The Case for Suffrage Rights

Northern African Americans presented broad-ranging and sophisticated arguments on behalf of suffrage rights. Although they differed at times on tactics, timing, and the language that should be incorporated into suffrage legislation, they were in full agreement that both justice and morality demanded political equality. In making their case for suffrage rights, they were perhaps most determined to challenge the accusation that political equality would lead to demands for social equality. This charge was repeatedly leveled by the Democrats, but many Republicans held similar views. Blacks realized that this issue was a potent weapon for opponents of political equality—and equal rights generally—for in a society that was rigidly segregated along racial lines and where the possibility of miscegenation was so feared by whites that many northern states prohibited interracial marriage, any move toward racial equality might breach those barriers and threaten white supremacy. Thus, African Americans were especially intent on allaying the fears of Republicans, who were at least open to the possibility of enacting equal rights legislation.4 They unequivocally denounced the tendency to conflate political and social equality as “superlative nonsense,” “a hideous phantom,” and “ridiculous and absurd.”5 A black convention reflected the thinking of most African Americans when it demanded equality before the law, not special privileges.6 Likewise, when Democrats resorted to the assertion that social equality would open the door to interracial marriage, blacks turned the argument against their accusers by noting, as the Christian Recorder did in an 1866 editorial, “We had never supposed that there was such a strong affinity between Democrats and black men and women, as to make such marriage possible.”7

Yet in vocally condemning the charge that they desired social equality with whites, black equal rights activists seemed willing to accept laws and customs that denied them equal access to many public facilities as well as privately owned businesses. Indeed, they would not add to the equal rights agenda a demand for such access until after black male suffrage rights were embedded in the U.S. Constitution. Some blacks even acknowledged that they were not the social equals of the most educated and “enlightened” whites. Much as they had done prior to the war, they frequently urged African Americans to cultivate moral and religious habits and to acquire wealth and intelligence. Otherwise, the Christian Recorder warned in 1866, “We will be ever despised, set aside, and denied our rights among the people of this country.” Northern African Americans, especially inclined to view the freed people as culturally and socially inferior to middle- and upper-class whites (and, for that matter, many northern blacks), often lectured them on the virtues of industry, frugality, education, morality, and religion.8 Nevertheless, northern black spokesmen were quick to deny that the freed people’s—or their own—low social and economic status and limited education justified the denial of equal rights. Instead, they maintained that virtue and patriotism were more important requisites for voting than social and educational achievements. In a thinly veiled reference to many southern—and some northern—whites who had fought against the Union yet now enjoyed suffrage rights, a speaker at an Indiana meeting used the role of black troops in the Civil War to make the point that “if we have virtue and intelligence enough to fight on the right side, certainly we will not vote on the wrong side.” Moreover, they often pointed out that African Americans had already made progress in the face of enormous adversity and would continue to do so. In his lecture on “Citizenship and the Ballot,” John Mercer Langston underscored the “surprising advance” that blacks had made, while Douglass told a Detroit audience in 1868 that his people’s “capacities are great” and that the equal rights cause would “develop him faster than any race was ever developed before.”9

Most suffrage activists, however, devoted far less attention to denying that they lacked sufficient intelligence to vote or desired social equality with whites than they did to the premise that, as American citizens, they unquestionably deserved suffrage rights. The numerous arguments they set forth on behalf of political rights were part of a broader strategy: to educate and inform white Americans on the relationship between the demands of the equal rights movement and the core values that most whites at least gave lip service to; to gain a favorable hearing among Republican politicians—and any Democrats who were willing to listen to their pleas—and thereby apply irresistible pressure on the political system to enact the desired legislation; and to mobilize the black community for the purpose of moving whites to act on this issue.

The language contained in the documents disseminated by the Syracuse Convention in 1864 served as the model for northern blacks during the six-year struggle for manhood suffrage rights. The movement’s national officers sought to guide the campaign by publishing the proceedings of its annual meetings and dispatching Langston to deliver lectures on the suffrage issue. In addition, the NERL recruited a national delegation in 1866 to lobby federal officials to extend the franchise to black males. Yet especially in the mid-1860s, when the struggle focused largely on persuading state legislatures to remove whites-only clauses from state constitutions, the state leagues and their local auxiliaries often took the lead in addressing the issue.

Throughout the campaign for suffrage rights, the dominant message was that, as the Christian Recorder declared in 1867, blacks were Americans in language, manners, and customs and thought and debated as Americans. In arguing their case, they especially sought to contrast their plight as American citizens without political rights with immigrants, who could enjoy those very rights after living in the United States for only five years. While they often based their claims to the franchise on lofty principles, such as Michigan blacks’ assertion in a petition to the state legislature that “if freedom is good for any, it is good for all,” suffrage activists at times resorted to anti-immigrant rhetoric to substantiate their demands.10 They especially targeted Irish immigrants, who consistently voted Democratic and were frequently hostile toward blacks. The Elevator, for example, referred to Irish Americans as “ignorant and disloyal,” while, in a statement that had racial overtones, a speaker at a Newark meeting claimed that “blacks do not vote like a machine, as another class of people do, but like white men.” On at least one occasion, blacks’ anger toward the Irish for helping to defeat suffrage initiatives led them to call for a boycott of Irish-owned businesses.11 Anti-immigrant arguments were also occasionally employed by California blacks to rebut the Democrats’ contention that black suffrage would open the door to political rights for Chinese immigrants, whose numbers had grown rapidly during the previous decade and a half. Bell, the editor of the Elevator, was particularly outspoken on this matter, asserting that, unlike African Americans, the Chinese did not intend to become citizens, would remain apart from other groups, and were “only sojourners” who cared little for Christianity or “American habits and aspirations.”12

For northern African Americans, any doubts that blacks had proven themselves worthy of enjoying political rights had been shattered by the sacrifices of nearly two hundred thousand black troops during the war. Although they consciously focused on the Civil War experience, they also repeatedly reminded whites that blacks had fought in every American war since the Revolution. Thus, they insisted that whites were obligated to secure suffrage rights for both northern and southern black men. To refuse to do so, the Weekly Anglo-African editorialized, would “dishonor the nation in the sight of God and man.” It is not surprising that black Civil War veterans played an integral role in the campaign for suffrage rights, for they had been profoundly politicized by their military service. They now transformed their demand for equal pay in the army into an insistence on equal rights. They saw themselves, and were accepted by other blacks, as special advocates for the African American community on this issue. Black veterans therefore believed that it would be difficult for whites to ignore their moral authority. On a few occasions, they organized their own conventions for political rights. For example, at a meeting held by seven hundred troops of Iowa’s 60th U.S. Colored Infantry in October 1865, they resolved that “he who is worthy to be trusted with the musket can, and ought to be trusted with the ballot.” They also spoke out forcefully and eloquently at many state and local meetings organized by civilian leaders. In 1866, northern and southern African American veterans carried their crusade for the franchise to the national level by forming the Colored Soldiers’ and Sailors’ League. At these and other meetings, they and other blacks repeatedly reminded whites that, unlike most southern, and a minority of northern, whites, African Americans had never falsely sworn to the government or taken up arms against it.13

