Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/355

Rh the election of a Democratic President would be immediately followed by the restoration of slavery. When month after month had passed after the dreaded event without any startling commotion of that kind, the apprehension subsided and some intelligent colored men conceived the idea that it would be the best policy for their race in the South to divide the colored vote between the two political parties and thus to win friends and protectors on both sides. At the same time a fresh breeze of industrial enterprise and development was blowing in the South, encouraging the hope that the growing up of new economic interests would bring forth new political alignments, and thus gradually loosen the so far rigid adherence of the Southern whites to one party organization. This would, of course, have facilitated the division of the negro vote. By such agencies many troubles in the internal condition of the South might have been allayed and the way to a final solution of the puzzling and dangerous problem prepared, had not the race-antipathy overshadowed almost all political thought among the Southern whites. With a majority of them—apparently a large majority—the desire not merely to control or reduce in strength but entirely to suppress the colored vote seemed to overrule every other consideration, and to this end, they finally resorted to the adoption of provisions in some of their State constitutions by which in various indirect ways the grant of the suffrage to the negro was to be made substantially inoperative, without in terms directly disfranchising the negro as such altogether. The colored people were thus effectively stripped of the political power by the exercise of which they had been expected to protect their own rights.

That the suppression of the negro franchise by direct or indirect means is in contravention of the spirit and intent of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution of