Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 by Michael Perman

Author:Michael Perman [Perman, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: political science, Civil Rights, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, African American Studies
ISBN: 9780807825938
Google: RtuQQgAACAAJ
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2001-11-15T00:11:55.338532+00:00

Problems of the Convention

The vote in May 1900 on whether to call a convention and the election in May 1901 to choose delegates both indicated that the base of the movement to reform the state’s governmental and electoral system was quite narrow. In the referendum vote, 77,362 endorsed the call and 60,375 opposed it. This vote was only about half of the 264,000 votes polled in the national election later that year, and it was nearly 310,000 less than the number eligible to vote.36 “The vote cast was small,” acknowledged the Richmond Dispatch. Heavy rains on election day and the demands of tobacco planting at that time of year may have contributed to the low turnout, but still, the paper noted, “both sides were apathetic.”37 Certainly the Martin organization made no effort to get out the vote, and the corporations were unenthusiastic. But among Republicans and African Americans, there was less activity than might have been expected in view of the disfranchising threat to poor voters, black and white. Nevertheless, more counties opposed (52) than favored (48) a convention.38 This meant that the stuffed ballot boxes of the Tidewater and the Southside carried the election statewide, along with a large turnout in the cities, which generally supported a convention.39 Besides the heavy vote in the black belt, which was obviously fraudulent, the dishonesty of the proconvention forces was also evident in the form of the ballot itself. The assembly had approved Hal Flood’s proposal that only the words “For Convention” be printed on the ballot, forcing opponents to scratch it out—and only in the prescribed manner or their ballot would be thrown out. In a second desultory canvass to select delegates, held a year later in the midst of Montague’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for governor, 88 Democrats were returned and 12 Republicans, all but 2 of whom came from the mountain areas west of the Blue Ridge. The Democratic members, whose political experience and standing had, the Dispatch liked to think, deterred opponents from running against them, included a U.S. senator, six former congressmen, and one incumbent, Flood, along with a massive body of sixty-four lawyers, most of them past or present officeholders as judges or commonwealth attorneys.40

By the time the convention assembled, this body of politically experienced and professional men was aware that sentiment was “most crystallized,” as the Dispatch phrased it, on “negro suffrage,” “the paramount question” before them.41 Even a year earlier, the Democratic Party chair, J. Taylor Ellyson, had stated that “the greatest of all questions to be considered by the convention is that of negro suffrage.”42 Therefore, in his presidential speech at the start of the convention, John Goode spent most of his time outlining the suffrage provisions formulated and implemented by other southern states in preparation for Virginia’s deliberations on the issue.43 Not surprisingly, the suffrage committee was the most important committee to be formed. As evidence of its significance, Senator Daniel, the state’s best-known and most respected public figure, rejected the offer of the convention’s presidency in favor of chairing the suffrage committee.

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