The courage and patriotism of black soldiers, equal rights activists believed, stood as indisputable proof that African American men deserved “manhood” rights. Prior to the Civil War, American citizenship rights were interpreted as “manhood” rights for whites only; in most of the free states, black males were placed in a dependent category with women and children and were therefore viewed as less than men. Many black men enlisted in the Union Army in part because they clearly understood that this act would—as many opponents of black enlistment indeed feared—significantly strengthen their claim to equal rights and destroy the racist stereotype of black men as childlike or feminine. Black recruiters therefore often employed the rhetoric of action and will and of enlistment as a means of securing manhood and freedom. Coming out of the Civil War, black suffrage advocates consciously and emphatically connected voting rights to manhood, for they realized that politics was considered an exclusively male domain and a proving ground for male identity. As a speaker at a Kansas convention declared in 1866, to deny a black man political rights and access to power was “to take from him one of the essential elements of his manhood,” thereby rendering him “less than a man.”14

Northern blacks also frequently looked back to the Revolutionary era in making their case for suffrage rights. They repeatedly emphasized that African Americans had fought for the American cause in the Revolution because they understood that the stated ideals of that struggle resonated with Americans as much as those that emerged in the recent Civil War. At times they employed the language of the Declaration of Independence almost verbatim in declaring that the right to vote was “inherent and natural” and “as sacred and inviolable as the right of property, liberty or life.” Likewise, they appealed in the name of republican principles, especially the Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government in the states. Convinced that all states that denied African Americans political rights on the grounds of race or color violated this guarantee, an Illinois suffrage convention charged: “An aristocracy of race or color is as repugnant to the principles of republicanism, as one of birth or wealth would be.”15

They also invoked the Revolution’s rallying cry of “no taxation without representation” to impress upon whites the fact that blacks willingly paid taxes even though they were denied a voice, either directly or indirectly, in shaping public policies that profoundly affected their lives. Langston expressed this grievance forcefully when he told an Indiana audience in 1865 that taxation and representation were inseparable and constituted “the bond of union, and the bond of obligation between the Government and the citizen.”16 In emphasizing this point, Langston did not mean to imply that such a gross violation of their rights might lead blacks to contemplate severing their ties to the government. But their anger and frustration did lead some to warn white lawmakers that, so long as they withheld the franchise from African Americans, agitation and protest would remain a disruptive force in society. In a resolution he presented at the New England Convention of Colored Citizens in 1865, George Downing predicted that disorder and turmoil might occur if the demand for suffrage and other rights were not realized. Until the struggle for equal rights came to fruition, he warned whites in an unmistakable reference to the antebellum battles surrounding the slavery issue, agitation and conflict as intense and widespread as that which had occurred during the antislavery crusade would damage the economic interests of the nation.17 Some blacks indeed went so far as to warn explicitly that divine retribution would be visited upon those who perpetuated injustice. In response to Ohio Governor David Tod’s assertion that blacks did not deserve the franchise, an Ohio veteran stated ominously: “There is a day of retribution coming when justice will be meted out to those dangerous and political aspirants. A Cromwell will be found who will secure eternal justice to our oppressed race.”18

Means of Persuasion

Northern black activists marshaled a broad array of sophisticated and powerful arguments on behalf of manhood suffrage rights; they also employed a wide variety of methods to disseminate their arguments and bring pressure to bear on white politicians and voters. Coming out of the Civil War, black suffrage activists at all levels of the movement—from the national officers in Philadelphia to the local auxiliaries—appear to have agreed that they must take action primarily at the state level because they realized that nearly all Americans assumed that the states had sole authority to determine suffrage rights. Members of the state and local leagues were generally pragmatic in selecting the combination of means they believed held out the best chance of success in any given situation. Relatively little disagreement seems to have developed over which tactics would be most effective. An exception to this pattern emerged in California in 1867, where followers of Philip Bell and Peter Anderson—editors of the Elevator and the Pacific Appeal, respectively—differed sharply on whether African Americans should agitate the suffrage issue while the Democrats controlled the legislature. Bell’s allies insisted the effort must continue and that it was possible to influence Democratic legislators. But Anderson and his loyalists, deeming such efforts fruitless, preferred, in the name of racial pride and manhood, to “wait and combat the popular prejudice against our race, than whiningly to seek that boon” from the Democrats.19

Northern black rights activists established state organizations whose structures varied from state to state. The organizational structures that emerged in California and Illinois were quite different. In California, a centralized structure was created in which authority was concentrated in the hands of a statewide executive committee. At the Fourth California State Convention in 1865, which Bell termed “the most important assembly of colored men that ever met on the Pacific Coast,” the delegates passed a series of resolutions, presented an address to the public, sent petitions and memorials to the legislature, and called for sending lobbyists to Sacramento. Throughout the mid- and late 1860s, the executive committee controlled the agenda of the suffrage cause in the state; Bell, whose Elevator was designated as its organ, dominated the committee.20 In Illinois, on the other hand, a more complex and decentralized organizational structure developed, within which various rights organizations cooperated in furthering the suffrage cause. African Americans, led by John Jones and other activists, held three suffrage conventions following the Civil War. The most important of these meetings, convened at Galesburg in 1866, called for the creation of a thirteen-person State Central Suffrage Committee with one member from each congressional district and a general agent who would canvass the state, establish auxiliaries, circulate petitions, collect money, and mobilize the people. Jones, who served as the state agent for the Illinois Equal Rights League, was also selected as general agent for the newly formed State Central Suffrage Committee. In preparation for his presentation to the state legislature and later to the state constitutional convention, a committee of five men was appointed to draft resolutions. Beyond this, suffrage leagues were established at the county level throughout the state.21 While the organizational structure that emerged in Illinois dispersed power and participation more widely than did that in California, both allowed for important input from local activists. Moreover, both states employed very similar methods to disseminate the equal rights message and to pressure whites to support their objectives.

One of the methods that suffrage activists most frequently utilized was petitioning state legislatures and state constitutional conventions. Some of these petitions, which circulated in black communities across the North, were signed by hundreds of men and women even where there was a small black population. In many cases, sympathetic Republicans agreed to submit the petitions to the appropriate legislative or convention committees.22

In addition to sending petitions and memorials to government leaders and lobbying in the state capitals, northern blacks wrote letters to Republican newspapers and especially to the black press. Black-owned and -edited newspapers published in Philadelphia, Cincinnati, New York, Harrisburg, and San Francisco—as well as Douglass’s New National Era, which was published in the District of Columbia between 1870 and 1875 but circulated throughout the North—informed and shaped the views of many northern blacks on a broad range of issues. These newspapers circulated widely in the black communities because they were quite inexpensive and because northern blacks received little coverage even in the more sympathetic Republican papers. African Americans also sponsored parades, which attracted large numbers of participants and spectators. These parades drew attention to the suffrage issue and used celebrations of the Emancipation Proclamation, the British emancipation of slaves in the West Indies in 1834, and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment as occasions to call for the franchise.23 Taken together, these activities represent a multi-faceted assault on laws that denied most Northern blacks fundamental political rights. The suffrage activists viewed all of these tactics as integral and necessary components of the effort to shape public opinion and pressure the political parties to act.

