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Updated: June 23, 2025
If the Constitution knows none, it is clearly no part of the duty of a Republican Congress now to institute one. The mistake of the last session was the attempt to do this very thing, by a renunciation of its power to secure political rights to any class of citizens, with the obvious purpose to allow the rebellious States to disfranchise, if they should see fit, their colored citizens.
Coincident with this scheme of partial Negro suffrage an attempt was made by the conservative leaders in Washington, working with the Southerners, to propose a revised Fourteenth Amendment which would give the vote to competent Negroes and not disfranchise the whites. A conference of Southern governors met in Washington early in 1867 and drafted such an amendment. But, it was too late.
If it were anywhere the custom to disfranchise persons of superior virtue because of their virtue, and to present others with the ballot, simply because they had been in the state prison, then the exclusion of women from political rights would be a high compliment, no doubt.
Boyer, a Democratic member from Pennsylvania, declared that the effect of the amendment if adopted would be to disfranchise for a period of four years nine-tenths of the voting population of eleven States.
'You had better ask him, says I, 'to nominate some foreign potentate to appoint commissioners who will say to Mr. Parnell, "Let Ireland pay her share of the national debt and buy out every loyal person who wishes to leave the country," and then, if Mr. Parnell says, "We are not able to do that," let them retort, "We will then disfranchise you, for this humbug has been going on long enough."
As the reconstruction of a State cannot be done under the war power, the General government can no more enfranchise than it can disfranchise any portion of the territorial people, and the question of negro suffrage must be left, where the constitution leaves it to the States severally, each to dispose of it for itself.
Prosperous cities ought always to show that they desire every good for the unfortunate, for the future is dark to us all." His conclusion is this. "Any person who abandons the post assigned to him by his commander you disfranchise and exclude from public life. Even so all who desert the political tradition bequeathed you by your ancestors and turn oligarchs you ought to banish from your Council.
The Constitution of Louisiana, in its attempt to disfranchise the Negro and enfranchise, so to speak, every other class of men, the ignorant scum of Europe, as well as the intelligent and illiterate native born whites, outdoes both Mississippi and South Carolina.
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." Thus the Thirteenth Amendment did not destroy the auction block.
No doubt it is illogical if, in fact, the difference of colour does not imply a difference of the powers which fit a man for the enjoyment of certain rights. We may at least grant that the burden of proof should be upon those who would disfranchise all red-haired men. But this is because experience shows that the difference of colour does not mark a relevant difference.
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