. They were the deliberate enactments of that period for the purpose of nullifying the Thirteenth Amendment.

Of this period Mr. Justice Miller in rendering the decision in the Slaughter House Cases said: