Making Race, Making Power: North Carolina's Road to Disfranchisement

1. The Structuring of Southern Voter Turnout

1 The Structuring of Southern Voter Turnout This chapter attempts to gauge the basic parameters of the franchise in the South1 by analyzing southern voter turnout between 1880,prior to most disfranchisement regulation,and 1912,after basic forms of disfranchisement had been implemented in every southern state. As I examine patterns of voting as turnout declined from nearly 65 percent to less than 30 percent, I will be looking for the trace of disfranchisement to set the broader context for indepth analyses of the actual struggles that brought about disfranchisement in North Carolina. Racial division is a key part of the story,but here racial division is analyzed within the context of a broader process of political restructuring.Battles over suffrage expansion and restriction provide an excellent vantage point from which to study the process by which patterns of voting participation are produced out of political conflict. Once set, these patterns are often very difficult to change and thus have long-term consequences.In the South,the structures erected during the 1890s lasted nearly seventy years, with enormous consequences for both the South and the nation. This chapter begins to account for the generation of these patterns through a dynamic analysis of their bases. The analysis looks at the political and socioeconomic determinants of voter turnout in the South for four elections across four decades. I test four propositions concerning voter turnout and find some support for all four. I use this analysis to develop a broader explanation for voter turnout based on the dynamic structuring of politics. 18 making race, making power Notes on U.S. and Southern Electoral History In general, the nineteenth century is notable for the progressive expansion of suffrage in the United States. By midcentury, all U.S. states had eliminated property qualifications for voting,and throughout the century American laws governing voting were among the least restrictive in the world. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1870, expanded suffrage even further by barring states from abridging the right to vote “on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” National Politics In spite of these reform efforts, the nineteenth century is marked by strong discontinuities.The CivilWar deconstructedAmerican politics.The conflicts leading up to the war destroyed one-half of a stable two-party system and generated a new party that had no organizational base south of the MasonDixon line while altering the sectional and demographic bases of the surviving party. Though characterized by sectional antagonism,strong ethnocultural cleavages , and struggles over whether and how to incorporate blacks into the political system, presidential elections of the postbellum era were highly competitive. Free male suffrage along with vigorous mobilization efforts by the two dominant parties energized and engaged a strongly partisan electorate and generated high levels of voter turnout. From 1876 to 1900 turnout averaged better than 75 percent in presidential elections. Even in the South, since known for low rates of political participation, voter turnout averaged 60 percent for this period.2 By the turn of the century, however, the majority of states had begun moving in the opposite direction, toward the restriction of suffrage through such measures as personal registration and residency requirements and, in the South, poll taxes and literacy tests. Coincident with these legal regulations were real declines in voter turnout, both nationally and within key regions , especially the Northeast and the South. While they disagree over whether the legal changes were themselves the cause of the decline, scholars broadly concur that this decline in suffrage was a crucial factor in the massive restructuring of American politics at the turn of the century.3 The South The social transformations that shook the South during this era were perhaps even more monumental than those in the rest of the nation,yet this has Structuring of Southern Voter Turnout 19 been obscured by the pervasive image of the “Solid South” from Reconstruction forward. True enough, by the time of the presidential election in 1880, the first following the official end of Reconstruction with the Compromise of 1877 and the withdrawal of federal troops, Democrats had captured the statehouses in all eleven of the former Confederate states. Democrats also captured the electoral votes in every state of the former Confederacy from 1880 through 1910, averaging better than 60 percent of the vote throughout the period. Nonetheless, the South was far less than “solid” prior...