Fragile Democracy

The Struggle over Race and Voting Rights in North Carolina

James L. Leloudis,Robert R. Korstad

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469660400
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

America is at war with itself over the right to vote, or, more precisely, over the question of who gets to exercise that right and under what circumstances. Conservatives speak in ominous tones of voter fraud so widespread that it threatens public trust in elected government. Progressives counter that fraud is rare and that calls for reforms such as voter ID are part of a campaign to shrink the electorate and exclude some citizens from the political life of the nation. North Carolina is a battleground for this debate, and its history can help us understand why--a century and a half after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment--we remain a nation divided over the right to vote. In Fragile Democracy, James L. Leloudis and Robert R. Korstad tell the story of race and voting rights, from the end of the Civil War until the present day. They show that battles over the franchise have played out through cycles of emancipatory politics and conservative retrenchment. When race has been used as an instrument of exclusion from political life, the result has been a society in which vast numbers of Americans are denied the elements of meaningful freedom: a good job, a good education, good health, and a good home. That history points to the need for a bold new vision of what democracy looks like.

Chapter 1 Race and Democracy in the Long Era of Reconstruction

We usually think of Reconstruction as the period between the end of the Civil War and the end of military occupation of the South in 1877. But that periodization is misleading, particularly in the case of North Carolina. It obscures continuities in a protracted struggle for racial equality and political democracy that spanned more than three decades, from ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and the abolition of slavery in 1865 to black disenfranchisement and the reestablishment of white rule at the end of the nineteenth century. During this long era of Reconstruction, freedmen and a disaffected white minority forged political alliances on the basis of common economic interests and shared understandings of the rights of citizenship. In the late 1860s and again in the late 1890s, they used the ballot box to win control of both the General Assembly and the governor's office. Once in power, they reorganized state and local government according to democratic principles, liberalized election law, and expanded public investment in the welfare of fellow citizens. Together these reformers sought to build up a new order from the ruins of a society that for the better part of two centuries had been firmly anchored in the institution of racial slavery.

That project was fraught from the outset. Black North Carolinians had good reason to distrust most whites, who, if they had not owned slaves, almost certainly had aspired to do so. And for whites, who were long accustomed to equating freedom with skin color, few things posed a greater psychological threat than an association with former slaves and their descendants. Under these circumstances, it is all the more remarkable that interracial politics emerged so quickly after the Civil War and with such vibrant force. But the issues at stake made a compelling case for solidarity: equal protection of the laws and the right to live without fear, a fair return on one's labor, access to education and to adequate food and housing, and an effective voice in electing representative government. All of this, of course, required free and fair access to the ballot box. The North Carolinians who fought for that right aimed to replace a white man's republic with what they called a “cooperative commonwealth,” in which an injury to one was understood to be an injury to all.

War and Its Aftermath

The story of North Carolina's long reconstruction begins on the eve of the Civil War, when slaveholders ruled through a government that was more oligarchic than democratic. Eighty-five percent of lawmakers in the General Assembly were slave owners, a higher figure than in any other southern state. North Carolina's constitution granted these men their hold on power. Seats in the state senate were apportioned among fifty districts defined by the value of the taxes paid by their residents. In the state house of commons (later renamed the house of representatives), apportionment was governed by the “federal ratio,” which counted slaves as three-fifths of a person. This structuring of the legislature advantaged the wealthy, slaveholding eastern section of the state. Additionally, only white men who owned one hundred or more acres of land could run for a seat in the lower chamber. Those who stood for election to the state senate were required to own at least three hundred acres, and a freehold valued at $2,000 or more was the qualifying standard for gubernatorial candidates. Oligarchic principles also shaped local government. Voters elected only two county officials: a sheriff and a clerk of court. Authority over political matters rested in the hands of justices of the peace who were nominated by the house of commons and commissioned for life terms by the governor.¹

Taken together, these constitutional provisions removed a large majority of middling and poor whites from governance of both the state and their local communities. Even so, North Carolina's antebellum oligarchs did not rule unchallenged. In the 1850s, they faced a political revolt by white farmers in the central Piedmont and mountain west who called for removal of property requirements for the right to vote for state senators and demanded an ad valorem tax on slaveholders’ human property—more than 330,000 black men, women, and children. The dissenters won the first contest by means of a popular referendum on free suffrage in 1856, and they prevailed in the second in 1861, when delegates to the state secession convention gave ground on taxation for fear that in war with the North ordinary whites “would not lift a finger to protect rich men's negroes.”²

