Black Politics

By: Eric Anderson

Source:

 Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

Black Politics

Broadly defined, black politics can include almost any group endeavor undertaken by Negroes, free or slave, male or female. Scholars have found political significance in social activities ranging from slave worship services to the creation of African American families to the formation of clubs and fraternal organizations. Defined more narrowly, as the exercise of citizenship, black politics underwent a revolutionary transformation from the early through the end of the nineteenth century.

Slaves were not considered citizens; they experienced a form of “social death” which denied them most civil and political rights. But free Negroes exercised the rights of citizenship in some parts of the Union. In Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and New Hampshire blacks could vote. Even the slave states of Tennessee and North Carolina allowed free Negroes the privileges of the ballot box, though non-slave blacks had been disfranchised in 1810 in Maryland and in other southern states.

“Jacksonian” Restrictions

These rights were sharply restricted during the next quarter century, as “Jacksonian democracy” removed most barriers to voting and office holding by white men but denied, as much as possible, the political rights of free men of African descent. New York, for example, revised its state constitution in 1821 to eliminate most restrictions on white men's suffrage but retained property qualification for Negroes. Constitutional conventions in Tennessee in 1834 and North Carolina in 1835 extended white suffrage while eliminating black voting. Pennsylvania's constitutional convention of 1837 likewise disfranchised black voters, an action ratified by the state's voters in 1838. A Democratic leader summed up the contradictory assumptions of the majority: “I should rejoice to see adopted in this commonwealth a constitution which would give every citizen—I use the word citizen as not embracing the coloured population—whether in poverty or affluence, that right, sacred and dear to every American citizen—the right of suffrage.” The only successes for black voting rights came in the New England states of Maine and Rhode Island, where voting rights were extended to black men in 1842.

Struggle for Rights

After 1845, when Frederick Douglass achieved fame as the author of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, free blacks gained significant political and civil rights in the North, though not without bitter struggle. As Paul Finkelman has shown, most racial restrictions on the legal right to testify in court had been removed by 1860, with Illinois, Indiana, Oregon, and California the only free states to forbid Negro testimony. During the 1840s and 1850s every northern state except Minnesota and Oregon guaranteed even runaway slaves the right to counsel, a jury trial, and the protections of the writ of habeas corpus. Only Indiana denied black residents access to public schooling, while Iowa, Massachusetts, some areas of New York, Rhode Island, and Ohio provided racially integrated schools.

Northern Republicans attempted to extend black voting rights, placing the issue on the ballot in Iowa (1857) and New York (1860), but a majority of voters rejected these proposals. Even as New York voted for Abraham Lincoln, the state's electorate voted down the Negro suffrage referendum, much to Douglass's disgust. “The black baby of Negro Suffrage,” he complained, had been “stowed away like some people put out of sight their deformed children when company comes.”

“The Shackle Broken—by the Genius of Freedom.” A commemoration of a famous speech supporting the Civil Rights Act, delivered in the House of Representatives on 6 January 1874 by Robert B. Elliott of South Carolina (center). The banner hanging from the ceiling is a quotation from his address. The other images are a scene from the Civil War (top); statues of Lincoln holding the Emancipation Proclamation (middle left) and Charles Sumner holding the civil rights bill (middle right); and (at bottom) black soldiers (left) and sailors (right) flanking a farm owned by an African American.

Library of Congress.

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Ohio in the late antebellum allowed mulattoes to vote, as readers of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will remember. (In a richly ironic passage, Huck's father announces that “I'll never vote again” after he learns that a visiting professor “most as white as a white man,” well-dressed and knowing “all kinds of languages,” was allowed to vote when he was back home in Ohio.) In 1855 John Mercer Langston was elected town clerk in Brownhelm, Ohio, thus becoming, according to Steven Hahn, “the first African American ever elected to political office in the United States.”

Black Politics during the Civil War

During the American Civil War, the issue of black citizenship took on new significance, especially as the federal government considered asking black men to fight. For a citizen-soldier to take up arms to defend his country was, for nineteenth-century Americans, the highest symbol of democratic responsibility, undeniable evidence that a man had political rights. Douglass recognized the direct relationship between military service and citizenship: “Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship in the United States.”

With the beginning of the regular recruitment of black soldiers in August 1862, and their baptism by fire in mid-1863 in battles ranging from Milliken's Bend and Port Hudson to Fort Wagner, many northern leaders were willing to consider a broader definition of black rights than ever before. By the end of the war Lincoln was quietly suggesting that at least “the very intelligent” negroes, “especially those who have fought so gallantly in our ranks” should receive voting rights. This cautious suggestion was a radical change from any policy Lincoln had been willing to endorse before the war.

Black leaders tied the basic goal of abolishing slavery to the issue of political rights for African Americans. In a continuation of the antebellum black convention movement, a national convention of leading negroes met in Syracuse, New York, a few weeks before Lincoln's re-election in 1864. Because blacks had loyally fought for the Union, declared the delegates, they should now receive the “full measure of citizenship.”

