Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History
Benson Lossing, Ed.

No form of government can be based on systematic injustice; least of all a republic. All governments partake of the imperfections of human nature, and fall far short not only of the ideals dreamed of by good men, but even of the intentions of ordinary men. Nevertheless, if perfection be unattainable, it is still the duty of every nation to live up to the principles of simple justice, and at least follow the lights it can clearly see.

Whatever may have been the intentions of our forefathers, the steady growth of our government has been towards a democracy of manhood. One by one the barriers which kept from the suffrage the poor and the unlearned have been swept away, and, in the long run, no majority has been great enough, no interest has known a refluent wave. What democracy been strong enough, to stand up against that general public opinion which continually grows in the direction of larger liberty. That public opinion has never has gained it has always kept. If you suppose that the progress of democracy among white men has been pleasant for those gentlemen who were at ease in their possessions, you have not read history. It is not an agreeable thing in any day or generation to distribute power which any set of men have always had exclusively to themselves among those who never had it before. It lessens one and exalts the other. [196]

We of the North have by no means reached the perfection of self-government. Our apportionments of congressional districts are by no means utterly fair; but there is a limitation to injustice beyond which no party does to go, except in Indiana, where 4,000 majority in the State gives Republicans but three out of thirteen Congressmen. Our voters are not entirely free from undue influence, but there is a point beyond which no employer dares to go; and the votes in manufacturing districts show how sturdy is the defiance of most workingmen to even a dictation which is only inferred. Many a man seems to vote against his own and his employer's interest to show that he is in every way his own master. But whichever way he votes, his vote gets counted, and his will, whether it be feeble or sturdy, gets expressed.

It often happens that when debate springs up about the condition of affairs in other parts of the Union, when intimidation with shot-guns and mobs, when systematic falsifications of returns, are made subjects of comment, the errors and shortcomings in the North are dragged in as a justification for all that has happened of illegal action elsewhere. This kind of answer is so common, and so reminds one of the beam and the mote of Scripture, that it is worth analyzing. It is founded on the axiom of geometry that things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. This is undoubtedly true. if you are sure of the first equality. All things are not equal because they have the same names. When an employer intimates to some of his workmen that he cares most for men who look after his interests, and that his interests are with such and such a party, that employer is guilty of intimidation. When the interesting collection of gentlemen in a Southern district go forth to fire guns all night, in order, as the member from that district phrased it in open House. “to let the niggers know there is going to be a fair election the next day,” they also are guilty of intimidation. Nevertheless, there is a difference: especially if there be an honest eye to see it. Murder and catching fish out of season are both crimes: but there are odds in crimes. Is a community where men violate the laws relating to close time debarred from complaining of murder elsewhere when its own families suffer by it? Must we ourselves reach absolute perfection before we ask others to treat us decently? Is robbery by violence to be tolerated and approved until we have utterly abolished petty larceny? The difference between the nation of highest and the nation of lowest civilization is only in degree.

But, after all, have we any right to complain of bad actions in the South? Why should not the citizens of each State be allowed to manage their own affairs? If you have any confidence in a republican form of government, why not show it? Let them wrestle with their problem alone. It is theirs; let them manage it. If it were founded on fact, this would be a powerful appeal to one who believes as does the writer of this article, in democracy—which is to say, in government by all the people; who believes that no community can permanently dethrone justice; who believes that all the laws of this universe are working towards larger liberty, greater equality, and truer fraternity.

But so far as federal elections are concerned, this appeal is founded on no fact whatever. When he goes to elect a member of Congress, the man from Mississippi or the man from Maine does not go to the polls as a citizen of Mississippi or of Maine, but as one of the people of the United States. All meet on common ground. They are citizens of one great republic—one and indivisible. Each one votes for the government of himself and of the other. The member from Mississippi whom the one elects and the member from Maine whom the other sends to Washington must unite in making the laws which govern both. The member from Mississippi has the same right to demand that the member from Maine shall be elected according to the law of the land as he has to demand the same thing of a colleague from his own State.

The object of assembling the Congress together is to declare the will of the people of the United States. How can that will be declared if there be more than twenty men returned to the House who never were elected, whose very presence is a violation of the Constitution of the [197] United States and of the law of the land? Still less will the will of the people be declared if those twenty men shift the control of the House from one party to the other. All free countries are governed by parties. They can never be governed any other way. If, then, fraud changes the very principles on which a country be governed, how can it be justified?