Those Confederate leaders must surely have had in mind the excoriating words of Hinton R. Helper, a native of Davie County. In 1857, he had put men like them on notice with a treatise titled The Impending Crisis of the South. Helper argued that eastern slaveholders’ refusal to share political power and to invest their considerable wealth in the economic development of the central Piedmont and western backcountry served “to keep the poor whites, the constitutional majority, bowed down in the deepest depths of degradation.” Though opposed to black equality, he called for the abolition of slavery—the political and economic evil that lay “at the root of all the shame, poverty, ignorance, tyranny and imbecility of the South.” “Slavery must be thoroughly eradicated,” Helper declared. “Let this be done, and a glorious future will await us all.”³

The circumstances of war spread such sentiments among nonslaveholding whites. Most of North Carolina remained behind Confederate lines until the final surrender of southern forces, and for that reason the state bore a herculean share of hardship and deprivation. As resources grew scarce and conditions worsened for wives and children on the home front, North Carolina troops fled the battlefield, eventually deserting at a higher rate than soldiers from any other southern state. Many of those men received assistance from the Order of the Heroes of America, an underground network of Unionists and Quaker pacifists who were active in the Piedmont and western mountains. Food riots also broke out in North Carolina's largest towns, and in the 1864 gubernatorial election, William W. Holden, a self-made newspaper publisher, ran on a peace platform, arguing that a negotiated return to the Union offered North Carolina's only chance to “save human life” and “prevent the impoverishment and ruin of our people.” Holden lost to incumbent governor Zebulon B. Vance by 58,070 to 14,491 votes, but his candidacy exposed a deep rift between the state's wealthy rulers and a significant minority of whites who had “tired of the rich man's war & poor man's fight.”⁴

As the war ground on, Calvin H. Wiley, a distinguished educator and publicist, warned of the revolt that collapse of the Confederacy and the end of slavery would likely unleash. “The negroes [and] the meanest class of white people would constitute a majority,” he feared, and those “who were once socially & politically degraded” would make common cause and rise up in rebellion. Signs of impending disaster were all around. In the eastern part of the state, much of which fell to Union occupation early in the war, enslaved people liberated themselves and sought refuge behind federal lines. Some took up arms against the whites who claimed to own them. In many districts, poor whites also settled scores with their “betters” by stealing livestock and crops, pillaging homes, and burning barns. One wealthy slave owner who was the target of such reprisals reported “plundering or destroying with impunity in every direction.” Another was warned by landless white men that they intended to “destroy all the property and annihilate” the slaveholding class.⁵

After the Confederacy's collapse, some among North Carolina's economic and political elite despaired of the future. They most feared “being placed under our negroes—of being made the slaves of slaves.” In such a condition, they would be “deprived of property of all kinds” and made into “the most downtrodden and wretched people under the sun.” Others imagined that they might reclaim much of the power they wielded before the war. These men styled themselves “Conservatives” and won election to the legislature and the governor's office in late 1865. The next year, they campaigned successfully to defeat a new constitution that would have balanced political influence between the eastern and western regions of the state. Conservatives also reasserted control over black people's lives by passing legislation known informally as the Black Code. That law sought to keep blacks subjugated and to “fix their status permanently” by attaching to them the same “burthen and disabilities” imposed on free persons of color before the war. Under the Black Code, freedmen could not vote, carry weapons without a license, migrate into the state, return to the state after more than ninety days’ absence, or give testimony against a white person in a court of law, except in cases in which they were either plaintiff or defendant. The law also prohibited interracial marriage; made the crime of rape or attempted rape, when committed by a black man against a white woman, punishable by death; and gave sheriffs broad authority to prosecute freedmen for vagrancy, a crime punishable by hiring out to “service and labor” (in effect, a form of reenslavement).⁶

The Republican majority in the U.S. Congress watched these developments in North Carolina and similar defiance elsewhere in the South with deepening concern. Thaddeus Stevens, congressman from Pennsylvania, warned North Carolina Conservatives that they would “have no peace until a negro is free as a white man … and is treated as a white man!” To that end, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment to the federal Constitution in June 1866 and tendered it for ratification by the states. The amendment granted birthright citizenship to freedmen and struck directly at the Black Code by guaranteeing all citizens equal protection under the law and forbidding the states to deprive any citizen of life, liberty, or property without due process.⁷

