[reposted from bloodandoranges.com; Part I orig. Nov. 18, 2014, and Part II Nov. 19, 2015]
PART I:
In the 1888 presidential election, about 74% of eligible Florida voters (i.e., men 21 years and older) cast ballots.[1] Just four years later, that percentage plummeted to 33%.[2]
Why did Florida voter turnout shrink by more than half in four years – and remain that low, and even lower, for decades after?
Like other Southern states during the late nineteenth century, Florida experimented with legislation to suppress voting until its Democratic Party-controlled legislature finally concocted the perfect blend of laws that effectively eliminated black voters–and a heck of a lot of poor white voters too.
For Southern whites, Reconstruction was a nightmare of Republican state rule dominated by Northern carpetbaggers, Southern scalawags, and the occasional African American politician, all enabled by black voters enfranchised in late 1867.
After enduring eight intolerable years, conservative whites finally “redeemed” their states through a mix of terrorism, electoral intimidation, and the ballot box. They were determined never to lose control again. How to establish this advantage as permanent and unassailable was the dilemma.
The obvious tactic was to reserve voting for Democratic Party (i.e., conservative whites) loyalists. But achieving this goal was not so simple. Reconstruction insurgencies had demonstrated that intimidation and vote fraud were intermittently powerful but ultimately inefficient tools. Excessive violence risked congressional and executive branch interference to defend minority voting rights. Democratic leaders quickly turned to legislation as a tool to suppress black voting. The challenge in drafting laws to restrict voting rights was surviving constitutional challenges. Passage of the XIV and XV Amendments to the US Constitution had overturned laws that explicitly barred black voting–such as the “black codes” passed by Southerners immediately after the Civil War and similar restrictions in many Northern states.
Deciding who could vote was especially sensitive in a contested state like Florida. State elections from 1870 through 1876 were extremely close, with the Republican margin of victory in statewide contests declining from 53% of the vote in 1874 to 51% in 1870 and 1872, with 1876 effectively tied.
The small but consistent white Republican vote in Florida – probably 10% to 20% of Republicans during Reconstruction– provided the margin of victory in these elections. It is also certain that black voting rates in Florida were extremely high and may have approached 90% of eligible voters in certain counties.
Most accounts have attributed the Republican collapse in the mid-1870s to intra-Republican divisions, black disillusion about the state party’s white leadership, the toll of Regulator violence, and the small but increasing number of blacks voting the Democratic ticket.
These were all factors. But the most serious challenge was demographic: Florida’s white population majority grew from 51% in 1870 to 53% in 1880. Republicans’ failure to expand their white electorate beyond the small coalition of Southern unionists and carpetbaggers proved fatal.
In the 1874 election, Democrats regained partial control of the state assembly and two years later won back the statehouse and both chambers. The Republican drafted state constitution that placed sweeping powers of local appointment into the governor’s hands, now delivered the reins over county political machinery to the Democrats. This control was particularly important in the “black belt” counties (Jackson, Gadsden, Leon, Jefferson, Marion and Madison, as well as Alachua) which held a large percentage of the state’s black voters.
The road to complete suppression of the black vote was long and gradual. Certainly Republicans were far from pure. Republican county officials likely took advantage of poor slavery era recordkeeping to allow underage blacks to vote while also averting their eyes to repeat voting. Democrats were paying attention and later shamelessly insisted that they learned all about vote fraud from the Republicans.[3] But Democrats soon showed that they could both neutralize and far surpass Republican gamesmanship.
On taking office in January 1877 Democratic Governor Drew called for legislation purportedly intended to combat voting irregularities (i.e., voting fraud by blacks and Republicans) by handing local Democrat officials power to revise voter rolls and the discretion to remove voters who, in the commissioners’ view, did not meet the new law’s requirements.
The proposed law instructed each county’s commissioners (conveniently appointed by the Democratic governor) to review all registrations rolls by November 1877 and to continue to scrutinize such rolls annually. Counties were divided into multiple precincts and voters were required to register and vote only in the precinct where they resided (Laws of Florida, Ch. 3021 (No. 45) 1877). Attorney James McClellan – compiler of Florida’s code of law as well as a former Confederate army colonel and leader of Jackson County’s Regulators–chaired the state assembly’s judiciary committee. He remarked that his committee had “spent much time upon this bill, and hope and believe that it will answer the many demands for a salutary law upon this agitating and important subject,” and prevent “abuse of suffrage.”
The re-registration bill may have been patently reasonable (and conforming with contemporary practices), but alarmed Republican leaders recognized that, with Democrats in firm control of county electoral machinery, Republican (i.e,. black) voting would be greatly reduced. Black Republican legislators strenuously objected: Jefferson County senator Robert Meacham complained that the bill would “deprive a large number of people of voting” and was “unjust, unfair, unlawful;” Senator Frederick Hill of Gadsden County sarcastically proposed renaming the bill as “to provide for disenfranchising one-third of the legal voters.”
As historian Canter Brown Jr. has observed, the law “took away from rural blacks the protection afforded them by voting together at the county seat and mandated that they exercise their rights in potentially hostile areas away from the eyes of federal officials.” In short, the law gave Democratic county officials the latitude to manipulate voter rolls. (Brown, Florida’s Black Public Officials 1867-1924, p. 39). With Democrats firmly in control of state government, there was nothing Republicans could do. The bill passed easily and Gov. Drew signed Ch. 3021 into law on Feb. 27, 1877.
