Black Reconstruction in America by Henry Louis Gates Jr

Author:Henry Louis Gates Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2013-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

At first, the planters thought to defeat Reconstruction by refusing to vote and thus making the whole experiment a failure at the very start. Many leading whites, small in total number but large in influence and in former wealth and power, were disfranchised, perhaps 200,000 in all.

On the other hand, the poor whites must have voted widely, especially when we note the large white vote in most of the states despite war, mortality, abstentions and disabilities. It is probable that in 1868 not only did Negroes vote freely, but more poor whites than ever before exercised the franchise. Democracy for the first time in at least a century succeeded oligarchy in the South. The voting of nearly three-fourths of a million Negroes was especially significant and represented a very large proportion of, perhaps, a million eligible black voters.

The elections which reconstructed the South under the Congressional plan were fair and honest elections, and probably never before were such democratic elections held in the South and never since such fair elections. Indeed, as a special champion of the South says: “It would be hard to deny that, so far as the ordinary civil administration was concerned, the rule of the generals was as just and efficient as it was far-reaching. Criticism and denunciation of their acts were bitter and continuous; but no very profound research in necessary in order to discover that the animus of these attacks was chiefly political.”28

As a result of the elections, constitutional conventions were decided on in all the Southern states and the following number of members of the Conventions elected:

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