After Abraham
Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, Vice President Andrew
Johnson succeeded to the presidency. Republicans initially
believed they could work productively with Johnson, even though
he was a Southern Democrat. Radical Charles Sumner remarked in
May that “on the question of colored suffrage the President is
with us.” That positive assessment of President Johnson was
apparent in the May 27, 1865 issue of Harper’s Weekly, in
which editor George William Curtis
designated
black voting rights “The Main Question.”
The editor rejected Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion in
the Dred Scott case (1857) that blacks were not citizens
of the United States. Curtis argued that access to the ballot
was a right of citizenship, not a privilege, explaining that
most states had allowed blacks to vote in the early years of the
republic, and tracing their disfranchisement to the parallel
expansion of the government’s protection of slavery. With the
official end of slavery near, the editor emphasized the
practical necessity of enfranchising black men so that they
could secure other rights and liberties. “Are those who were
willing to sell other men’s children likely to shrink from
forbidding those men to learn to read or to bear arms?”
Curtis’s comments were prophetic: by the end of the year,
Southern states had begun enacting
Black Codes, which severely restricted the liberties of the
newly freed slaves. To those who insisted that voting
qualifications fell under states’ rights, the editor reminded
his readers that the former Confederate states would be
reorganized only under the authority of the federal government.
That view, however, would not be shared by a majority of
Republicans until almost a year later. As an answer to
doubters, Curtis proposed a constitutional amendment “making
every native and properly naturalized citizen, if unconvicted of
crime, a voter.”
During the summer of 1865, President Johnson began
implementing his Reconstruction policy. It included the
stipulation that high-ranking or wealthy ex-Confederates
personally petition him for pardons, but no requirement of
enfranchising black men. Thomas Nast responded with a
double-page cartoon in the August 5 issue of
Harper’s Weekly. On the first page, entitled “Pardon,”
Columbia looks with dismay at the former Confederates
petitioning for pardons and asks, “Shall I trust these men”; on
the second page, entitled “Franchise,” she stands with her hand
on a wounded black Union veteran and a ballot box behind her,
completing the question with: “and not this man?”
The petitioners kneeling in the foreground of “Pardon” are
(right-left): State Representative Roger Pryor of Confederate
Virginia, holding a petition on the far right; General Robert E.
Lee, lowering the battle standard; Confederate Vice President
Alexander Stephens, holding a petition; former Confederate
Secretary of State and General Robert Toombs, behind Stephens’s
head; the mustachioed Admiral Raphael Semmes, former commander
of the Alabama naval ship, who kneels behind Stephens’s
back; General Richard Ewell, behind Semmes; John Letcher, the
ex-governor of Confederate Virginia, wearing glasses on the far
left; and, General John Bell Hood, behind Ewell.
Despite Johnson’s refusal to make black voting rights part of
his Reconstruction policy, editor Curtis continued to give the
president the benefit of the doubt. In the November 4, 1865
issue of Harper’s Weekly, an editorial
contrasted Johnson’s support of gradual enfranchisement of
veteran, literate, and propertied black men in the president’s
home state of Tennessee with former Postmaster General
Montgomery Blair’s endorsement of colonizing black Americans to
foreign lands.
While no Southern state reconstructing under President
Johnson’s plan enfranchised black men, white voters in three
Northern states—Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Minnesota—and the
territory of Colorado also rejected the reform in 1865. Before
Connecticut’s referendum, Harper’s Weekly editor George
William Curtis
urged each voter to “remember that
the question upon which he is to vote is the most fundamental
one in the country. Do you believe the Declaration of
Independence … that men are created with equal rights…?” The
referendum was defeated 55%-45%, losing in seven of eight
counties,
according to the October 14, 1865 issue
of Harper’s Weekly. (The exception was Windham County in
the northeast corner of the state.) The defeats were similar in
Minnesota and Wisconsin: 55%-45% and 54%-46%, respectively. In
the December 2, 1865 issue of Harper’s Weekly, Curtis
pointed out that while the failure to enfranchise
black men in Northern states was “a pitiful disgrace,” it was
not a question of “national welfare,” as it was in the South,
where the exclusion of black voters meant control of the
political process by former Confederates.
White reformers like Curtis were not the only voices calling
for black voting rights. After the war, the civil rights
activism of Frederick Douglass and the National Equal Rights
League spread to the South. In 1865 and 1866, hundreds of
delegates attended black conventions in the Southern states.
The conventions condemned anti-black violence and demanded equal
rights, with their central concerns being equality under the law
and voting rights. George William Curtis
lauded
their efforts in the lead editorial of the December 16, 1865
issue of Harper’s Weekly. |
1)
May 27, 1865, p. 322
editorial, c. 1-4, “The
Main Question”
2)
August 5, 1865, pp. 488-489
cartoon,
“Pardon/Franchise”
3)
November 4, 1865, p. 691, c. 1
editorial, “A
Difference”
4)
September 30, 1865, p. 610, c. 2-3
editorial,
“The ‘Steady Habit’ of Equal Rights”
5)
October 14, 1865, p. 643, c. 4
“Domestic
Intelligence” column, “News Items”
6)
December 2, 1865, p. 755, c. 2
editorial, “The
Suffrage”
7)
December 16, 1865, p. 786, c. 1-2
editorial,
“Convention of the Other Color”
|