Voting Rights in Post-Civil War America: The Struggle for Suffrage Through the Eyes of Harper’s Weekly
By Jeffrey V. Moy, North Jersey History and Genealogy Center
In declaring independence from Great Britain in 1776, the American colonies upended hundreds of years of reign by a sovereign whose authority was determined by heredity and sanctified through the church by God.
Devising a suitable substitute to this political system was, thus, a formidable task and one that required a great deal of argument and compromise.
The framers of the Constitution ultimately decided to grant the right to vote to free landholding white men over 21 years old, while leaving the details of the election process to the states unless Congress made specific laws otherwise.
In some cases this resulted in contradictory and unfair practices, many of which Harper’s Weekly documented as citizens fought for their right to vote.
By 1860, most states had extended the right to vote to non-property holders, with the exception of women, Native Americans, African Americans, and citizens under age 21. Following ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870, black males over 20 years old were enfranchised and state and congressional seats began to reflect the racial demographics of the South.
However, after Reconstruction, Southern states rushed to implement numerous barriers to voting, including poll taxes, literacy tests, and rules intended to limit voter registration (grandfather clauses exempted most white voters).
Those who attempted to circumvent voter restrictions were frequent targets from hooded terrorists. Mobs of Klansmen operated under the cover of darkness to drag men and women from their homes for systematic rape, torture, and murder; often leaving their bodies in the streets as a warning to other potential agitators in the community.
As disenfranchisement of African Americans became institutionalized, other legal protections eventually gave way and Jim Crow laws were enacted starting in 1890; at this point lynch mobs often felt empowered to brazenly execute individuals in broad daylight for offenses (both real and fabricated) for which white defendants would have received jail time or been found innocent at trial.
Although anti-Catholic sentiment was common during the colonial era, German and Irish Catholics were particularly the recipients of violence and the occasional attack on their homes and churches; the Native American Party (or “Know Nothing” Movement as they were sometimes referred) briefly rose to prominence in the mid-1850s on fears that the massive influence of so many foreigners would irreparably damage the country’s traditions of hard work, sobriety, liberal democracy, and individualism.
Long before the mass defection of conservative Southern Democrats in the 1960s after President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Amendment into law, the Radical Republicans of the 1860s sought to rebuild post-Civil War America through nationalistic Protestant progressivism and vehemently opposed any groups they viewed as challenging the unified fabric of the nation.
They were fierce advocates for the voting rights of African Americans, Native Americans, and aggressively denounced attacks on immigrants while resisting attempts to restrict immigration based on race. Radical Republicans particularly “hated the manipulations of the urban Democratic machines and they feared the power of the Catholic church – consequently, they despised the Irish.”[iii]
Savvy politicians capitalized on the passions of the Know Nothing Movement and made strides in establishing local voting restrictions and bans on non-Protestants from holding government jobs, until the issue of slavery during the 1856 presidential election fatally divided the party; many anti-slavery members joined the newly formed Republican party with pro-slavery members gravitating towards the Constitutional Unionist Party.
Ultimately, their goals of closing off immigration to non-Protestants and restricting naturalization to foreigners failed, even though aspects of the nativist group’s philosophy were adopted by the Ku Klux Klan after the Civil War.
At the time of its founding, the United States entered into a bold experiment of placing the means of political power directly in the hands of the governed, and Harper’s Weekly covered the struggle by succeeding generations to fight for liberty, self-determination, and the right to vote.
This is one in a series of articles offered by the North Jersey History and Genealogy Center to highlight its historic collection of Harper’s Weekly newspapers, as a means of exploring how Americans sought to resolve the contentious social, political, and economic problems of the late 19th century, even as they wondered at the technological achievements and new frontiers that greeted them each day.
For a behind the scenes look at our collections and additional information on New Jersey history, follow us on Twitter @NJHistoryCenter and on Tumblr at njhgc.tumblr.com.
MORE LOCAL HISTORY FROM THE LIBRARY
[i] Foner, Eric. A Short History of Reconstruction, 1863-1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1990, p. 145
[ii] Journal of the Thomas Nast Society, Vol 5, No 1, 1991, pg 2
[iii] Journal of the Thomas Nast Society, Vol 5, No 1, 1991, pg 2
[iv] Journal of the Thomas Nast Society, 11/25/1871, pg 9
