CONCLUSION

By Reason of Race

On January 11, 1869, the Republican George Boutwell of Massachusetts, former member of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction and current member of the House Judiciary Committee, presented to Congress a joint resolution that would eventually become the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Designed to bolster the Fourteenth Amendment’s second section and further protect southern African American men’s access to the ballot, the proposal (House Resolution 402) declared that “the right of any citizen of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State by reason of race, color, or previous condition of slavery.”¹ It did not mention sex or gender.²

Yet the question of women’s enfranchisement was consistently present as congressmen debated the amendment’s language. Some members raised the issue to defend or oppose it. One good example: the first amendment offered to the Judiciary Committee’s proposal explicitly proclaimed women’s right to vote, declaring that “the right of any person of the United States shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of his or her race, sex, nativity, or age when over twelve years, color, or previous condition of slavery of any citizen or class of citizen of the United States.”³ By adding “sex” and “nativity,” New York’s conservative Democratic representative James Brooks most likely sought to make the whole resolution unpalatable to a majority, rather than to truly advocate women’s enfranchisement. Less duplicitous, the other congressmen who raised women’s voting rights did so most frequently to challenge their political opponents as they debated the resolution, using women’s disfranchised state to note that not all adult citizens should possess the right to vote. But regardless of political party, most congressmen who discussed the connection between gender and the ballot demonstrated their belief that women’s exclusion from the polity was natural, legally appropriate, and even advantageous to both women and the nation. For example, the Ohio Republican John Sherman used woman suffrage to argue in favor of leaving some restrictions to the states: any suffrage rule, he said, ought to “operate universally and withdraw from the States all power to exclude any portion of the male citizens of the United States, leaving to them if they choose, to regulate the length of residence, whether females shall participate in the elective franchise, at what age males shall vote, &c.”⁴ In other words, the federal government would protect the fundamental right of all men to access the ballot, but states should feel free to restrict the rights of women.

Like Sherman, Senator George Edmunds, Republican of Vermont, saw no problem with excluding women from the franchise. He claimed that in this he was supported by the nation’s courts, which deemed it normal to defend the “right of manhood citizenship” and yet deny those same rights to women. This perspective on women was not restricted by party. Democratic senator Garrett Davis from Kentucky also rejected women’s enfranchisement, but he did so by emphasizing domesticity rather than the law. Davis declared that “woman now occupies her proper domain. She is the priestess of the altar of the household.… He is a most mistaken man, if not a positive misanthrope, who would bring to that altar the defilements of party politics.”⁵ Delaware Democratic senator James A. Bayard Jr. agreed. If women were enfranchised and “the sex is dragged down into the political arena,” he said, it “will demoralize women’s nature, and… her real influence over man will gradually but certainly fade, and be lost, and with that loss we shall, as a people, retrograde in civilization.”⁶ Bayard rejected the “folly” and “fanaticism,” of the “communists, socialists, and women’s rights party” who advocated women’s enfranchisement and instead declared women’s domestic role to be paramount. “Inordinate vanity and the love of notoriety may have tempted some women to unsex themselves, both in their dress and in their pursuits,” he said, “but woman’s heart and the instincts of maternity will keep her true to the greatest duties in life, the culture and formation of the character of her offspring.”⁷

Despite Bayard’s assumptions to the contrary, throughout the Fortieth Congress there were plenty of “unsexed fanatics” asking for the ballot. During debates on the Fifteenth Amendment, petitions were presented almost daily from groups of women and men “praying that in any amendment of the Constitution extending or regulating the right of suffrage no discrimination shall be allowed as between men and women.” On February 15 alone, four petitions signed by more than 3,600 people were submitted to the House.⁸ Large petitions like these kept the problem of women’s enfranchisement present in the minds of congressmen debating the Fifteenth Amendment. It was so prominent that some proposed alternatives even included gendered language. For example, the Ohio Republican John Bingham, author of the Fourteenth Amendment’s first section, offered a version of the Fifteenth Amendment that protected the voting rights of all “male citizens.”⁹ And Bingham was not alone. Between January 23 and February 26, as Congress evaluated the Fifteenth Amendment’s language, at least one other proposed version included the word “male.”¹⁰

