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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - V. Politics - 20. Underlying Factors - 4. The Southern Defense Ideology - 5. The Reconstruction Amendments
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Chapter 20. Underlying Factors 445
The former Negro slaves, therefore, started their new life as free
citizens with a solid mistrust against them, which was crystallized into an
elaborate political philosophy, powerful even in its partial disorganization.
The very idea of awarding Negroes suffrage was, to the average South-
erner, preposterous. The white South wanted- the Negroes to fail as freed-
men and saw in their failure a confirmation of their own wisdom and the
Northerners^ folly.
5. The Reconstruction Amendments
But the North was in power and Negro suffrage received constitutional
sanction. Thus Southern conservatism started out with the law against it.
After having lost out as rebels against the Union, the Southern conserva-
tives had now to be rebels in their own land. And as they did not have the
power to overthrow the fundamental laws of the Union, they had through
generations, and have today, to persist as transgressors of law and order.
The white Southerners’ attitudes toward the Reconstruction Amend-
ments deserve some comments. It seems probable, from the literature on
the Negro problem after the Civil War, that the abolition of slavery was
soon widely accepted as irrevocable. Even if, up to this day, the average
Southerner is inclined to paint the institution in somewhat brighter colors
than is a Northerner, the opinion early established itself that slavery was
incompatible with social and economic progress and, indeed, had been the
curse of the Old South. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments,
which granted the Negroes civil rights and suffrage, were not so readily
accepted by Southern opinion. They were looked upon as the supreme
foolishness of the North, and, worse still, as an expression of ill-will of
the Yankees toward the defeated South. The Negro franchise became the
symbol of the humiliation of the South.
Later, during the movement to legalize disfranchisement in the decades
around the turn of the century, proposals to have the federal Amendments
abolished popped up here and there.*^ Such proposals, however, were never
part of serious discussion. The obvious impossibility of getting the North-
ern states to agree was reason enough for that. Corporate business had
developed a vested interest in the Fourteenth Amendment. Its proviso
guaranteeing all ‘^persons” due process of law turned out to be much more
useful in defending corporate business against public interferences and
control than in securing political and other civic rights for the Negro.^’’
Apart from this particular interest, Northern sentiment could hardly be
expected to tolerate such a retreat in principle, even if it was prepared to
’
wink at flagrant circumvention in Southern practice. But it is probable that
soon after their passage the two Amendments, and the principle of civic
equality they expressed, had acquired a certain amount of idealistic attach-
ment even in the South.^®
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