We know that the 15th Amendment giving non-white men the right to vote was ratified in 1870.
We also know that various state laws and policies were introduced following Redemption of the former Confederate states that rolled-back the ability of blacks to vote. These intensified under Jim Crow.
While we may think of these efforts to keep blacks from voting as simply examples of naked white political power, there was an intellectual/ideological backing for them. A. Caperton Braxton was the President of the Virginia Bar Association at the start of the 20th Century. In 1903 he addressed the Association on the 15th Amendment. His address was widely reprinted and later issued as a short book in 1934. I will post some excepts from it that show the depths of intellectual opposition to the 15th Amendment from within the leadership of the Bar of Virginia.
Here is a link to the full text of the address. I suggest you read it. I will be highlighting some of the central aspects of the address, along with some explanatory notes.
In today’s excerpts from Barton’s speech, I offer his opening argument, which is that almost no white people, including Lincoln, supported Black suffrage before the Civil War. Blacks were given the right to vote over the objections of white men, who were, after all, the only people who really mattered, he argues.
Braxton begins by saying that white Americans had never supported the broad enfranchisement of blacks:
Barton then offers several quotes from Lincoln in which he disclaims supporting Black Suffrage.
We will dive deeper into Barton’s white supremacist apologetics tomorrow.
[excerpt amend7]
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I will come back to this later with a fuller post.
At the minimum, Braxton ought to have remembered that a high amount of ex-Confederates and Unionists who’d actually fought the war he evidently attempted to use for political advantage came to reform their views to at least a significant portion and support at least limited Black American suffrage, (‘impartial suffrage’, as the term was then coined).
This meant that voting rights could not be denied upon the basis of race; it could be denied to any person/s on other grounds, (ie. inadequate intelligence, low character, etc).
There is a measure of fair and balanced criticism that can certainly be applied to the figures of the immediate post-war for the often-limited scope they could conceive Black Americans and other minorities being granted the right to vote, and this ought not be denied.
It is also true that these same figures significantly challenged their own and the wider social prejudices of their times that they had always known and forged the possibility for our contemporary views. This was humane and heroic.
The figures I refer to above include, but are not limited to, Ulysses S. Grant, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Alexander Stephens, William Mahone, James Longstreet, Felix Brannigan, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Edward Pollard and Edward O. Ord.
I’m not aware at the time of writing this piece if Jefferson Davis ever espoused any views at any point of his life about Black Americans voting, (if any have any information, I am glad to receive and consider it); I am aware that he opined even before/during the war that Black Americans ought be allowed to serve on juries and provide evidence, even against White Americans.
I thank the Admin for his customary excellence in bringing this information and topic to light.