A BIT OF HISTORY
©2020 SARAH BECKER
Credit: U.S. National Archives
Voting propaganda poster.
The Right to
VOTE… “T
he question of suffrage is one which is likely to agitate the public so long as a portion of the citizens of the nation are excluded from its privileges,” President and former Union General Ulysses S. Grant [R-IL] said in 1870. Amendment 15, Section 1, as ratified on March 30, 1870 gave black men the right to vote. “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States that by the accession of a Republican Administration their property and their peace and personal security are to be endangered,” incoming President Abraham Lincoln [R-IL] said on March 4, 1861. “In legal contemplation the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself,” Lincoln continued. “[O] ne of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was ‘to form a more perfect Union.’” Seven southern states had seceded as of February 23, 1861: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas. “Plainly the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy,” Lincoln concluded. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of Civil War…[As I have said previously]—I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists.” On March 21, 1861, Confederate States of America officeholder Alexander H. Stephens [Whig, Democrat and CSA-GA] responded. “Our new government is founded upon…the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition… With us, all of the white race, Old Town Crier
however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro.” “We meet this evening, not in sorrow, but in gladness of heart,” President Lincoln said on April 11, 1865 his last public address. “The [Confederate] evacuation of Petersburg and Richmond, and the surrender of the principal insurgent army, give hope of a righteous and speedy peace…By these recent successes the re-inauguration of the national authority— reconstruction—which has had a large share of thought from the first, is pressed more closely upon our attention. It is fraught with great difficulty.” “Unlike the case of a war between independent nationals, there is no authorized organ for us to treat with,” Lincoln continued. “No one man has authority to give up the rebellion for any other man. We simply must begin with, and mould from, disorganized and discordant elements. Nor is it a small additional embarrassment that we, the loyal people, differ among ourselves as to the mode, manner, and means of reconstruction.” “We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper relation with the Union,” Lincoln concluded, “and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation.” He also mentioned “the elective franchise,” his want to confer it “on the colored man.” On March 18, 2016, NAACP President Cornell Brooks sharply criticized voter identification laws, noting “the 2016 election is the first election in 50 years without the full protection of the 1965 Voting Rights Act [VRA].” In 2013, in Shelby County, Alabama, Petitioner v. Eric H. Holder, Jr., Attorney General, et.al., the U.S. Supreme Court ruled portions of the VRA unconstitutional.
The VRA enabled the Federal government to suspend all literacy, knowledge or character tests for voting in areas where less than 50 percent of the voting age population is registered. “The Voting Rights Act of 1965 employed extraordinary measures to address an extraordinary problem,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote on June 25, 2013. “Section 5 of the Act Credit: U.S. National Archives required States to obtain President Gerald R. Ford Greeting Roy Wilkins, Vernon Jordan, and federal permission before Others Prior to the Signing Ceremony for H.R. 6219, Extending the enacting any law related to Voting Rights Act of 1965. voting—a drastic departure House of Representatives Joint Senator Charles Sumner, an from the basic principle of Committee on Reconstruction 1870 Massachusetts Radical federalism,” Roberts continued. wrote in 1866. “Slavery, by Republican. It provided that “And Section 4 of the Act building up a ruling and all persons, regardless of applied that requirement only dominant class, had produced race, were entitled to “the to some States—an equally a spirit of oligarchy adverse to full and equal employment” dramatic departure from the republican institutions, which of accommodations, public principle that all States enjoy finally inaugurated Civil War. transportation, and places of equal sovereignty. This was The tendency of continuing amusement.” strong medicine, but Congress the domination of such a class, “You say you have determined it was needed by leaving it in the exclusive emancipated us,” Frederick to address entrenched racial possession of political power, Douglass told the 1876 determination in voting, ‘an would be to encourage the same Republican National insidious and pervasive evil spirit, and lead to a similar Convention. “But what is your which had been perpetuated result [Jim Crow and the Lost emancipation? What is your in certain parts of our country Cause]. ” The Committee’s enfranchisement? What does it through unremitting and conclusion: “the right of [male] all amount to, if the black man, ingenious defiance of the suffrage should be granted, after having been made free by Constitution.’” without distinction of color or the letter of your law, is unable In April 1865 the Federal race.” to exercise that freedom, and, government divided the South “Underlying Reconstruction after having been freed from into five occupied military the slaveholder’s lash, he is to districts. Freed black men were lay principles important to modern civilized nations,” be subject to the slaveholder’s often homeless; without money historian Arthur M. shotgun.” and at loose ends in a society Schlesinger, Jr., wrote. “Civil “Ours is the most tainted by the hostilities of rights, racial equality, federal extraordinary case of any war. Their wants: ratification powers.” people ever emancipated on of the 13th, 14th and 15th The Federal Congress passed Amendments; privileges and the globe,” Douglass concluded. its first Civil Rights Bill on immunities, and independence “When you turned us loose… April 6, 1866. It granted full through education. you turned us loose to the sky, citizenship to all persons, Amendment 13 ratified to the storm, to the whirlwind, except for Indians, born on December 6, 1865, abolished and, worst of all, you turned United States soil. Black men, slavery. Virginia’s Black Code, us loose to the wrath of our for the first time, had the right its Vagrant Act became law in infuriated masters.” to enforce contracts; to sue, give January 1866. Six ex-Confederate soldiers evidence, and buy property. “By constitutional formed the Ku Klux Klan A reunited, Reconstruction amendment…[a] large portion in Pulaski, Tennessee, on Congress passed the Civil of the population had become, December 24, 1865—for instead of mere chattels, free Rights Act of 1875. The Act A BIT OF HISTORY > PAGE 10 men and citizens,” the U.S. was first introduced by U.S. November 2020 | 9
