After the Civil War, the U.S. government passed three Constitutional amendments in succession, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments. The 13th abolished slavery, the 14th gave African Americans equal protection under Federal law and the 15th gave African American men the right to vote.
The losing forces on the other side of the Civil War didn’t like any of these amendments, but they especially didn’t like the 15th Amendment. In this time frame of the late 1800s, African Americans were Republicans mainly because former President Abraham Lincoln was a republican who helped end slavery. Southern white democrats had to concoct ways to stop African American men from voting in the south. The democrats came up with the ideas of poll taxes (a fee to vote), literacy tests (a test you had to pass just to vote), and grandfather clauses (If your grandfather voted, you were also eligible to vote). They passed these laws to stop African American men from voting.
Even with these provisions that were harmful to the U.S. democracy, this still wasn’t enough for the state of Mississippi. In 1890, Mississippi drafted and passed a new state constitution that explicitly legalized literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African American voters from voting. The thing with these tests, were the African American men were giving ridiculously hard tests to pass and if there was one error or wrong answer, they failed the literacy tests. With poll taxes, the local city or government official would set the fee high so no African American could afford to pay it besides the very rich. With Grandfather clauses, all the voting eligible African American men, grandfathers were slaves and thus did not and could not vote.
Other states, like South Carolina and Oklahoma, passed similar state constitutions, which restricted African American men’s right to vote.
The reasons for these laws were two-fold. African Americans voted primarily republican. In Mississippi, the African American population comprised 58% of the total population in the state. If African Americans could freely vote, they would vote for republicans who were more progressive on issues of race and equality and the southern democrats could not have that happening! Whereas the democrats in the South wanted to continue to implement white supremacy and keep the African Americans out of government. The second reason was the democrats, which included a lot of ex-confederate soldiers and a lot of confederate sympathizers, viewed African Americans as subhuman or second-class citizens. They didn’t think African Americans had the intelligence to vote correctly, so they took the right from them.
With all of this impediment on constitutional freedoms going on in the south, the federal government had to do something. Representative Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts introduced a bill known as the Lodge bill to fix the issue. The bill provided for the U.S. House of Representatives to regulate elections. In particular, the bill would appoint federal supervisors who would attend elections, inspect registration lists, verify doubtful voter registration information, stop illegal aliens from voting and certify the vote count. The supervisors could even request United States Marshals to secure elections by force if necessary.
The bill passed the House of Representatives by just 6 votes! With such a narrow margin of passage, getting it passed in the Senate would be no simple task. The bill was filibustered in the Senate, then politics came into play. In the Senate, the Senators were mulling over three separate bills at the same time. The bills were the Elections Bill a.k.a. The Lodge Bill, The Sherman Silver Act and the McKinley Tariff Act.
In the McKinley Tariff Act, the bill would establish the highest tariff in U.S. history by raising rates of 49.5%. The Bill would also give the President greater authority to conduct foreign trade, by allowing him to hold trade conventions, negotiate reciprocity agreements and build a federal bureaucracy to deal with global trade.
The Sherman Silver Act called for silver to be included in federal coinage. The purpose behind the bill was to bring a higher price for silver, which would trigger inflation and bring higher farm produce prices and better terms for debtors. Farmers were increasingly leaving the republican party to join the upstart populist party, and republicans hoped this bill would stem the flow of defectors.
The problem for the republicans was they did not have the votes to pass all three bills. Northern industrial interests and northern republicans supported the McKinley Tariff Act. To get western republicans and western farmers to support the Tariff act, they made The Sherman Silver Act. The Lodge Bill, you ask? Well, at this time in U.S. history, most of the South was controlled by Democrats who hated the bill and didn’t want it passed. Though most of the republicans were sympathetic to the African American plight in the South, cash rules, so a compromise was made.
In the Compromise of 1890, democrats agreed to support the McKinley Tariff act and the Sherman Silver act if republicans dropped their support for the Lodge bill. The republicans, thinking economics, first agreed to the compromise.
Voter suppression of African Americans would only rise after the non-passage of the Lodge bill. It wasn’t until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that African Americans resumed the rights the government gave them in the 15th Amendment in the southern United States.
In 2020, the issues of a global pandemic, police brutality, and a President who induces people to hate or love him with no in-between, brought out a very large voter turnout for the 2020 presidential election. Democrats, to the surprise of many, were able to win traditionally red states like Georgia and Arizona. In Georgia, two democrats were also able to win the two U.S. Senate seats up for grabs in the state.
In response to this high voting turnout, especially among minority citizens, 18 U.S. states have enacted restrictive voting laws. The primary reason given for these laws is to stop voter fraud. There has been no conclusive evidence of mass voter fraud, but because our ex president claims it, it must be true. The hidden reason behind the law is to restrict or limit minority voter turnout so that 2020 turnout totals will never happen again.
The new voting restrictions passed will roll back vote by mail access, shorten the time voters have to apply for an absentee ballot and limit who can return another voters mailed ballot. Other laws impose new identification requirements and increase maintenance of the voter rolls. All in the attempt to nip that ghost voter fraud in the bud!
Congress has passed the For the People Act and The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which would protect voters by preventing these new discriminatory laws from being implemented. Surprise, surprise, the bills are being held up in the Senate.
This is sounding like deja vu from 1890, right? The party roles are reversed now but same intended outcome. One side (the Republicans) wants to restrict minority voting rights where the other side (the Democrats) want to do away with the restrictions. As in 1890, cash or economic interests still rule our government. Will the democrats trade away the voting rights for monetary pursuits? Or will they fix the wrongs of 1890 and redeem themselves by fighting and passing the voting rights act laws this time? If I were a betting man, I would say get ready for a repeat of an 1890 compromise, but I really hope I’m wrong.