Not all alternatives included gendered language, however. And for at least one congressman this omission posed a problem. On February 17, 1869, Roscoe Conkling, now a Republican senator from New York, was defending his preferred version of the Fifteenth Amendment when the connection between women’s voting rights and gender-specific constitutional language was again raised. Conkling’s version of the amendment declared that “Citizens of the United States of African descent shall have the same right to vote and to hold office in the State and Territories as other electors.” In the midst of defending this language, the Indiana Democratic senator Thomas Hendricks interrupted Conkling to ask why the term “elector” was used. He answered that “elector” had been chosen rather than “citizen” to describe the default possessor of rights because “the word ‘citizen’ it was suggested, might refer to minors or to women, and therefore, the right to vote by comparison with other citizens would not be guarantied.” Hendricks then suggested that even without revision the language of the proposed version would enfranchise “all citizens of the United States of African descent—and that includes the women, of course.” Conkling rejected this interpretation outright and offered a quick and simple solution to the problem: “If the honorable Senator thinks that is true it would involve the insertion of the word “male,” which I believe has been inserted in a number of these amendments other than this. I do not think this is important enough to discuss. I make no comment upon it, except that if there is any danger of that [then] this amendment ought to be perfected in that respect.”¹¹

Conkling had ample cause to know that one simple word could easily prevent women’s enfranchisement. Just three years earlier he himself had been the first person to suggest “perfecting” the Fourteenth Amendment by adding the word “male.” Perhaps it was this experience that made him so confident that women’s voting rights could be easily avoided in the Fifteenth Amendment’s text. Or perhaps it was the repeated failures of the women’s rights movement of the past few years that assured him that the issue was not a political problem worth commenting upon. In any case, this brief exchange indicates that by 1869 members of Congress were fully aware that the issue of women’s voting rights was, at the very least, an open question. It also indicates that they were fully prepared to ensure that that question would be answered negatively. Clearly, by 1869, members of Congress had learned the power of gender-specific language and were not afraid to use it.

I began this book began with two related questions: Why was the word “male” used in the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment, and why did Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony adopt racist suffrage arguments in the late 1860s? Or put another way, how did the words of politicians, congressmen, and activists become legal standards and rhetorical norms that determined the distribution of political and social power? The answers I found indicated that while race and gender had both come to substitute for property during the antebellum period of suffrage expansion, during Reconstruction, for some powerful partisans, race lost a degree of its political salience as a marker of voting status. Instead, to define the newly reforming political community, those in positions of political and social power followed the lead of African American activists and adopted gender as their guiding principle. This principle was explicitly declared in the Fourteenth Amendment. In the face of a politics and partisan culture that so privileged manhood, Stanton and Anthony, to define white women as voters, turned to race as an equally powerful and equally malleable identity that also had deep roots as a determinant of voting status. That they did so to craft an alternate partisan relationship does not mitigate the most troubling long-term consequence of that act—placing racism at the heart of the woman suffrage movement.

Both the centrality of manhood to politics and the suffragists’ racism suggest that changing categories of identity rather than broadening understandings of equality drove the Reconstruction era expansion of suffrage rights. Republicans were not fundamentally redefining voting rights on the basis of a new interpretation of democratic ideals. Instead, they were wielding flexible, constructed identity categories to justify their own partisan policies and interests. That they opted to expand the franchise in this way, rather than simply issuing a positive declaration of enfranchisement, would in the future raise a number of problems. Primarily, by grounding black men’s right to vote in such a shifting and socially determined category as gender identity, Republicans during Reconstruction made it all the easier to revoke that franchise when Reconstruction came to an end. If black men’s right to the franchise was based not in the right of all adult American citizens to participate in the making of the laws that govern them but rather in their contingent identity as men, then redefining their gender identity could call into question their right to vote, as whites in the Jim Crow South demonstrated with such tragic results.¹²

Further, by using the word “male” in the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and tacitly permitting gender distinctions among voters in the Fifteenth Amendment, Republican Reconstruction politics codified a gendered vision of the voting polity in America’s fundamental law. This constitutional language embedded in the nation’s primary text a vision of an ideal American political community as gendered, as restricted by the meanings attributed to sexual difference in the mid-nineteenth century. While the representation provision of the Fourteenth Amendment was never actively enforced, its definition of voters as “adult male citizens” contributed to and legally enshrined women’s ongoing exclusion from American politics until 1920. Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s prediction in 1865 that it would take a “full century, at least” to remove “that word ‘male’” from the Constitution was wrong, it did take almost fifty years for women to gain equal access to the American political system and to remove the association between manhood and voting rights from the American political consciousness.¹³

Of course, the project of defining the limits of America’s franchise certainly did not stop there. It took almost a full century for African American men and women to gain full enforcement of the legal, civil, and political protections the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments promised. Indeed, determining who should and who should not vote in America is an ongoing process. From the millions of explicitly disfranchised convicted felons and prisoners, excluded undocumented immigrants, and tacitly disfranchised poor Americans, today there remain substantial groups with limited or no access to the mechanisms of democracy. How we shall choose to address this, and what qualities we identify as necessary for a legitimate voter, remains one of the most vital political questions of the American democracy as we continue to reconstruct our suffrage.