Battle over a New Constitutional Order

In North Carolina, as in all other southern states except Tennessee, Conservative lawmakers stood firm. They refused to ratify an amendment that, in their view, turned “the slave master, and the master, slave.” Congress answered that defiance by asserting its authority once more, this time through passage of the Military Reconstruction Act of 1867. That legislation ordered the continued military occupation of the South, instructed army commanders to organize conventions that would rewrite the southern states’ constitutions, and granted all adult male citizens—“of whatever race, or color, or previous condition of servitude”—the one-time right to vote for convention delegates.⁸

This extension of a limited franchise to black men radically altered the political landscape in North Carolina. It was now possible that an alliance between freedmen and dissenting whites could constitute a political majority. With that end in view, opponents of Conservative rule gathered in Raleigh in March 1867 to establish a biracial state Republican Party. William Holden, the Confederate peace candidate who had served briefly as provisional governor after the South's surrender, stood at the party's head and directed efforts to build a statewide organization. He used networks established during the war by the Heroes of America and by the Union League, an auxiliary of the Republican Party that recruited freedmen and sympathetic whites under the banner of “Union, Liberty, and Equality.”⁹

When voters went to the polls to elect delegates to the constitutional convention, leaders of the old elite were stunned: Republicans won 107 of the convention's 120 seats. Of that majority, fifteen were black, including minister and educator James W. Hood, who had presided over the first political convention of blacks in North Carolina in late 1865. At that gathering, 117 delegates, most of them former slaves, met in Raleigh to petition white leaders for “adequate compensation for our labor … education for our children … [and abolition of] all the oppressive laws which make unjust discriminations on account of race or color.”¹⁰

During the winter of 1867–68, delegates to the constitutional convention crafted a document that defined a thoroughly democratic polity. The proposed constitution guaranteed universal male suffrage, removed all property qualifications for election to high state office, and at the county level put local government in the hands of elected commissioners rather than appointed justices of the peace. North Carolina would no longer be “a republic erected on race and property.” The constitution of 1868 also expanded the role of the state in advancing the welfare of its citizens by levying a capitation tax to fund education and “support of the poor,” mandating for the first time in North Carolina history a state system of free public schools, and establishing a board of public charities to make “beneficent provision for the poor, the unfortunate and orphan.” Black delegates to the convention knew that the success of these reforms would depend on safeguarding broad access to the franchise, and for that reason they backed the forceful defense of voting rights. The convention passed an ordinance to criminalize efforts to intimidate “any qualified elector of this State … by violence or bribery, or by threats of violence or injury to his person or property.”¹¹

In May 1868, voters ratified the constitution, elected William Holden governor, and gave the biracial Republican Party six of North Carolina's seven congressional seats and control of more than two-thirds of the seats in the state legislature. The scale of the Republicans’ victory reflected the fact that in North Carolina the percentage of whites who crossed the color line and made common cause with former bondsmen was larger than in any other southern state.¹²

This revolutionary moment was crafted in large part by a generation of black leaders who professed a radically inclusive vision for American democracy. In 1869, twenty of those men traveled to Washington, D.C., to attend the Colored National Labor Convention, where they joined nearly two hundred other delegates from across the South and throughout the nation. Three of the North Carolinians served in elected leadership positions, including James H. Harris, who occupied the president's chair. Harris had been born into slavery in Granville County in 1832 and later left the state as a free man to study at Oberlin College. He traveled to settlements of former slaves in Liberia and Sierra Leone, helped to raise the Twenty-Eighth Regiment of U.S. Colored Troops, returned to North Carolina as a missionary teacher after the Civil War, served in both the state senate and the state house of representatives, and became an influential figure in the national Republican Party. Over the course of five days, Harris led convention delegates in drafting a manifesto for a future built on interracial cooperation, labor solidarity, and equal rights for women. The document called for unions organized “without regard to color”; extended a “welcome hand to the free immigration of labor of all nationalities”; and implored the states to fund “free school system[s] that know no distinction … on account of race, color, sex, creed, or previous condition.” These things, the manifesto proclaimed, would make the “whole people of this land the wealthiest and happiest on the face of the globe.”¹³

Back in North Carolina, white Conservatives were determined to make race, not democracy, the “central question” in state politics. They described Republicans such as Harris and his col...