The attempted justification is this: We in the South, inasmuch as you have conferred the right of suffrage on the negro, and inasmuch as he is in the majority in many of our States, are in grave danger of being overwhelmed by mere ignorant numbers. We white people who pay the taxes will never permit these barbarians to rule over us. When we thought it necessary to prevent their domination, we swarmed around their cabins by night; we terrorized them; we showed them by examples that to be a politician was dangerous—that it led to death even. Those things have in great measure passed away now, and we simply falsify the count; we stuff the ballotboxes. That makes less trouble and is just as effectual. Finding that their votes do not count, the negroes have lately ceased to vote. Whether clothed in the fervid eloquence of the late Mr. Grady or in the strange language of the governor of South Carolina, which will be quoted further on, this is the justification.

But this justification does not in the least touch the subject of federal elections. Every Southern man knows that there is no possibility of negro domination in the United States. No federal taxes will ever be imposed by the negro. No federal control is within his power. If all this wrong at the ballot-box be needed to preserve a proper local State government, to keep the Caucasian supreme in the State, not a living soul can dare to say that the same wrong, or any other, is necessary for Caucasian supremacy in the United States. In fact, transferred to the broader arena, the struggle is between the proud Caucasian and the Caucasian who is not so proud. If it be a race question, is there any reason why the white man in the South should have two votes to my one? Is he alone of mortals to eat his cake and have it too? Is he to suppress his negro and have him also? Among all his remedies, he has never proposed to surrender the representation which he owes to the very negro whose vote he refuses. The negro is human enough to be represented, but not human enough to have his vote counted.

Suppose it were a fact that negro domination and barbarism would follow from honest voting in the Southern State elections; suppose it were a fact that disregard of law and complete violation of the rights secured to the negro by the Constitution were absolutely necessary to preserve the civilization of the South; what has that to do with federal elections? Violation of law and disregard of statutes are not needed to save the United States.

Evidently, then, the question of race supremacy and of good government in the South has nothing whatever to do with that other question which concerns our whole people, whether the Republican party of the United States shall receive and have counted the votes which belong to it by virtue of the Constitution of the country. If you tell us that these are ignorant votes and ought not to be counted, we answer—and the answer is and that the Democratic party never conclusive—that ignorance is everywhere, failed to vote its ignorance to the uttermost verge of the law. Why should they, of all partisans, claim that only scholars should vote? Is the high and honorable esteem in which the chief officers of the greatest Democratic city—the city of New York—are now held among men an example of what intelligence will do for a community? If a man thinks the same thing of the republic that I do, must there be an inquest held over his intelligence before I can have his vote counted with mine in the government of the United States?

Or, to put it more directly, in the language of ex-Governor Bullock, of Georgia, which is quoted in the Atlanta Constitution, “It is now generally admitted with us that there is no more danger to the body politic from an ignorant and vicious black voter than from an illiterate and vicious white voter.”

This system of false counting is not indulged in with impunity. Its baleful influence has nowhere more clearly shown [198] itself than in its effects upon the sense of justice of Southern men. Where else on earth would you get such a declaration as came from John P. Finley, of Greenville, Miss., for twelve years treasurer of his county—a declaration made in the presence of his fellow-citizens—that he did not consider ballot-box stuffing a crime, but a necessity; that in a case of race supremacy a man who stuffed a ballotbox would not forfeit either his social or business standing; and that ballot-box stuffing, so far as he knew, was looked upon by the best element in the South as a choice between necessary evils? You would search far before you would find the parallel of what Watt K. Johnson said in the same case (Hill vs. Catchings). “I would stuff a ballot-box,” said he, “if required to do it, to put a good Republican in office, as I would a Democrat, as my object is to have a good honest government.”

“Good honest government” by ballotbox stuffing! Think of the moral condition of a community where a man would dare openly to make such an avowal. In saying this there is no purpose to speak unkindly, but only to point out the inevitable effect upon public morals of continued violation of law. No community can encourage systematic disregard of law, even for purposes deemed justifiable, without injury to all other laws and to its own moral sense. It only needs to have the fence broken down in one place to have the bad cattle range through the whole garden.