Reconstruction: The High Point of Black Citizenship

The struggle for black citizenship reached a triumphant conclusion after the Civil War with the abolition of slavery in 1865 and the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. By the time of the presidential election of 1872 “colored men” had a legal right to vote everywhere in the Union. This dramatic expansion of black suffrage began in 1866, when black men gained the right to vote in the territories and in the District of Columbia, followed by the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which required that black males be allowed to vote in the election of the new constitutional conventions the act mandated in ten former Confederate states. By 1868 suffrage for black men had expanded to Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska, and Wisconsin, as well as to the New England states and New York (though still with a property qualification). Ulysses Grant's margin of victory in that year's presidential election was significantly smaller than the estimated half million black voters in the nation, an overwhelming majority of whom supported the Republican nominee.

The platform upon which Grant campaigned was remarkably inconsistent on the subject of black voting rights, proposing one policy for the South and a different one in the North. “The guarantee by Congress of equal suffrage to all loyal men at the South was demanded by every consideration of public safety, of gratitude, and of justice, and must be maintained,” declared the Republican platform of 1868, “while the question of suffrage in all the loyal States properly belongs to the people of those States.”

Grant's party moved toward consistency after the election by drafting a proposed Fifteenth Amendment, which in carefully limited language barred any racial limitations on suffrage. Without taking the control of voting standards away from the states, the amendment, ratified in 1870, directed the states not to deny the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Strictly speaking the amendment did not give the right to vote to anyone; rather it merely made one potential type of suffrage restriction illegal. A carefully crafted compromise, the amendment was, according to Henry Adams, “more remarkable for what it does not than what it does contain.” As a matter of practice, however, many black Americans, especially in the North, gained the right to vote as a result of its passage.

For many Republican leaders Negro suffrage was “the civil panacea,” as the eminent abolitionist Wendell Phillips declared in 1869. “A man with a ballot in his hand is the master of the situation,” as Phillips saw it. “As soon as the negro holds the ballot at the South, whatever he suffers will be largely now, and in future wholly, his own fault.” Such thinking shaped Republican policy for the South, making the Fifteenth Amendment a substitute for a long-term, radical restructuring of southern society.

The Fifteenth Amendment was also important in the North, since by 1870 southern blacks had already secured the vote. In the closely fought elections of the 1870s and 1880s a few thousand Negro voters could spell the difference between victory and defeat in crucial states. For example fewer than 10,000 votes separated the winner from the loser in the presidential election of 1880, and northern black votes were essential to Republican victory. In 1888, when Benjamin Harrison carried President Grover Cleveland's home state of New York, it is reasonable to assume that the state's 20,000 black voters played a role in his narrow 14,373-vote victory. In the disputed election of 1876 Rutherford B. Hayes eked out an even narrower 7,513-vote victory in Ohio, a state with approximately 15,000 black voters.

Although some black leaders, including Douglass, favored extending the franchise to women, all proposals to that end were unsuccessful. Yet the elimination of white-only voting standards held wide significance for all African Americans, female as well as male. The new possibilities for black citizenship affected even women, who were quick to take advantage of the changed environment in order to attend political meetings, agitate on behalf of specific candidates or causes, and promote community solidarity.

Black Officeholding

The expansion of black voting rights led immediately to an unprecedented number of black elected officials. All of the constitutional conventions mandated under Congressional Reconstruction had some black delegates, with African Americans holding an absolute majority in South Carolina and half the seats in Louisiana. Despite being mocked by their political opponents as “black and tan” convocations, these conventions did not have a disproportionate number of Negro delegates. Indeed white natives made up a majority of the delegates in six of the ten constitutional conventions held in the former Confederate states in 1867–1868.

“Marshal Frederick Douglass, in His office at the City Hall, Washington, D.C.—the New Administration.” This wood engraving, from Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper of 7 April 1877, shows “colored citizens paying their respects—sketched by our special artist.”

Library of Congress.

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The reconstructed state governments elected under these new constitutions also included a remarkable number of black officers, though never equal to overall black voting strength. No black man was elected governor, not even in such heavily black states as South Carolina, Mississippi, or Louisiana. Six black lieutenant governors won office in three different states, and one of them, P. B. S. Pinchback, was acting governor of Louisiana for a month. Black politicians held several other important offices including superintendent of education in Florida and Mississippi, and secretary of state in Mississippi. Francis Cardozo served for four years (1868–1872) as South Carolina's secretary of state and four more years as state treasurer. In addition more than 600 black men served as legislators, with particular political success in South Carolina and Mississippi and limited influence in Arkansas, Texas, and Florida.