From the movement’s inception, some activists, such as Langston, a lawyer, and J. Sella Martin, a New York minister who had assisted the freed people during the war, also contemplated turning to the courts for redress of their grievances on the suffrage issue. At the ninety-third anniversary celebration of the death of Crispus Attucks, a black man who died in the Boston Massacre in 1773, Langston expressed the hope that an African American would bring suit in a federal court to strike down state laws that denied black males the franchise. He was confident that U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase would rule in favor of such a suit. In early 1866, Martin presented a similar case for legal action. Because the Thirteenth Amendment had made African American males eligible to vote, he declared, the federal courts should lend their support to this worthy endeavor. He therefore urged his listeners to go to the polls and, if turned away, to take the matter all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.24

The New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and New York equal rights leagues soon acted on Langston’s and Martin’s recommendations. The New Jersey Equal Rights League developed plans in 1866 to offer their votes at several polling sites in the state and, if refused, to carry the issue into the courts. They hired lawyers, and Charles Sumner and other leading Radical Republicans offered to serve as counsel. A meeting in Newark then established the State Executive Committee, which was instructed to raise money and institute legal proceedings in the state and federal courts. Two of the parties then filed suit when registrars refused to enroll them as voters. That the Pennsylvania league’s executive board soon decided to cooperate with the New Jersey group in this endeavor indicates that, where federal action was deemed relevant and important, state leagues chose to combine forces for maximum effect. In 1866 the PSERL selected a five-man committee, authorized a circular soliciting contributions for the litigation, and decided to seek assistance from the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society as well as Congressman William D. Kelley and Thaddeus Stevens. Five members of the league were delegated to test the right of Pennsylvania blacks to vote, but a motion to raise $5,000 for the legal effort was rejected, probably because of budget constraints. For reasons that are not entirely clear—though limited funds appear to have been a decisive factor—neither the New Jersey nor the Pennsylvania initiative produced tangible results.25

Yet those who sought redress in the courts achieved one notable victory when a suit brought by an African American in Wisconsin led to a definitive ruling on the suffrage issue by the state’s supreme court. Blacks’ efforts to gain the vote had failed in 1849 and 1857. In 1865, black leaders in Milwaukee—probably associated with the Wisconsin Equal Rights League—called a mass meeting in which it was declared that the courage and sacrifice of African American soldiers during the war necessitated the enactment of black manhood suffrage. Following this meeting, two blacks attempted to vote in order to force the issue into the courts for a reconsideration of the 1849 referendum. Black manhood suffrage had been approved in that referendum, but such a small percentage of the electorate voted on the issue that the state decreed that the referendum had failed to meet the constitutional standard of majority approval. Following the 1865 vote, a Milwaukee man, whose request that his ward’s board of registry enroll him as an elector was rejected on the grounds of his skin color, filed suit in the County Circuit Court. When his suit was rejected, he appealed to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, which ruled that blacks had wrongly been denied the franchise since the 1849 referendum because a majority of voters casting ballots at the time had in fact supported the suffrage measure.26

Nevertheless, between 1865 and 1869 the victory in Wisconsin stood nearly alone in the northern black struggle to gain the franchise. Only in Iowa and Minnesota, where African Americans constituted a tiny percentage of the population, was black manhood suffrage enacted by a vote of the legislature or the electorate. Even in these states, success came only after long and contentious struggles. Notwithstanding a vigorous petition and lobbying campaign by African Americans in Minnesota, black manhood suffrage referenda were defeated in 1865 and 1867. A black suffrage provision was finally enacted in 1868—and then largely because, in order to make its passage more likely, the Republicans decided that the vote on whether to delete the word white from the state constitution should be placed on the presidential, not a separate, ballot. In Iowa, the process was especially cumbersome, for amendments to the state constitution required approval in two consecutive legislative sessions before submission to a popular vote. A black manhood suffrage provision was passed overwhelmingly in 1866 and 1867; then, with black Iowans continuing to apply pressure, it was finally enacted in 1868.27

In all other northern states—except for five of the New England states and for those New York blacks who owned property valued at $250 or more—where the issue of black manhood suffrage was either discussed within the Republican Party or was voted on by a legislature, a state constitutional convention, or the electorate, it was decisively rejected. In 1865, Connecticut voters defeated an attempt to remove the whites-only clause from the state constitution, while Republican leaders in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Michigan prevented the issue from coming to a popular vote. Then, in 1867, political rights for black males were denied in Ohio, Kansas, and Connecticut and, a year later, in Michigan and New York.28 Thus, three years after the Syracuse Convention, the drive for suffrage rights had stalled, and the prospects for progress at the state level appeared bleak. Black activists’ arguments had seemingly fallen on deaf ears, and their tactics had changed relatively few minds. Indeed, a powerful white backlash had routed their white allies in key northern states. These developments above all underscored the reality that African Americans could not count on the Republican Party to mobilize its supporters on behalf of an issue that stood at the very center of the equal rights agenda.

Complicated Relations with the Republican Party

Any explanation for the numerous setbacks suffered by northern blacks in their efforts to strike the word white from northern state constitutions must take into account the deep-seated and pervasive racism among whites. If anything, racial prejudice among northern whites may well have been intensified by the fear of black migration to the North following emancipation. Such prejudice was forthrightly acknowledged by E. L. Godkin, editor of the Nation, who wrote in 1865: “We do not fully and heartily believe that the Negro is a man. We could not act or reason as we do unless this were the case.” Democrats were especially inclined to appeal to voters’ racial prejudice for political gain. They repeatedly asserted that ignorant blacks would be duped and controlled by Republicans, that the United States was a white man’s republic in which only whites were citizens, and that political equality would inevitably lead to demands for social equality. Their blatant racism, which was evident in all parts of the North, was manifested clearly in the minority report presented by Democratic legislators on the Connecticut General Assembly’s Committee on Constitutional Amendments in 1865: “This race, so inferior in the highest qualities of manhood to our own cannot in our view be benefited by the right of suffrage.”29 Long the target of the Democrats’ pandering to racist sentiment, northern blacks had no illusions about converting the party faithful to the cause of black suffrage. They viewed Democrats as the enemy and generally attributed the party’s political success not to their stated principles but rather, as the Christian Recorder stated, to their conscious decision “to pander to the low tastes of the vilest part of the population.”30

Their relationship with the Republican Party was much more complicated. Most Radicals in the party felt strongly that African American males were fully entitled to the vote. Thus, blacks could generally count on them to present petitions and resolutions on behalf of suffrage rights to state legislatures and constitutional conventions and to vote for such proposals and urge the electorate to do so in referenda.31 A growing percentage—often a majority—of northern Republicans in fact came to support blacks in their quest for political rights.32

Yet leading Radicals were painfully aware that many Republicans thought differently. For example, in 1865 Thaddeus Stevens, a leading Radical in the House of Representatives, informed Charles Sumner, the most influential Radical in the Senate, that large numbers of Republicans, including some Radicals, considered black suffrage “heavy and premature.” Likewise, George W. Julian, an Indiana Radical who vigorously supported black manhood suffrage, accurately observed that party members everywhere were deeply divided on the issue. Many Republicans, according to Julian, feared that because the issue might help restore the Democrats to power, the party must wait until public opinion became more favorable before it committed itself.33

