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107 Chapter Five Voice of Equality I will never bind my hand so as not to vote for the proper man. I ask you to stand fast in the liberty by which the Republican Party has made you free, and don’t throw it away by any foolish pledges. Peter Clark, July 1873 On the evening of April 11, 1870, Cincinnati’s African American community convened at Zion Baptist Church to discuss the upcoming local election the following Monday. The Fifteenth Amendment, which granted suffrage to African American men, had been ratified on February 3 of that year. Eager to exercise these new rights for the first time in history, these new voters and their families met before elections to outline the issues, debate the positions, endorse candidates, and advise one another on how to mark their ballots. According to one eyewitness, Zion was nearly filled to capacity with all classes of African Americans from “the nearly white persons, who have long been voters” to those who had only been recently emancipated from bondage in the South.Although the newly acquired right to vote was limited to African American men, this did not stop “scores” of African American women from attending the meeting.1 In many political meetings following Emancipation, women voiced their positions, helped define party loyalties, and weighed in about the way their male relatives would vote. Cincinnati’s African American men did not see voting as their sole prerogative; each of their votes would benefit the collective whole.2 Several people spoke that evening, including J. H. Perkins, William Parham, and Peter H. Clark. When he took the podium, Clark remarked that he had been present when the Republican Party was organized and had joined the party because of its antislavery position. He boasted that he had voted Republican in every election since 1856. As a free African American of mixed ancestry, Clark had been voting long before many of his peers, which placed him among the small percentage of those who 108 America’s First Black Socialist voted before the Fifteenth Amendment. He exercised that right in Cincinnati , where mulattoes and African Americans with lighter complexions had been allowed to vote for decades. Although he had long been Republican, Clark’s speech at the suffrage meeting suggests he was neither a partisan nor blindly loyal. He made it clear that he believed in the “reserved or unreserved right of every Republican citizen” to vote as he pleased. Yet, he did not think newly enfranchised African Americans in Cincinnati were quite ready for that. Calling for black nationalist politics, Clark advised that they should vote for the Republican Party as a racial voting bloc until they fully understood Cincinnati ’s ward politics: he added, the “safe, straightforward rule for every colored man . . . [would be to] go and vote the clean Republican ticket.”3 African Americans had had an interesting history with the Republican Party before 1872. When the party was organized in 1854, it generally did not appeal to free African Americans—largely because it took a comparatively lukewarm position on abolition. The Republican Party, primarily concerned with preventing the extension of slavery into the western territories , took no stand on the abolition of slavery where it already existed. The young party, desperate for voters, tried to woo black voters, but most of them remained reluctant to join a party that failed to condemn slavery wherever it existed. Quick to point out such limitations, Frederick Douglass editorialized that the party just did not “go far enough in the right direction ,” and urged it to take a firmer stand and not to make any concessions to the Slave Power.4 With the decline of the Liberty and Radical Abolitionist Parties by the mid-1850s, the political options for African Americans and abolitionists shrank. The Republican Party—even with its comparatively weaker antislavery position—became the next best option. According to one scholar, the Republican Party was “more of a negative choice than a positive one, stimulated not so much by Republican party appeal and action, as by Democratic accusations and weakness in the antislavery parties.”5 African Americans’ initial ambivalence about the party gave way to increasing support over time. By 1858, African American voters enthusiastically threw their support behind the party and its candidates, forming Republican clubs, campaigning for candidates, writing favorable editorials , and endorsing the party at conventions. The nomination of Abraham Lincoln further cemented that antislavery marriage: by 1860, African Americans voted nearly solidly with...

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