<x-flowed>   Despite the strong efforts of Andrew Johnson to get all of the governments of Presidential Reconstruction to make nice about slavery and accept the results of the War, the constitutional conventions of 1865 in South Carolina and in other states, according to Dan Carter's book "When the War Was Over," "horrified" northern observers with their racism.  The S.C. convention reluctantly voted to accept the reality of emancipation, but explicitly blamed it on the federal government, and delegates, reported a Boston journalist, dismissed African-Americans off the record as "animal[s] whose presence is endured but is in no way desirable."  Any action of that constitutional convention is suspect for its racial intent, just as, according to then-Justice Rehnquist in Hunter v. Underwood, any action of the 1901 Alabama Constitutional Convention was suspect.
  With regard to the possible racial intentions of the criminal disfranchising amendment adopted by S.C. in 1865, it must have been clear to the conventioneers that the Republicans who dominated the North were pretty unlikely to accept their radical neo-slavery positions, from the Black Codes to their reluctance to repudiate the Confederate debt.  By 1865, an increasing number of Republicans in the North were calling for racially impartial suffrage, and even if they feared to impose it in the North, Republicans had an overwhelming self-interest in insuring black voting in the South.  White upper-class South Carolinians, who had led secession in 1861 on the distant possibility that Lincoln would set slavery on the road to ultimate extinction, surely had much better reason in 1865 to fear that the hated black suffrage would be fastened on them much more swiftly  than they had had in 1861that slavery would soon be abolished.
  While it's true that other southern states disfranchised men for some crimes before 1865, it's also true that free people of color could vote in N.C. and TN before 1835.
  In any event, the argument that if a law was ever passed for a non-racial purpose, it can't be amended or administered in different circumstances for a racial one is obviously invalid.
  The S.C. constitutional provision of 1865 is no help to those who cling desperately to the view that felon disfranchisement has or has had no racial purpose or effect.
Morgan

Prof. of History and Social Science, Caltech
snail mail:  228-77 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125
phone 626-395-4080
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home page:  <http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~kousser/Kousser.html> (Newly Revised!)
to order Colorblind Injustice:  http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-388.html
          "Peace if possible, Justice at any rate" -- Wendell Phillips

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