Some powerful Republicans, such as Governor Jacob Cox of Ohio, as well as the editor of the Indianapolis Journal, indeed pointedly warned that it would be disastrous for both the party and northern blacks if it embraced political rights for African Americans. Many more Republicans were profoundly ambivalent on the issue. While Republicans tended to embrace the concept of legal equality, they feared the political consequences of endorsing suffrage rights. In nearly all of the northern states from Connecticut to California where the issue came to a vote, it lost by a decisive margin, even where Republicans constituted a majority of the electorate or controlled both houses of the legislature.34

Coming out of the Civil War, northern blacks occupied a vulnerable position, as their destiny lay in the hands of Republicans, many of whom were ambivalent and unreliable allies. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether a viable alternative existed to African Americans’ decision to agitate for inclusion in the mainstream of American society. During the grim years of the 1850s, many African Americans had seriously considered emigration as a solution to their plight. But this course was not financially feasible for most blacks, and it ran the risk of further marginalizing them while doing virtually nothing to change white racial attitudes. In the late 1860s, as watershed events unleashed by the war seemed to be moving the nation inexorably toward a new era of equality and democracy, they were not prepared to turn their backs on what seemed a unique opportunity to realize their dream of full citizenship. Because they constituted a mere 2 percent of the northern population, they had no choice but to look to the Republican Party to enact suffrage and other rights.35

Yet northern blacks’ conviction that there was no viable alternative to urging Republicans to stand on principle in support of political equality provided little solace. In fact, they were often dismayed and angered by the party’s cautious and expedient course. William D. Forten expressed the profound sense of betrayal felt by many African Americans when he complained bitterly in 1865: “We have been deserted by those whom we faithfully supported, and insolently informed that this is a white man’s country, though it required the strong arms of over 200,000 black men to save it, and that the elective franchise is not now a practical question, and we must find homes in some Territory separate to ourselves, as white and black men cannot live together upon terms of equality.” In similar vein, a New York rights activist denounced the decision by many Connecticut Republicans to oppose a suffrage referendum in 1865 as “unreasonable, unjust, and the result of cruel prejudice.” These activists especially resented that, while most southern rebels had regained political rights and, by 1867, the freedmen were promised franchise rights, the vast majority of northern blacks still could neither vote nor hold office.36

Many old abolitionists, such as Theodore Tilton, Horace Greeley, and members of the Boston-based Impartial Suffrage League, actively worked for black manhood suffrage. But northern blacks were particularly disturbed by William Lloyd Garrison’s decision in 1865 not to agitate for suffrage rights. They regarded Garrison’s position as an indication of most northern whites’ inability or unwillingness to develop a genuine appreciation of the importance of black manhood suffrage. As Charles Lenox Remond, a New York activist, lamented: “It is utterly impossible for our white friends, however much they have tried, fully to understand the black man’s case in this nation.”37

Yet notwithstanding Remond’s and other blacks’ sense of alienation, they realized that there was no real alternative to working with the Republicans to achieve their objective. They could not imagine voting for the Democrats, and their occasional warning that continued Republican opposition to black suffrage would eventually destroy the party held out little promise of forcing the hand of the party’s leadership. Thus, the best they could hope for was that, under pressure from black and white proponents of suffrage, the party would come to its senses. “We vote that ticket,” the Christian Recorder stated with an air of resignation, “just as a hungry man would vote to have bread and a thirsty man, water.”38

Perhaps motivated by the desire to convince themselves and others in the movement that they must continue the struggle, no matter how difficult and prolonged it might be, a few African Americans expressed confidence that suffrage rights would soon become a reality. As the Social, Civic, and Statistical Association of the Colored People of Pennsylvania stated confidently in 1867, “This is well nigh a settled question with large numbers of intelligent white people”; meanwhile, the Pacific Appeal predicted that black suffrage would inevitably be enacted in all of the northern states.39 But whatever optimism they and their white allies managed to muster was shattered by the devastating defeats in the 1867 northern state elections. Voters in twenty states went to the polls that year, and the Republicans lost ground in nearly all of them, including Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York—all swing states with many electoral votes. Even worse for African Americans, in every state where a black suffrage amendment appeared on the ballot, it was decisively defeated. Once again, though a majority of Republicans supported these suffrage initiatives, enough party members either chose not to vote or joined the Democrats to ensure defeat.40

Taking the Fight to Washington

The convergence of circumstances—including the numerous setbacks experienced by black manhood suffrage advocates between 1865 and 1867, Republican control of both houses of Congress, and the realization that congressional legislation would perhaps bring suffrage rights sooner than attempts to change state constitutions—convinced northern blacks that they must also focus their attention on Washington. Even before the war ended, a few northern blacks had begun to call for an agent or a group of lobbyists to reside in the nation’s capital for the purpose of urging Congress to act on the suffrage issue and other matters. In a speech before the Indiana Conference of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in February 1865, John Jones, who headed the lobby that was seeking to convince the Illinois legislature to repeal the state’s Black Laws, recommended that blacks in each congressional district send a representative to Washington to press urgent claims for African Americans. In the same month, the PSERL urged the national organization to hire an agent and establish a newspaper in the nation’s capital; it then reiterated this plea at the NERL’s first annual meeting in September 1865. The Christian Recorder soon endorsed these recommendations, calling on blacks in every state to send between three and six influential men to Washington to lobby Congress.41

George Downing probably was most instrumental in recruiting a delegation of prominent African Americans from both North and South. At the Convention of the Colored People of New England, held in late 1865, he expressed the conviction that a national delegation would attract the attention of blacks and whites alike, generate grassroots support for the cause, strengthen the hand of friends in Congress, and transform the racial attitudes of many Congressmen. The convention ultimately pledged $10,000 to sustain the delegation.42

The delegation that assembled in Washington in January 1866 was composed of leading northern activists such as Downing, Douglass, Langston, and Jones as well as men from Maryland, the District of Columbia, South Carolina, and Mississippi. Many states were not represented. With the exception of Downing, who was selected by the Convention of the Colored People of New England, members of the delegation appear to have been chosen by the NERL’s officers. Yet these men reflected the national scope of the equal rights movement, for the North and the South were equally represented.43 Almost immediately after they assembled, the delegation encountered racial prejudice. Although well dressed and orderly, they were denied admission to the Senate gallery. Refusing to be segregated or excluded, they asked Charles Sumner to do what he could to change the Senate doorkeeper’s policy, saying that “our self respect is greater than our desire” to hear the Senate debates. Sumner’s intervention appears to have prevented any more such discrimination. The national delegation encountered much the same prejudice in their meeting with President Andrew Johnson. Before Johnson moved into the White House following Lincoln’s assassination, Langston and a committee of black leaders—probably members of the executive committee of the National Equal Rights League—met with the president. In his memoirs, written nearly thirty years later, Langston recalled that Johnson pledged to protect the rights of all citizens with “earnest and positive” action and to execute with vigor every law enacted on their behalf.44

