The Grandees of Government: The Origins and Persistence of Undemocratic Politics in Virginia

10. An Anglo -Saxon Electorate

10 22 AN ANGLO-SAxON ELECTORATE Carter Glass (1858–1946) (courtesy of the Library of Virginia) served in the General Assembly, in the House of Representatives, as secretary of the Treasury, and in the United States Senate. As a member of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1901–2 he played a leading role in the disfranchisement of the state’s African American men and also of a substantial portion of the state’s white men. Like most white Virginians of his time, Glass believed in the innate inferiority of African Americans, and he and most of the other members of the convention sought to restore control of Virginia politics and government to what they regarded as the best class of white men. If Wood Bouldin went into Isaac Edmondson’s barbershop in the town of Halifax, also known as Halifax Court House and as Houston, between the summer of 1901 and the summer of 1902, it is intriguing to speculate about the conversation that they might have had. They were almost the same age: Wood Bouldin was born in the adjacent county of Charlotte in 1838, and Isaac Edmondson was born in Halifax County about 1840. By 1901 they had lived as near neighbors in the same little town for more than twenty years, but they were different in many ways. Bouldin was white. He was a veteran of the Confederate army and the son of a man who had signed Virginia’s Ordinance of Secession in 1861 and served on the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. He was the long-serving commonwealth ’s attorney for Halifax County and for many years was a member of the state central committee of the Democratic Party.1 Edmondson, on the other hand, was black. He was born into slavery and after working as a farm laborer in the first years after emancipation established himself in the respectable profession of barber, for most of the time the only barber in the county seat. He also worked part time as a janitor in the courthouse, where Bouldin had his law office. For one two-year term, from 1869 to 1871, Edmondson was a member of the House of Delegates in the first sessions of the General Assembly of Virginia in which African Americans ever served.2 What did they talk about in 1901 or 1902 if Bouldin sat in Edmondson’s barber chair while the black man cut the hair or shaved the whiskers of the white man who was then serving in the state constitutional convention with ninety-nine other white men and debating methods to disfranchise and expel from public life as many as possible of the state’s black men? What might Wood Bouldin have said? What might Isaac Edmondson have said? What might Isaac Edmonson, in particular, have thought and not said? The white Democrat and the black Republican lived contemporary but not parallel lives. If they reflected on their political pasts at the barbershop or when they encountered each other in the courthouse, they would have realized that their lives had ups and downs at precisely opposite times. The abolition of slavery in the mid-1860s, the admission of black men into Virginia’s political world when Edmondson was elected to the General Assembly at the end of the 1860s, and the brief ascendancy of the Republican-Readjuster coalition early in the 1880s were times of excitement and opportunity for Edmondson and men like him and times of disappointment and uncertainty for Bouldin and many other white Virginia men. Conversely, the derailment of the Re- 256 the grandees of government publicans’ plans at the end of the brief Reconstruction of the 1860s and the overthrow of the Readjusters in the mid-1880s would have been times of fresh opportunity and optimism for Bouldin and of disappointment and disillusionment for Edmondson. The two men were entering their seventh decades when the twentieth century began and had lived more than half their lives since the abolition of slavery. Their adult lives spanned the arc between one system of racial domination that slavery and the black codes of the old South created and enforced and another system that the emerging racial segregation known as Jim Crow re-created and reenforced. Men like Isaac Edmondson watched, almost helplessly, as men like Wood Bouldin systematically chipped away at the democratic rights that freedmen had received and sought to exercise . For the Wood...