Sixteen African Americans won election to Congress during Reconstruction, including the Mississippi senators Hiram Revels (elected to fill the unexpired term of Jefferson Davis) and Blanche K. Bruce (elected to a full term in 1875). Fourteen black men were elected to the House, representing districts in South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, North Carolina, and Louisiana.

Black participation in local government was particularly significant. For the average southerner, the hub of political life was not in Washington or the state capital, but in the county seat. Thus black justices of the peace, recorders of deeds, school committeemen, and county commissioners represented dramatic change and potential controversy. The rare black sheriff or prosecuting attorney was even more unsettling to white voters.

In some cases the symbolism of black political responsibility outweighed more practical considerations. For example when James O'Hara was selected in 1876 for the unpaid, largely ceremonial post of presidential elector in North Carolina, Democrats reacted with such fury that he was eventually forced to resign to prevent their appeal to “caste prejudice” from hurting the Republican ticket.

Erosion of Black Politics

By the time of Frederick Douglass's death in 1895 black political rights were again under attack in the South, though even a careful observer would not yet discern the full extent of the decline of black politics, a retreat that would reach its culmination by 1915, during the Woodrow Wilson administration.

From the end of Reconstruction to about 1890, black political participation seemed relatively secure, with most observers accepting black voting as a permanent achievement of Reconstruction. In crucial races or closely balanced districts, it is true, southern Democrats sometimes partially suppressed the black vote or manipulated election returns, but few expected that black political influence could be entirely eliminated. Running in gerrymandered districts, black candidates, including John R. Lynch in Mississippi (1880), John Mercer Langston in Virginia (1888), and James O'Hara in North Carolina (1882, 1884), occasionally won election to Congress. Scattered independent movements, such as Virginia's “Readjusters,” allied with black voters to win significant victories.

Republican platforms regularly promised, in the words of the 1888 platform, to uphold the “sovereign right” of every citizen, “rich or poor, native or foreign born, black or white,” to cast a free ballot “and to have that ballot duly counted,” and Republican Federal attorneys continued to defend black suffrage by invoking the Enforcement Acts—laws not repealed until 1894. In 1889 the House of Representatives passed the Lodge Federal Election Bill, designed to give the federal government new authority to combat vote fraud, only to see the bill die in the Senate amid Republican second thoughts and vehement southern protest against “the Force Bill.”

Although Frederick Douglass rejected the Supreme Court's reasoning in the Civil Rights Cases (1883), both he and the judges thought of the post-Reconstruction era as a return to normal conditions. “An abnormal condition, born of war, carried [the Negro] to an altitude unsuited to his attainments,” wrote Douglass in 1884. “He could not sustain himself there.” The majority opinion in the Civil Rights Cases went further, declaring that “When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of beneficent legislation shaken off the inseparable concomitants of that state, there must be some stage in progress of elevation when he takes the rank of mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws.” (In dissent Justice Harlan defended the Civil Rights Act of 1875 as, in fact, designed “to enable the black race to take the rank of mere citizens.”)

Beginning in 1889 with the passage of Tennessee's laws to restrict suffrage, black political rights in the South began to erode rapidly. Using residency requirements and a strange literacy test (requiring potential voters be able to “read or understand” the state's constitution), Mississippi revised the state constitution in 1890 to get around the Fifteenth Amendment—with the result that of the state's 76,000 qualified voters in 1892 only 8,600 were African Americans. Other states would find Mississippi's approach appealing, especially in the face of a strong Populist challenge in the 1890s. Frederick Douglass did not live to see South Carolina's disfranchising convention (1895), in which six black delegates resisted in vain the tide of disfranchisement. One southern state after another followed suit, using constitutional conventions or amendments or statutory means such as poll taxes, until the process was completed in Georgia in 1908. Not until 1915 did the Supreme Court rule that “grandfather clauses” were unconstitutional under the Fifteenth Amendment. Although Republicans intermittently threatened to reduce southern representation in Congress under the terms of the Fourteenth Amendment, they failed to act.

The weakening of black political rights was accompanied by other forms of oppression. Mob violence against Negroes intensified in the 1890s, with more than a hundred southern blacks killed by vigilante attacks in each year of the decade. By law and by custom, blacks were more and more isolated, systematically subjected to a pervasive “color line.” By the end of the century in 1900 much of the progress of Frederick Douglass's lifetime was threatened. His earlier conclusion that his people were “steadily rising” faced persistent challenge, especially in the area of political rights.

In the two decades after Frederick Douglass's death black political participation (strictly defined) was largely restricted to the North, where blacks continued to vote, seek patronage, and advocate legislation. In the South black citizenship was so sharply restricted that political activity had to find new channels. Scholars seeking evidence of black political aspirations in this era of southern history have been forced to redefine their understanding of politics, looking to such diverse subjects as the politics of education, the social influence of philanthropy, the ideology of black women's organizations, and the paradoxical power of black religious denominations to understand the citizenship of African Americans.

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