While this state of things exists in Mississippi, a glance at South Carolina will give even more food for reflection. In that State, by law there was but one registration at the home of the voter (at the polling precinct), which took place in 1882. Since that time all additions to the list have been made at the county seats. Whenever a man moves not merely from county to county, not merely from town to town, not only from precinct to precinct, but whenever he removes from house to house in the same precinct, he must have a new certificate from the supervisor of registration, who, nominally at least, has his office at the county seat. Without this changed certificate, he is disfranchised. If he travels to the county seat and cannot find his supervisor, he has no remedy. Even among the most intelligent and alert politicians it is easy to see what a vast chance there is for misbehavior, and it needs no specification to show how it works in South Carolina among that part of the population which has just struggled to manhood. But in order that the work of government by the minority may be complete, the law decrees that there shall be eight different ballotboxes, so that those who can read can know where to put their tickets and those who cannot read can exercise their ingenuity. The law also provides that the officials, who alone are present with the voter, shall read to him the inscriptions on the ballot-boxes; but as the governor provides that all the officials shall be of one party, it is easy to see how valuable this provision is. In order that the negro shall have no advantage from the position of the boxes becoming known, the boxes are shuffled from time to time, and if a ballot gets into a wrong box it cannot be counted. In the Miller and Elliott case, Mr. Elliott's counsel, unable to deny the shifting of ballot-boxes, justifies it on the ground that there is no law against it, and on the further ground that it is in the spirit of the law; which last defence is true.

With this preliminary statement the reader can enter into the grim humor of the reply of the governor of South Carolina, himself a candidate for re-election, when the Republicans asked that among the judges of election should be some Republicans. It would seem not unreasonable that one of the great parties to the political contest should have a “sworn official” to see that the voter was correctly told which box to put his vote into, and to see that the vote was rightly counted. The governor, however, rose above party, rejected the Republican request, put none but Democrats on guard, and in his reply used, among other similar things, the following words:

To the eternal honor of our State and the Democratic party, it can now be said that our elections are the freest and fairest in the world, and that not a single citizen of hers, no matter what his rank, color, or condition, can, under her just and equal laws, impartially administered, as they are, be by any perversion or intimidation barred [199] at the polls from the free and full exercise of his suffrage. There is not only perfect freedom in voting, but the amplest protection afforded the voter.

These words were in his letter of Sept. 29, 1888. On July 30 preceding, just two months before, that same governor said, in a public speech, which you will find in the Charleston News and courier of the 31st, the following:

We have now the rule of a minority of 400,000 over a majority of 600,000. No army at Austerlitz or Waterloo or Gettysburg could ever be wielded like that mass of 600,000 people. The only thing which stands to-day between us and their rule is a flimsy statute—the eight-box law—which depends for its effectiveness upon the unity of the white people.

Of course, the utterance of July 30 was for the home market, and the letter of September for export. But when you consider that both these statements were made to the same community, by the governor of the State, you can form some idea of the effect which this system of action at the polls has had on the morale of the people.

This course of utterly riding over the will of the voter has been carried to such excess as was never dreamed at the outset, even by those who planned the first great wrongs. When South Carolina, by a gerrymander which remains up to date the greatest spectacle that has ever been put upon a map, and which to this day almost defies belief, put 31,000 colored people in one district with only 6,000 whites, the framers of the act meant at least that that district should have the representative of its choice. But, encouraged by the success of the Southern plan elsewhere, even that district has been taken away. It is well known that in the South itself this was regarded as an outrage, but the voice of those so regarding it has fallen into the silence of consent.

In Alabama the 4th district was so made that 27,000 colored men were packed in with 6,000 whites, and at every election the Democratic candidate is returned. So flagrant was one of the instances that the Forty-eighth Congress, Democratic by ninety-five majority, was obliged to disgorge the sitting member, which it did after waiting for the death of the contestant

If any man replies, as sometimes people do, “You are assuming that the colored man will vote your ticket, and that is not so,” the plain answer is: “It is either so or not so. If it is so, then we are deprived of a vote which belongs to us under the Constitution of the United States. If it be not so, and the negro is voting the Democratic ticket from choice, where is your race issue? If both white man and negro are agreed on white supremacy, why do you send so much Southern eloquence North to touch our Caucasian hearts?”

This state of things cannot be good for this nation, either North or South. Remember that this is not a question of outcries and epithets, of reproaches and hysterics. It is a plain question of justice and fair-dealing. Both sections of this country can afford to be fair and open with each other. If you say that you have a right of local self-government which we have no business to interfere with, and that, unless you are allowed to go on in your own way, you fear disaster most foul, the next thing for all of us to do is to find some plan which will give us the votes of the whole people of the United States, and leave you your local self-government.

