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1312 An American Dilemma
cavaliers of shackles and handcuffs will not degrade themselves by holding private
converse with those who have neither dimes nor hereditary rights in human flesh.”®
“It is expected that the stupid and sequacious masses, the white victims of slavery, will
believe, and as a general thing, they do believe, whatever the slaveholders tell them ; and
thus it is that they are cajoled into the notion that they arc the freest, happiest and
most intelligent people in the world, and are taught to look with prejudice and disap-
probation upon every new principle or progressive movement. Thus it is that the South,
woefully inert and inventionlcss, has lagged behind the North, and is now weltering
in the cesspool of ignorance and degradation.”**
24 most tangible reform that he [Tillman] could suggest was that the Fifteenth
—^and sometimes the Fourteenth—^Amendment be repealed . . . [but] ... he did not
arouse [Northern] public opinion to eflFect the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment.”®
25 “Less than 5 per cent of all cases involving the Fourteenth Amendment have
dealt with Negro rights and most of those have been lost.”**
“Since 1868 some 575 cases involving the 14th amendment have come before the
supreme court for adjudication. Only 27, or less than 5% of these have dealt with the
negro. By far the greater portion of the litigation under this act has been concerned
with the federal regulation of industrial combinations. Organized capital rather than
the negro race has invoked the protection of the 14th amendment against state inter-
ference. Of the 27 cases concerned with the negro, 20 were decided adversely to the
race for whose benefit the act was framed. The six decisions favouring federal inter-
vention in modified forms are concerned for the most part with the refusal to admit
negroes to jury service in the state courts.”®
For example, two leading Southern Restoration statesmen, L. Q. C. Lamar and
Wade Hampton, in a symposium in 1879, stood by the post-war Amendments. In
presenting his opinion, Lamar first states the two propositions for the symposium:
“i. That the disfranchisement of the negro is a political impossibility under any
circumstances short of revolution.
“2. That the ballot in the hands of the negro, however its exercise may have been
embarrassed and diminished by what he considers, erroneously, a general southern
policy, has been to that race a means of defense and an element of progress,
“I agree to both propositions. In all my experience of southern opinion I know no
southern man of influence or consideration who believes that the disfranchisement of
the negro on account of race, color, or former condition of servitude is a political
possibility. I am not now discussing the propriety or wisdom of universal suffrage, or
whether, in the interests of wise, safe, and orderly government, all suffrage ought not
to be qualified. What 1 mean to say is that universal suffrage being given as the condition
of our political life, the negro once made a citizen can not be placed under any other
condition. And in this connection it may surprise some of the readers of this discussion
• lbid,y pp. 43-44.
pp. 44-45.
* Butler Simkins, “Ben Tillman’s View of the Negro,” in The Journal of Southern History
(May, 1937), pp. 1 70-1 73. See also Paul Lewinson, Race, Class and Party (193a), p. 84.
footnote.
® Charles S. Johnson, T/te Negro in American Civilization (1930), p, 337.
•John Moffat Mecklin, Democracy and Race Friction (1914), pp. 231-232.
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