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The possibility of the negro's holding the balance of power seemed dangerous and ultimately led to attempts to disfranchise him by law, which will be considered in another chapter. The relation of the races was not the only question which confronted the whites when they regained control of the state governments. The problem of finance was equally fundamental.

If a man has been President of the United States, we do not disfranchise him thenceforward; if he has been governor, we do not declare him thenceforth ineligible to the office of United States senator. On the contrary, the supposed reward of high merit is to give higher civic privileges.

These foreigners, who had found their own manhood by coming to a land which not only the Pilgrim Fathers but the Pilgrim Mothers had settled, and subdued, and freed for them, were still ready to disfranchise most of the daughters of those mothers, on the ground that they had not "sense enough to vote."

It contemplates and provides for, and in that way, taken by itself, authorizes the States to wholly disfranchise entire races of its people, and that, too, whether that race be white or black, Saxon, Celtic, or Caucasian, and without regard to their numbers or proportion to the entire population of the State.

This they knew would virtually disfranchise many conscientious antislavery men; while, on the other hand, they enacted that each inhabitant who had paid his territorial tax should be a qualified voter for all elective officers.

Mr Washington opposes unjust race legislation, like the recent proposition in Georgia to disfranchise the black man, as a black man; but he does not urge the negroes in his own State of Alabama to make voting the chief end of life.

One of the daughters, for instance, married a white man and reared in a neighboring county a family of white children, who, in all probability, were as active as any one else in the recent ferocious red-shirt campaign to disfranchise the Negroes.

The Attorney-general was ordered to prosecute the five members of the managing committee for "an illegal and corrupt conspiracy;" and a bill was brought in to disfranchise and declare forever incapable of voting at any election eighty-one freemen who had been proved to have received bribes, and to punish the borough itself, by extending the right of voting at future elections to all the freeholders in the rape of Bramber, the district of Sussex in which New Shoreham lies, an arrangement which reduced the borough itself to comparative insignificance.

Rogers, "to enunciate a doctrine that will, if carried out, disfranchise seven or eight million people, and that will put them in a worse condition than the serfs of Russia or the downtrodden people of Poland and Hungary, until the year 1870." Mr. Farnsworth advocated the amendment, but did not regard the third section as of any practical value.

Before the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the States had the power to disfranchise on account of race or color. These amendments, ratified by the States, simply forbade that discrimination, but did not forbid that against sex."