To put this whole matter in a nutshell, the Republican party alleges that it is deprived by all manner of devices—differing in different States, but having one common purpose—of votes which under the Constitution of the land that party is entitled to. To this the parties offending reply that the suppression of votes and voters is necessary to prevent the threatened destruction of local self-government by the numerical superiority of race ignorance in very many States. We have a right, say they, to prevent, by violence or by fraud, if need be, the control of the ignorant in our own States.

Suppose all that to be so; suppose that all you are doing is needful for your preservation, and that you must keep on at all costs: how does that give you the right to govern us by your methods? If you have the right of local self-government, have we not the right of national self-government? If you of the States [200] are willing to take all hazards to save yourselves from ignorant negro domination, are you going to blame us of the United States if we refuse to submit to fraudulent domination? You think negro domination unbearable. We think fraudulent domination a crime.

But we need not quarrel. There must be some remedy consistent with the Constitution, which was intended to provide for this very local government, and for this very federal government. Each was to be respected within its sphere, and each was to subsist side by side with the other. So far as the election of members of Congress was concerned, the Constitution provides for the very condition in which we find ourselves. In the first instance, the legislature of the State may make the regulations for the election of members, but Congress may make or alter them in accordance with its own will. It may alter them by providing for federal supervision, or it may make such new regulations as will assume the entire election from registration to certification.

We have, then, two kinds of remedy— the alteration of State regulations and the making of new ones of our own. As to the first method, so far as it was exhibited in the proposed Senate bill for supervision, the Senator from Alabama, Mr. Pugh, when the bill was presented in the Senate, rose and declared:

If the bill becomes a law, its execution will insure the shedding of blood and the destruction of the peace and good order of this country. Its passage will be resisted by every parliamentary method, and every method allowed by the Constitution of the United States.

This declaration, made at a time when debate is not usual on a bill, will attract attention to the objections which are urged against the supervisor law. Some of them are worth reproducing in order that people may carefully consider all parts of a question which must have a settlement, and can never have any final settlement which is not right. The supervisor law is the subject of objection, among other things, because, while it leaves the elections in the hands of the States, it proposes to set watchers over the State officials, and to use a kind of dual control liable to all manner of friction. Moreover, the exercise of this supervisory power is to be called into being by petition, thus singling out by their own signatures those persons who are responsible for the claim that the elections need supervision, and who thereby become obnoxious to the very violence which they are striving to avoid.

In some States, like North Carolina and Virginia, a supervisor law would be very helpful; but there are States and communities with regard to which it is said that it would be assuming a terrible responsibility to enact it. Against such a law the South urges sectionalism and its interference with local self-government; for no supervision which does not examine all the boxes and count all the votes is worth the trouble of enacting. It is true that in New York City, under the able and thorough management of the chief supervisor, great results have been accomplished by this law, and elections are held so satisfactory to both parties that there have been no contested elections from that city in my remembrance. Whether in other regions, among a different people, in sparsely settled places, this could be so well done is the point at issue.

In what we call theory, no really valid objection can be urged against federal supervision, for an honest count can hurt no one. Even if all the boxes are subjected to the supervision of a second set of men, the result in New York proves that when once established it is a solid safeguard satisfactory to honest people. So easily does the system now move, and so free is it from friction, that it is doubtful if a tenth of the readers of this article even remember that the system is fully established. Many contests, however, were necessary to thus establish it in New York City. But this is a practical world, where all unnecessary difficulties ought to be avoided, and where the middle way is often the best because it is the middle way.

In this case the middle course is apparently—but only apparently—the most radical. Let the country at once assume at least the count and return of its own elections. It may be that this could be done in a way that would leave the States which object to supervision free from all interference from their neighbors, as it [201] would certainly leave us free from false counting and false returns. They could then govern their own people in their own way, free from federal supervision in congressional elections, and the United States could govern itself free from all fear of those practices deemed indispensable to local government. They could, if they pleased, and at their own risk, try the experiment of keeping outside of governmental power a body of men almost as large as those who govern, and in three States larger. All we ask is that in national matters the majority of the voters in this country may rule. Why should any Southern man object to this? Under what possible pretence can it be claimed that certain States should send Representatives to Washington on the basis of a vote which is not allowed to be cast? Suppose your claim to govern yourselves under any violation of law be sound: on what do you ground your claim to govern us in the same fashion?