We are tempted to imagine that white supremacist propaganda was always presented in the non-standard English of the barely literate. That was not true. Many highly educated Americans joined in the crusade to keep down the recently emancipated African American citizenry.
There is a nicely argued article in the North American Review (1881) by Mississippi Supreme Court Justice H.H. Chalmers looking at the problem of the enfranchisement of blacks after the Civil War. The article, entitled The Effects of Negro Suffrage, can be found here:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25100941?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Below, I will highlight some parts of the article.
Justice Chalmers, a former Confederate officer, describes the possible motives for giving the black man the right to vote.
By allowing blacks to vote, the American people have been denied the right to choose their own rulers:
Giving blacks the vote has debased the meaning of democracy for Americans and led to widespread corruption, according to Chalmers:
Chalmers concedes that before the 14th and 15th Amendments, blacks had the same legal status in the South as unnaturalized aliens:
While Chalmers acknowledges the need to protect the basic rights of blacks, he says that giving them the right to vote on an equal basis with whites was the wrong solution:
Where blacks formed a majority of the population, they confounded democracy by not allowing whites to choose their own governors:
Black enfranchisement discourages immigration and investment in the South according to Chalmers:
Chalmers holds out some frightening possibilities resulting from black voting:
Chalmers admits that the 15th Amendment will not be repealed, so instead he proposes that education and property qualifications, facially race-neutral, be used to insure the dominance of the Anglo Saxon over all others:
Southern whites have the right to expect sympathy when they lash out violently against blacks because the serpent of Nero suffrage was attached to the South against her will, argues Chalmers:
The “She” referred to in the first word of the paragraph, is the White South.
Remember that this article was by a respected jurist writing in a national magazine.
Note: While the language and ideas I reproduce from Chalmers’ article are harsh, I think it is important for us to understand how these issues were discussed at the time. There has been a tendancy to whitewash Reconstruction and Jim Crow history, and this blog will hopefully prove a corrective.
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