Beyond Redemption: Texas Democrats after Reconstruction

3. The Ballot Box and the Jury Box: Redeemers and the Privileges of Citizenship

3 The Ballot Box and the Jury Box Redeemers and the Privileges of Citizenship The integrity of the State is only compatible with perfect local independence, and this is only possible, under existing Federal codes, when the privilege of suffrage, in these districts, is restricted to tax-paying intelligence. austin฀daily฀democratic฀statesman,฀ february฀27,฀1876 A s the Democratic Statesman suggests, it need not have been so difficult for texas Redeemers to reconcile their principle of local self-government with their interest in extending party authority in places where a majority or large minority of adult males sided with the opposition. should a sufficient number of the politically unreliable be eliminated from the electorate, “majority” rule might safely prevail. no issue more than voting rights shows the imprint of texas’complicated social history upon Redemption. in their debates over disfranchisement in the mid-1870s,texas democrats sought to solve a southern problem,negotiated a complex ethnic politics without parallel elsewhere in the south,partook of a national anxiety about the implications of universal manhood suffrage in an era of growing wage work, and addressed the distinct political concerns of the state’s burgeoning towns and cities. if the heyday of southern disfranchisement came only after1888,influential texas democrats had clearly been possessed of the ambition to “purify” the electorate from the dawn of Redemption and had made a concerted effort toward that end at the state’s 1875 constitutional convention.1 By the standards 62฀ beyond฀redemption of the era, texas’ Reconstruction constitution had defined the electorate broadly. it conferred the franchise upon all adult male citizens twenty-one or older, provided they were sane and law abiding.2 Following their party’s capture of the legislature in 1872,prominent democrats attempted to narrow that constitutional standard.John ireland,whose home county of Guadalupe continued to sport an active Republican constituency, introduced measures in 1873 and 1874 intended to exclude from the franchise those who had not paid a poll tax. the abortive constitution drafted by legislative committee in 1874 allowed the legislature to mandate payment of a poll tax as a prerequisite for voting.3 the chief objects of the proposed suffrage qualifications are easily discerned . in seeking appointive officeholding and at-large representation, democrats from black-majority regions had made no secret of their dismay over“negro rule.”the Galveston Daily News probably spoke for many in declaring black suffrage a“preposterous experiment”and a“monstrous peril.” shortly after taking office Governor coke made public note of “forty thousand unenlightened black voters, natural followers, in their simplicity and ignorance, of the unscrupulous trickster and demagogue, in some portions of texas largely outnumbering the whites, and having equal privileges with them at the ballot box.”4 A poll tax would effectively limit that power, black texans being far more likely than whites to be impoverished sharecroppers and laborers.5 Advocates of suffrage restriction,however,often identified their targets not as African Americans per se but as the“irresponsible”or the“non-taxpaying rabble.”6 Given the watchful eye many northern Republicans continued to cast upon the south, it made sense for democrats to pay rhetorical obeisance to the FifteenthAmendment and not agitate too nakedly for racial disfranchisement .But this race-neutral language had also surely been encouraged by the nature of their party’s critique of the state’s Reconstruction regime. Given the relatively small number of black-majority counties, the rapid growth of the white population outside those counties, the meager proportions of African Americans to whites through much of the state, and the absence of statewide black officeholders,the rhetoric of“negro rule”could not have been, for much of the democratic constituency,a particularly germane critique of local conditions.While by no means swearing off racist harangues (or in some cases racial violence),Redeemers had often given primacy to fiscal arguments against Reconstruction,stressing the era’s sharply higher taxes—allegedly the work of politicians elected by and answering to those whose propertylessness left them exempt from the ad valorem levies that funded much of state and local government.With this critique of Republican“misgovernment,”it stood to reason that democrats, in proposing to eliminate Reconstruction’s local vestiges, emphasized the trimming of the power of the poor to impose taxes upon the propertied and debt upon the public.many may well have equated exclusion of nontaxpayers with racial disfranchisement. democrats tended to...