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Absolutely loyal to republical institutions, he is willing to go as far as any in the matter of fairly and justly protecting the ballot from abuses that grow out of ignorance. The Constitution of Mississippi has served as the pattern for the disfranchising enactments of South Carolina and Louisiana.
In South Carolina, for instance, the breach of a labor contract has been made a crime, the object being to reduce the Negro to a state of serfdom. Not only has the legal status of the Negro been gravely affected by these disfranchising enactments; his economic status has also been lowered.
Miss Anthony and I were the first to see the full significance of the word "male" in the Fourteenth Amendment, and we at once sounded the alarm, and sent out petitions for a constitutional amendment to "prohibit the States from disfranchising any of their citizens on the ground of sex."
His disqualification as an elector shuts him out of the jury box in courts where what few rights he has left are adjudicated and his grievances redressed. His disqualification as an elector and as a juror discredits him as a witness. In the states which have adopted these disfranchising constitutions, more than three hundred thousand citizens have been thereby disqualified as jurors.
It adopts practically the same educational and property qualifications as are contained in the Mississippi and South Carolina instruments. The fifth section of it furnishes a true index to the spirit which is behind all of these disfranchising enactments.
This is the Selkirk election, which I supposed would be as tumultuous as the Jedburgh one, but the soutars of Selkirk had got a new light, and saw in the proposed Reform Bill nothing but a mode of disfranchising their ancient burgh.
Certain it is that under reconstruction the civil and political rights of all men were more secure in those States than they have ever been since. We will hear less of the evils of reconstruction, now that the bugaboo has served its purpose by disfranchising the Negro.
In 1898 Louisiana passed an amendment inventing the so-called "grandfather clause." This excused from the operation of her disfranchising act all descendants of men who had voted before the Civil War, thus admitting to the suffrage all white men who were illiterate and without property.
Since then a majority of the Southern states and practically all of the states of the "Black Belt" have embodied either in their constitutions or laws provisions for disfranchising the negro voter. Louisiana made the provision that a person must be able to read and write or be a lineal descendant of some person who voted prior to 1860.
But this so-called "understanding clause," or George scheme, is much more sweeping than was intended by its author. The intent of that clause was to make it possible to disfranchise the illiterate blacks without disfranchising the illiterate whites. But as construed and enforced it is not confined to illiterates but to persons of intelligence as well.
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