In fact, Johnson resisted every attempt by congressional Republicans to extend legal rights to African Americans. Very early in his presidency, some black leaders naturally began to severely criticize his stance on Reconstruction. The Christian Recorder termed his policies “so utterly unsuccessful, as to call for the condemnation of many earnest men,” while the Equal Rights League of Michigan denounced his energetic efforts to restore the southern states to the Union as “unwise, unfaithful to the colored American who has been faithful and self-sacrificing.”45

It is not surprising that the black delegation’s meeting with Johnson in early February 1866 went very badly. Hoping to move Johnson toward endorsing suffrage rights for black men, they told him they respected him as president and as a friend but insisted that blacks be protected in their rights as citizens. Downing and Douglass added that, because African Americans were subject to laws enacted by the government, they should share in its privileges. After listening to members of the lobby, however, Johnson devoted at least forty-five minutes to what Douglass termed “a set speech”—more like a harangue. The president stated emphatically that he had been a friend of African Americans and therefore did not appreciate being challenged by those whose liberty had never been in peril. Above all, he would do nothing that might risk precipitating a race war, for poor southern whites had been injured by both slaveholders and slaves. Johnson proceeded to insist that the states, not the federal government, were empowered to determine the status of blacks and that if the freedmen were enfranchised, they would become pawns of the former slaveholders, thereby further undermining the interests of the southern yeoman class. He therefore saw no solution to the race problem except black migration from the South.46

Stunned by the president’s tirade, Douglass attempted to reply but was immediately cut off by Johnson, who then ordered the delegation to leave his office. To make matters worse, one of the president’s private secretaries reported to a friend that after the “darkey delegation” left, Johnson said: “Those d——d sons of b——s thought they had me in a trap. I know that d——d Douglass; he’s just like any nigger, and he would sooner cut a white man’s throat than not.”47

Following the meeting, Douglass met with his colleagues, who considered Johnson’s remarks “unsound and prejudicial to the highest interests of our race as well as the country at large.” They discussed the contents of a rejoinder, to be written by Douglass, which would be published in the Washington Chronicle, a Republican newspaper. In this response, Douglass emphatically denied that black suffrage would lead to a race war or that black voters would become pawns of the planter class. He also asserted that enmity between southern African Americans and yeomen whites had been the product of slavery; with emancipation a reality, these groups could have similar interests and vote accordingly. Even if the hostility between them continued, the former slaves would be protected by their political rights; conversely, to keep blacks powerless would only invite continued abuse and oppression. For Douglass and his colleagues, “Peace between the races is not to be secured by degrading one race and exalting another; by giving power to one race and withholding it from another; but by maintaining a state of equal justice between all classes.”48

Despite Johnson’s insulting behavior and his obvious disdain for African Americans, some northern blacks chose to view the White House meeting as a positive development. For example, the editor of the Christian Recorder wrote Downing: “I think the seed sown this year by the colored delegation will produce sooner or later an abundant harvest.” But, with good reason, most black activists held out no hope that Johnson would lend support to the cause. Thus, the national delegation chose to focus their lobbying efforts on congressional Republicans and other officials. In meetings over a period of several weeks in the winter of 1866, they were much more warmly received by these men, including Gen. O. O. Howard, who headed the Freedmen’s Bureau; U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase; Charles Sumner; Thaddeus Stevens; and members of the House Judiciary Committee.49

When William Nesbit and other officers of the PSERL arrived in Washington a few weeks after the national delegation’s disastrous meeting with President Johnson, they wisely chose to avoid the White House and met with Chase, Sumner, and other leading Republicans. The Pennsylvania delegation came to Washington especially to present a memorial to Congress urging passage of legislation granting political and civil rights to African Americans. After a few days in Washington, Nesbit declared the mission “eminently successful.” But even in the midst of this concerted lobbying effort by equal rights activists, personal jealousies resurfaced. Perhaps resentful that no officer of the PSERL had been invited to join the national delegation, Nesbit boasted that African Americans in the District of Columbia had informed him that the Pennsylvania delegation was “far more effective if less noisy and demonstrative than the delegation which preceded us.”50

Both the national and the Pennsylvania delegations, however, were in full agreement that fundamental legal and political rights for African Americans were imperative. In its memorial to Congress, the national lobby rejected any constitutional amendment that disfranchised a group of citizens on the grounds of race or color. Because nothing in the Constitution gave a state the authority to make race or color a disqualification for suffrage rights, their memorial declared, any such language would be “a real calamity.” The PSERL memorial, which was broader in scope, reiterated the standard argument that African Americans had long been faithful to their government, that black men were citizens who deserved full rights, that Congress must guarantee a republican form of government in every state, and that congressional action that upheld justice and right would obviate continued conflict between the races as well as the vengeance of God. Above all, the Pennsylvania league condemned the common Republican refrain that black suffrage was inexpedient. “Expediency,” it maintained, “is a pillar on which oppressors and tyrants always lean. It is the vanguard in the army of iniquitous measures and practices—it supports every political wrong, and is used as an argument against right.”51

Black suffrage proponents supplemented these memorials with a broad array of measures designed to both pressure and assist Republican members of Congress. They raised money for Republican committee members to circulate documents and speeches favorable to suffrage rights and met frequently with leading Radicals such as Sumner, Stevens, Kelley, and Julian.52 At times they chided their Radical allies. Douglass, for example, expressed his displeasure with Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts when he felt that Wilson was not sufficiently vocal in his support of political equality for black males. But much more often they lavished praise on their friends in Congress. Sumner was the principal recipient of their admiration and affection. Henry Highland Garnet expressed the sentiments of many African Americans when he wrote Sumner in 1866: “Yes, you have been the instrument in the hands of God, in removing a burden from my heart, and in enkindling most blessed hopes for the future of my people—your people—in my bosom.”53

Northern blacks also held numerous public meetings—including the second annual meeting of the National Equal Rights League, held in Washington in 1866—which generated addresses and resolutions that were intended to apply direct pressure on congressional Republicans.54 These efforts were supplemented by a vigorous petition campaign. Many of their petitions urged Congress to use the Constitution’s guarantee of a republican form of government to prohibit state legislation that discriminated on the basis of race or color. These petitions often appear to have been circulated and signed by men and women from a broad spectrum of the black community, including members of churches, fraternal clubs, local equal rights league auxiliaries, and those who attended public meetings.55

Notwithstanding their concerted efforts to convince Republican congressmen to enact black manhood suffrage, northern blacks achieved only limited success prior to 1867. Even though a growing number of Republicans in Congress had come to focus their attention on developing a plan of Reconstruction during the last year of the war, they nevertheless organized the Montana Territory and passed the Wade-Davis Bill with no provision for black suffrage. By 1866, the situation had improved in some respects. A large minority of Republican senators now supported impartial suffrage legislation for the freedmen that would outlaw discrimination based on race or color but not necessarily on other grounds, and most Republicans embraced civil rights for blacks. In that year, Republicans in Congress indeed inserted in the Civil Rights Act some of the arguments pressed by the black delegations—especially their demands that the states and territories be prohibited from denying citizens a number of fundamental rights and privileges and that the federal courts have exclusive jurisdiction over crimes committed under the provisions of the Act.56

