American Politics Southern Style

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American Politics Southern Style

Southern Polling Practices. While corrupt, party machines served the important function of integrating new-comers and the urban poor into politics. Southern blacks, predominantly former slaves, had few allies in the post-Reconstruction period to help them become full participants in the political system. Ratified in 1870, the Fifteenth Amendment granted African American males the right to vote, a privilege they exercised freely throughout the Reconstruction period, electing large numbers of African Americans to local, state, and national offices, including seats in both houses of Congress. Between 1866 and 1876 fifteen African Americans served in the House of Representatives. After Reconstruction ended in 1878, the number of African American congressmen declined, but a few continued to be reelected, including John Roy Lynch, a former slave, who served as the speaker of the

Mississippi House of Representatives and as a Republican congressman from 1873 to 1883.

Disfranchising African Americans. In the 1880s a rising tide of racism and the growing presence of Populism and other forms of political unrest in the South made conservative white southerners fearful that poor whites and African Americans might join forces and upset Democratic rule in the region. Using threats and violence, fraudulent vote counts, literacy tests, poli taxes, and separate ballots and ballot boxes for state and federal elections, as well as by holding periodic voter registrations at places inaccessible to African Americans, southern states created major roadblocks to blacks’ participation in the electoral process, denying the vote outright to the vast majority. The Democratic Party of South Carolina, for example, enacted a rule in 1894 that stated, “every Negro applying to vote in a Democratic primary election, must produce a written statement of ten reputable white men” who could swear the applicant voted Democratic in previous elections. The consequence of ’ such practices was a dramatic decline in southern voting. The southern turnout in presidential elections went from 64 percent of eligible voters in 1880 to 43 percent in 1900.

The Federal Elections Act. In an effort to ensure that more African Americans could vote and to clean up corrupt polling practices, Congress debated the Federal Elections Act of 1889-1890. The key element of the bill was a provision that allowed federal circuit courts, not the state, to oversee congressional elections if one hundred or more voters in a district requested it. In such cases federal marshals would supervise the balloting and vote counting. The bill was the Republicans’ last effort to reinstate gains that had been won in the Civil War but had quickly evaporated in the wake of Reconstruction. The pervasive racist belief that African Americans were not intellectually capable to participate in politics and a widespread indifference to the dilemma of southern blacks blocked passage of the bill.

The Kansas Exodus. After the abolition of slavery southern plantation owners continued to need cheap labor to work their land. Under various systems of share-cropping and farm tenancy, former slaves worked plots of land either for a share of the crop they raised or for rent. With crop prices in a long-term decline and with control of the contracts in the landowners’ hands, sharecroppers and tenants found themselves poorer and more in debt with each passing year. Poverty combined with the growing threat of racially motivated lynching and the curtailment of their legal rights to convince some African Americans to seek better lives outside the South, and many headed to the newly opened land of the Midwest. Their first large post-Civil War “exodus” was to rural Kansas. Led by former slave Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, who was proud to be called the “Moses of the Colored Exodus,” this migration attracted national attention. Singleton, who had escaped and settled in Detroit before the Civil War, moved to Tennessee after the war and began to preach self-help to former slaves. Between 1876 and 1879 he personally led as many as seven thousand people to settle in Kansas.

Migration Fever. Throughout 1879 a migration fever swept through the South, and thousands of African Americans set out for Kansas, many traveling by steamboat up the Mississippi to Saint Louis, and by rail the rest of the way. Democrats in Congress saw the exodus as a plot by the GOP to pack the developing state with black, Republican voters. In Kansas African American farmers found a degree of the autonomy and civil rights that had eluded them in the South.