Congressman James Garfield's article on Voting Rights for Blacks
[The North American review. / Volume 128, Issue 268, March 1879]
...Between slavery and full citizenship there was no safe middle ground. To
strike the shackles from the negro's limbs, to declare by law that he should not
be bought or sold, scourged or branded at the will of his master, and then to
leave him with no means of defending his rights before the courts and juries of
the country--to arm him with no legal or political weapons of defense--would
have been an injustice hardly less cruel to him, and a
policy even more dangerous to the public peace, than slavery itself. To leave
the defense of all the rights of person and property of the manumitted [freed]
slave to those who had just voted unanimously against his freedom would have
been alike dishonorable and cruel. Indeed, this experiment was attempted soon
after the close of the war. While the seceding States were under military
control, the white people of the South were invited to aid in solving the
difficulties of the negro problem by electing their own legislatures and
establishing provisional governments. The result was that in 1865, 1866, and a
portion of 1867, their legislatures, notably those of Mississippi and Louisiana,
restricted the personal liberty of the negro, prohibited him from owning real
estate, and enacted vagrant and peonage laws, whereby negroes were sold at
auction for the payment of taxes or fines, and were virtually reduced to a
slavery as real as that which existed before the war.
Congress was, therefore, compelled to choose between a policy which would have made the negro the permanent ward of the nation, and by constant interference with the local laws of the States would protect his personal and property rights, or to place in his own hands the legal and political means of self--defense...
The ballot was given to the negro not so much to enable him to govern others as to prevent others from misgoverning him. Suffrage is the sword and shield of our law, the best armament that liberty offers to the citizen...
Until there is one acknowledged law of liberty for liberty for white and black men alike, it is idle to claim that the amendments of the Constitution are obeyed, either in spirit or letter, or that enfranchisement has had a fair trial...[On] every ground of private right, of public justice, and national safety, the negro ought to have been enfranchised. For the same reasons, strengthened and confirmed by our experience, he ought not to be disfranchised. Reviewing the elements of the larger problem, I do not doubt that enfranchisement will, in the long run, greatly promote the intellectual, moral, and industrial welfare of the negro race in America; and, instead of imperiling the safety of our institutions, will remove from them the greatest danger which has ever threatened them.
.......... JAMES A. GARFIELD
Challenge Questions....
1) What is suffrage and why was it important for Southern Blacks?
2) What does Garfield mean by "Between slavery and full citizenship there was no safe middle ground."??
If you are a Fuchs Mizrachi School student, e-mail me your answers!
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