African American rights activists, however, did not succeed in gaining either protection of their rights when moving from state to state or an explicit statement condemning the violation of rights on the grounds of race or color. More important, the Civil Rights Act of 1866 included no mention of black suffrage. Most congressional Republicans in fact still believed that federally mandated political rights for African American males was too radical and therefore too politically risky and that to embrace such a demand would not only endanger party unity but also violate the concept of states’ rights. Thus, Sumner’s proposal for a national law establishing voting rights for all citizens in the states and territories attracted only limited support in Congress.57

The Fourteenth Amendment—at least with respect to the suffrage issue—illustrates the limits of many Republicans’ willingness to alter the balance of power between the states and Washington in any dramatic way and of their commitment to federally mandated black manhood suffrage. In a memorial to Congress that the national delegation presented while the Senate was debating the House’s version of the amendment, they declared emphatically that the insertion of any wording into the U.S. Constitution that implicitly or explicitly gave the states authority to deny the right of suffrage on account of race or color would be regarded as “a real calamity.” But their earnest plea had little effect on many Republican congressmen. While the amendment established national responsibility for protecting civil rights, in its final form the compromise reached between moderate and Radical Republicans contained only a modest provision for allowing southern whites to continue denying blacks the franchise if they were willing to lose fifteen seats in the House of Representatives and equivalent votes in the electoral college. Moreover, in an effort to avoid antagonizing northern voters, the framers of the amendment included no mention of political rights for northern blacks.58 When the amendment finally passed both houses of Congress, northern blacks applauded its sweeping language regarding legal rights but were furious that it granted only indirect and conditional rights for the freedmen and failed even to mention suffrage rights for northern African American males. They had hoped that, after months of intense lobbying and petitioning designed to sway Republican legislators on this issue, the party would exhibit far more political courage and moral commitment. Consequently, they felt betrayed and abandoned by those upon whom they were depending for the vote. The delegates to the second annual meeting of the National Equal Rights League articulated this sense of outrage when they declared that “in so far as it permits our disfranchisement it is undemocratic, illegitimate, and unjust.”59

During the late 1860s, northern blacks would experience additional setbacks and bitter disappointments. But they would also be heartened by the inexorable movement by a growing number of Republicans toward support of black manhood suffrage. Throughout this struggle, with all of its emotional highs and lows, African Americans refused to abandon the cause. Indeed, 1867 would prove to be a momentous year for the suffrage campaign. Sweeping Republican victories in the 1866 elections had emboldened the Radical Republicans and a growing number of moderates to place the suffrage issue back on the party’s agenda. At the same time, black activists across the North deserve considerable credit for maintaining relentless pressure on Congress to enact suffrage rights in the Colorado and Nebraska territories and the District of Columbia. In the Colorado Territory, they went so far as to go over the heads of the intransigent territorial Republican leadership by directly petitioning Congress for suffrage rights.60

Due in part to such pressure, between December 1866 and February 1867 congressional Republicans enacted black manhood suffrage in the District of Columbia and required impartial suffrage as a condition for admitting Nebraska and Colorado to the Union. During the debates on these controversial matters, Sumner and other Radicals were able to convince a number of moderates in the party to endorse federally mandated black suffrage. This helped to pave the way for the enactment of the First Reconstruction Act in March 1867, which explicitly required the southern states to enfranchise their black male citizens in the process of being reorganized.61

Northern blacks were heartened by these auspicious developments. Following more than two years of disappointment and frustration in dealing with Republicans in the state legislatures and Congress, this legislation seemed to constitute a watershed in the struggle for suffrage rights. The Christian Recorder was especially optimistic about the future. Terming Congress’s actions a “noble stand in favor of human rights,” the editor confidently predicted that the idea of political equality would soon prevail in the northern states, for it was “marching on in gigantic strength and speed, and he who resists it must and will be crushed.”62

Yet the disastrous defeats of black suffrage referenda and Republican losses in crucial northern states in the 1867 elections once again reminded blacks that northern white opinion lagged far behind the party’s position—however tentative and ambivalent—on this contentious issue. Many moderate Republicans blamed the Radicals for this rout and turned to Ulysses S. Grant—who had opposed enfranchising the freedmen until southern white intransigence convinced him they needed the vote to protect their legal rights—as the party’s standard-bearer. At the same time, the party’s leadership devised an ingenious double standard for its 1868 national platform, which called for permitting the northern states to continue to control suffrage while providing for federally mandated suffrage in the South.63

Especially following Grant’s election, a growing number of congressional Republicans came to support a suffrage amendment to the Constitution. Nevada Senator William M. Stewart’s journey from unequivocal opposition to black suffrage to vigorous support for the amendment sheds light on the path taken by many Republicans. Late in the Civil War, Stewart had rejected political equality for blacks on the grounds that they were inferior and that the United States “was made for white men.” By 1866, however, his views on the issue had become more nuanced. While still unwilling to work for black suffrage, he was now opposed to turning the freed people over to their former oppressors and was willing to concede that “a loyal Negro has a better right to vote than a disloyal white man.” Convinced that black suffrage was the right thing to do and that the black vote would enable the Republican Party to remain the dominant force in American politics, Stewart wrote the Senate version of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1868.64

Most Republicans were motivated to pass and ratify the Fifteenth Amendment by this mix of idealism and pragmatism. Many of them, especially the Radicals, feared that repudiating black manhood suffrage would weaken the party’s claims as guardians of morality and increasingly realized that African Americans’ arguments regarding justice, democracy, and fairness were entirely valid. At the same time, the moderate majority within the party desired to put the suffrage issue behind them in order to deny the Democrats a useful wedge issue, hoped that resolution of the matter would permit them to move on to other pressing issues, and worried that, in the near future, the party might lose control of the House of Representatives and some of the state legislatures.65

The pressure that African Americans directed toward Republicans on the suffrage issue reached a peak of intensity when the National Convention of Colored Men met for several days in Washington in January 1869 in the midst of the congressional debate on the Fifteenth Amendment. Although the northern states were the most heavily represented among the 130 delegates and Northerners dominated the proceedings, it was the first truly national black convention in American history. A large number of men from several southern and border states were present and played important roles in the convention’s proceedings. The major business of the convention was shaped and guided by men who had stood at the very center of the equal rights movement for many years: Douglass, who served as its president; Downing, who chaired the Business Committee; and George B. Vashon, who wrote the convention’s address to the public.66

The principal organizational issue that surfaced at the convention was the fate of the National Equal Rights League. Because it had been nearly moribund following Langston’s resignation as president in 1868, two delegates presented separate resolutions calling for the creation of a new national organization. Convinced that the movement needed a national structure and effective national leadership, they recommended that a group called the National Equal Rights League of North America be headquartered in Washington. This organization would be headed by a committee consisting of one member from each state and territory and the District of Columbia; this committee could then appoint an executive committee of nine members. These resolutions were endorsed by the Business Committee, and the delegates approved the establishment of the National Executive Committee of Colored Persons, which was a far more geographically representative body than the old executive board of the National Equal Rights League.67

The delegates focused primarily on lobbying congressional Republicans and President-elect Grant. Langston headed the delegation that met with Grant, who expressed full support for the Fifteenth Amendment and pledged to do all that he could to ensure its passage. Another group of delegates, led by Downing, spoke at length with Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee, who assured them that they would vote in favor of the amendment.68 The assertive mood of the delegates was reflected in their memorial to Congress, in which they stated unequivocally that, as native-born Americans, as saviors of the nation, and as loyal supporters of the Republican Party “so long as it continued to battle for righteousness and justice,” they must receive the vote. This uncompromising tone was echoed a few months later by a member of a local auxiliary of the PSERL, who implored Jacob White and other league officials to act forcefully on behalf of the proposed amendment. “Give us a ‘historic, denunciative, recitative, argumentative,’ or in short infuse into it as some would say, the damnation spirit that is the life of colored preachers,” he wrote White. “Let the proud caucassian feel that we do not cringe . . . on the demands for justice.”69

One of the major concerns the delegates discussed with congressional Republicans in January 1869 was the language of the amendment. Since 1865 northern blacks had differed at times on whether to endorse impartial or universal manhood suffrage. Downing, Douglass, and Philip Bell, editor of the Elevator, among others, expressed support for impartial manhood suffrage, whereby black and white males would be required to meet the same voting qualifications, such as a literacy requirement. Bell, perhaps the most outspoken proponent of impartial manhood suffrage, asserted in 1865 that suffrage laws should exclude “the vicious and ignorant” of both races, though three years later he predicted that within ten years 95 percent of black men then under the age of thirty would have the vote.70 Indeed, Bell and many of his fellow equal rights activists celebrated the dominant middle-class values of laissez-faire individualism and self-help. The ideology of individual uplift, which had occupied a central place in antebellum black protest thought, served to complement their emphasis on racial integration and inclusion. Peter Anderson, editor of the Pacific Appeal, succinctly expressed this belief when he urged whites to “give us equality before the law, and the removal of proscriptive laws, so we can run the free and fair race with the white Americans.” Even Robert Hamilton, editor of the Weekly Anglo-African, who sometimes chided his colleagues for paying insufficient attention to the black masses, called for impartial manhood rather than universal manhood suffrage. In his study of antebellum black protest leaders, Patrick Rael has noted that the problem with this emphasis on individual merit was that many whites, who remained blind to the obstacles that hindered blacks’ efforts to improve their condition—and often endeavored to maintain these barriers—might well hold northern African American leaders to their word that full citizenship should be based upon the ability to succeed in a race-neutral environment.71

Yet, in their defense, those who espoused impartial manhood suffrage did so at a time when virtually no Republican leaders endorsed federally mandated political rights for black males. Thus, their endorsement of this position appears to have been motivated in part by practical considerations, such as the hope that, by emphasizing individual uplift, they would gain a respectful hearing by middle-class whites, who, after all, dominated the political system. More important, by the late 1860s these men had come to urge Congress to enact universal black manhood suffrage.

Northern blacks did not agree on how the Fifteenth Amendment should be worded. Some leaders, such as William Nesbit, president of the PSERL, believed that African Americans should not insist on specific language. “Simply that we ask for the matter,” he wrote Jacob White, “and let our friendly statesmen supply the form or wording of the Amendment.” Others insisted that the language be inclusive, though they did not agree on what that meant. Petitions sent to the House Judiciary Committee by professors and students at Lincoln University, a black college in Pennsylvania, and by the PSERL’s executive board, which Nesbit himself headed, called for an amendment that would secure to all citizens equal political rights without regard to class, creed, birth, race, or color; whereas black public meetings in Newark, New Jersey, and New York City went further in urging universal manhood suffrage that would, as stated during the latter meeting, guarantee the right to vote and to hold office to “all persons”—presumably males—both black and white.72

William D. Forten enunciated yet another variation on the amendment’s language. He concurred with those supporters of universal manhood suffrage who asserted that, unless convicted of a crime, every male citizen 21 years of age or older should have the right to vote in all elections. But Forten, whose father had been born a slave, strenuously objected to any reference to race, color, or previous condition in the amendment, not only because of its conditional language but also, perhaps above all, because it would forever stigmatize blacks in the minds of most white Americans. The wording of Representative William Boutwell’s proposed amendment, he angrily informed Sumner in early 1869, was “virtually a bill of attainder. We cannot have this thrust to endless days in our faces that we are a Race of Slaves. We want no reference to race or color, or what is worse to previous condition, engrafted on the Great National Charter to be handed down to the detriment whereby we may be Constitutionally branded with the misfortune of our fathers.” This, he charged, would be “invidious” and “antirepublican.” In the final analysis, Forten wanted no distinctions among American citizens to be inserted into the Constitution. “There must,” he insisted, “be no color known to Americans but the national one—no race but the human race—no condition either previous or present but loyalty, patriotism, and sanity.”73

The Question of Woman Suffrage

Northern blacks also debated whether women should be granted political rights. Many African American men believed that political concerns were part of the male domain; thus, they claimed male citizenship on the basis of an idealized manhood and what they considered “civilized” gender conventions. They were convinced that if black males were ever to gain the respect of whites, African American women must adhere to proper gender roles. However, northern black women had long played a pivotal role in black public life in the areas of moral reform, abolition, and civil rights; this continued throughout the Reconstruction era. While women generally deferred to men in the equal rights organizations, they, like their southern sisters following the war, insisted on the right to participate in the political culture, including speaking out on a broad range of issues that affected the black community.74

At times their determination to challenge the idea that politics was an exclusively male realm produced heated debate within the equal rights movement. An incident that occurred at a San Jose, California, meeting in 1865 illustrates the intensity of feeling on this issue. At this meeting the matter of women’s political standing arose during a discussion of the recent election of delegates to an upcoming black state equal rights convention. A number of men strenuously objected to the election of a local businessman as a delegate because women had voted for him. To end the dispute, the businessman withdrew, and a new slate of delegates was proposed. But the women at the meeting were supported by the chairman, who moved that women be allowed to vote, as they had before. This produced chaos, with several men leaving the room in protest. The chair then congratulated the audience on the departure of “these relics of a past age”; subsequently, the businessman was reelected unanimously. But the moment of women’s empowerment was brief, for within a week another meeting, which included large numbers of men, proceeded to declare the previous meeting null and void because women and children had participated in the election. They then resolved that women and children “are not entitled to the exercise of the elective franchise in matters pertaining to the body politic” and elected a new slate of delegates.75

The question of whether woman suffrage should be joined with the enfranchisement of black males was the subject of extensive debate among northern African Americans. It even divided families, such as the Purvises of Philadelphia. While Robert and Harriet Purvis strongly supported woman suffrage, their sons, Charles and Henry, as well as their son-in-law, William D. Forten, did not. In 1869, Robert went so far as to publicly chastise Charles for saying that the franchise for black men should take precedence over woman suffrage.76 But the debate on universal suffrage was in fact more complicated than such divisions suggest, for race and gender both brought together and separated black and white men and women. Douglass, Downing, and Catto were among the prominent northern black men who had long endorsed suffrage rights for all citizens, regardless of gender. Equally important, black women had played an important role in the cause for a number of years. In 1859, two African American women held prominent positions at the New England Convention of Colored Citizens, which called for universal suffrage. Then, in 1866, several black women—including Harriet Purvis, Sarah Remond (a feminist and abolitionist), Sojourner Truth (a noted orator and Underground Railroad activist), and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (a well-known poet and novelist)—joined other black and white men and women in establishing the American Equal Rights Association, which urged that the franchise be extended to all women. In the same year, a group of black men and women helped to organize the interracial Philadelphia Suffrage Association.77

Nevertheless, while Douglass, Downing, and other leading black male rights activists vigorously supported the AERA, they reflected the thinking of nearly all African American men that black manhood suffrage must take precedence over woman suffrage. Douglass believed that the claim of black men to the vote was more urgent than that of women because it represented a crucial step toward true black liberation. Although he conceded that suffrage rights for women were “a desirable matter,” he insisted that black manhood suffrage was “a question of life and death,” especially in the South.78

This argument sparked heated debate between white suffragists and northern black male activists during the mid- and late 1860s. A number of white suffragists, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, launched a campaign for woman suffrage in Kansas and other northern states, asserting that white women deserved the vote more than did black men, whom they described as degraded and oppressed, and thus incapable of exercising the franchise in a responsible manner. When George Downing asked Stanton at an AERA meeting whether she would oppose the enfranchisement of black males if women did not attain the vote, she rejected the prospect of uneducated and degraded black men making laws for her.79 Stanton and many other white feminists were understandably angry and frustrated that, once again, women’s interests would be subordinated to those of men. They were especially outraged by the decision by congressional Republicans, in drafting the Fourteenth Amendment, to extend equality before the law to all “male citizens”—the first time that the word male appeared in the U.S. Constitution. Yet Stanton’s racist attacks on black men were both insensitive and unjustified, and they deeply offended black women as well as many white woman suffragists.80

In this debate, northern black women often stood between most African American men and white feminists such as Anthony and Stanton. Sojourner Truth’s and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s positions on the suffrage issue illustrate the complex and nuanced views held by many black women. Truth and Harper were a study in contrasts: Truth was an uneducated, poor woman, while Harper was a polished writer who had been educated by an uncle. But even though they came to somewhat different conclusions regarding the Fifteenth Amendment, they held rather similar views on the need for universal suffrage.81

Truth opposed the Fifteenth Amendment because she feared that it would place more power in the hands of black men. Indeed, Truth was reported to have said at the 1867 AERA meeting that “If colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the woman, and it will be just as bad as it was before.” Yet she was deeply troubled by the fact that Anthony and Stanton focused on black men while seldom mentioning rights for black women. In addition, she agreed with Douglass and other black males that the hour belonged to blacks, while also favoring universal suffrage.82

Harper’s views on race and gender were even more nuanced. She vocally supported woman suffrage but also was disillusioned and angered by many white feminists’ attempts to speak for African Americans and especially by their racist remarks concerning black men. While Harper was no less aware of black women’s struggle for equal rights than was Truth, she believed that the greatest obstacle for black women was not black men but white racism. At the 1869 AERA convention she argued that if the Fifteenth Amendment were defeated, black women would be less, not more, secure.83

In siding with Douglass on all counts, Harper spoke for most northern black women, who realized that many white suffragists were not dependable allies but also feared that if blacks enjoyed no political rights, the women’s struggle was meaningless. Since white Americans could handle only one suffrage question at a time, Harper told the delegates to the 1869 AERA convention, she “would not have black women put a single straw in the way, if only the men of the race obtain what they wanted.” When the issue involved race, she added, she would “let the lesser question of sex go.”84

In the final analysis, none of the black manhood suffrage activists’ petitions and memorials to Congress mentioned woman suffrage, nor did congressional Republicans ever seriously consider attaching it to the Fifteenth Amendment. While several Radical senators proposed that suffrage rights should not be denied on the grounds of race, color, nativity, property, education, or creed, there was no mention of gender. Indeed, both houses of Congress ultimately accepted a narrow form of impartial suffrage that excluded most of these considerations because they concluded that this was what would pass.85

The Response to the Fifteenth Amendment

Fashioned largely by moderate Republicans, who wished to alter the original federal structure while retaining its essential nature, the Fifteenth Amendment’s negative phraseology essentially left the states in charge of determining the criteria for political rights, with the exception of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. Notwithstanding the conditional language in the amendment, which moderate Republicans insisted was necessary for it to be ratified by the states, the ratification process was difficult and prolonged. In several states, including California, Democratic-controlled legislatures rejected the amendment; although the Republicans eventually prevailed in Indiana, most Democratic legislators sought to block the vote by resigning their seats. Moreover, Democrats in New York rescinded an earlier Republican vote for ratification, but this move was rejected by Hamilton Fish, Grant’s secretary of state. Even in some heavily Republican states the opposition was fierce. Nevertheless, driven by party loyalty, the pressure of time, and support by Grant and Colfax, Republicans were able to achieve ratification in the required three-quarters of the states by early 1870.86

During the ratification process, some northern blacks cautioned against attaching too much importance to the franchise. The Elevator urged African Americans not to be carried away by “false ideas” that the Fifteenth Amendment would dramatically change their lives, while Benjamin T. Tanner, editor of the Christian Recorder, warned his readers that the amendment should be viewed “as a means and not an end.” Because the ballot alone could do nothing, the Christian Recorder’s editor wrote, African American men should not depend excessively on the vote.87 Once ratification was achieved, however, both of these newspapers found cause for jubilation and chose to view it as a momentous watershed in the lives of African Americans. Philip Bell now judged the Fifteenth Amendment to be “the glorious consummation of a series of liberal and progressive legislations.” The Christian Recorder’s editor was even more effusive in his response, terming ratification “the harbinger of Peace and prosperity—such peace and prosperity as has never rested upon the land.” Indeed, Charles B. Ray, a New York rights activist, went so far as to proclaim the amendment a life-transforming achievement for African American men. “They are not only brought a new political status, a new relationship to the government,” he exulted, “but into a new life; looking upon men and things through other mediums, with corresponding effects and feelings which are moral feelings and effects.” This, he predicted effusively, would produce “a broader humanity.”88

One might well ask why northern blacks responded so positively to a flawed amendment that did not explicitly confer suffrage rights on a single African American male. One possible explanation is the sense of relief many of them experienced following a difficult five-year struggle whose outcome had seemed quite uncertain during much of that time. Moreover, the importance of the franchise as a means of protecting the rights and advancing the interests of a group had long been taken for granted by both native-born and immigrant white males. African American men were also inclined—perhaps naively—to take the Republicans at their word that, with the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments now embedded in the Constitution, the federal government would act resolutely to protect the civil and political rights of all citizens. But to expect northern blacks in 1870 to have peered into the future and foreseen, with much clarity, the return to power of the Democrats in the southern states and the U.S. House of Representatives, the Republican retreat from Reconstruction, and the resurgence of Jim Crow, with its inventive and unjust measures designed to deny blacks the vote on grounds other than race, color, or previous condition of servitude, seems both unfair and presumptuous.

With ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, northern black activists had finally achieved what they considered the salient element of the equal rights agenda. Yet this had by no means been the sole focus of their agitation since the Syracuse Convention in 1864. Another issue to which they devoted enormous energy and attention during the Reconstruction era was segregation within—and, in many places, exclusion from—public schools across the North.