It is difficult to assess the impact of the re-registration law with certainty. State-wide, the re-registration law did not eliminate one-third of voters as feared by Hill, but Republican voting was impacted in important ways. In four of eight counties which had black majorities in 1870, Republican votes as a percentage of eligible voters stayed close to the same or slightly increased from 1874 to 1878. In three other black majority counties, Gadsden, Jefferson and Jackson, however, the impact on Republican voting was catastrophic. Measured as a percentage of eligible voters in 1874 and 1878, Republican votes dropped 33% in Gadsden, 46% in Jackson and by an astounding 58% in Jefferson.
Assuming voting rates in 1878 remained similar to 1874 (as they did in black majority counties Duval, Leon, Marion and Alachua), voting decline (i.e., vote suppression) in these three counties translated to a loss of 2,440 Republican votes. The previously contested 1st Florida congressional district became a safe Democratic seat. Even with its 60% black majority, Jackson County was permanently lost to Republicans. Gadsden’s two-thirds black majority was effectively neutralized.[4] Madison County, more than 60% black, found its 1878 vote disqualified by Democratic officials, eliminating the Republican advantage in the 2nd Congressional district.
Black and Republican voting remained resilient in a handful of counties with strong black majorities in 1878 (e.g., Leon, Marion, Alachua and Duval), but the Republican vote fell statewide from 39% to 35% of all eligible voters (i.e., 11% drop) from 1874. Republican votes may have slightly increased in absolute numbers, but they grew at half the rate of increase enjoyed by the Democrats. [5]
As intended, the registration law granted county Democratic officials wide latitude to manipulate voter rolls and proved effective in several contested black belt counties, but it did not prove decisive in ensuring white electoral control of the state. Democratic strategy soon evolved from controlling state government to dominating the elected offices in every county, especially those with black majorities. Control of state offices appeared firm, but there remained the outstanding vexation of stubborn black voting majorities in Leon, Jefferson, Marion, Madison, Alachua counties. Democratic Party leaders were not going to rely on uncertain population trends and leaky registration laws, or the tactic of simply rejecting a black majority county’s votes (i.e., Madison Co. in 1878). It was time for the Democrats to return to the legislative conference.
[1] All voter participation stats herein are calculated using the total of adult males indicated in the US Federal Census at the Univ. of Virginia Census Browser. Voter numbers are actually slightly higher because I did not reduce the eligible numbers by non-citizens or others not eligible to vote. In 1880, fewer than 4% of the state’s population was foreign born and, presumably, a number of adult male immigrants had become citizens. I used straight-line averaging to calculate eligible voters in inter-census years.
[2] In 2012 about 63% of eligible Floridians voted in the presidential election (http://elections.gmu.edu/Turnout_2012G.html).
[3] Edward C. Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 1877-1893, p. 83.
[4] Because population numbers are not available for 1874 or 1878, I calculated straight line estimates of population and racial breakdowns using 1870 and 1880 census numbers. I’m not sophisticated enough to use regression analysis. I did not use 1876 voting results because those numbers were highly disputed by both parties.
[5] For 1878, I included my projection of Madison County votes based on the voting rates in 1874. Edward Williamson is very skeptical that large numbers of Jackson and Gadsden county blacks turned to the Democratic Party after 1874. Williamson points to the 1882 declaration by state’s attorney Daniel L. McKinnon that Jackson County Democratic leaders had boldly and audaciously violated election law. Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 83-84.
PART II:
In Part I, we discussed the re-registration law that Florida Democrats passed in 1877 immediately after taking full control of the state and the law’s impact of suppressing black voting in a handful of counties. White conservatives continued to face two significant challenges in their bid for total electoral domination of the state. Although the state’s demographics trended increasingly white, the narrow racial divide made white political control dependent on maintaining white electoral solidarity. Leadership was fully aware that their hysterical warnings about black-Republican voters bringing back the “outrages” of Reconstruction was an unstable platform on which to center a party. Still, pre-war Whigs and Democrats, who continued to hold their competing political and economic outlooks, suppressed their differences to form an unnatural alliance in the cause of white electoral domination. The fissures, however, were sure to resurface eventually. Should this uneasy, white Democratic coalition splinter, party leaders feared that unified black/Republican voters might still retake the state.
A second issue for Democratic leadership continued to be the status of whites in black majority counties. Ante-bellum leadership for both Whigs and Democrats tended to come from the wealthy planter class who resided in the agricultural counties with large pre-war slave populations. Although Republicans receded as an electoral threat for state offices after 1876, blacks continued to contest and win county-wide elections in Leon, Jefferson, Marion, Madison and Alachua counties well into the 1880s. Galling to Democrats, the second congressional district (north-east Florida) also continued to fall to Republicans as Congress approved a series of challenges to election results brought by white, Republican candidate Horatio Bisbee.
Faced with these threats to their complete political domination, Democrats looked toward a legislative solution to prevent any possibility of black political power: the poll tax. The ultimate regressive tax- in which every eligible voter was assessed the same amount, each year – poll taxes, also known as capitation taxes, were common in America and had often been proposed to support education. Mandating payment of a poll tax as a prerequisite to voting, however, was new to Florida. In theory, the poll tax was race neutral. It was assumed, however, that black males, who typically worked in a cash-strapped agricultural economy resting on liens and barter, would be disproportionately impacted. This awareness could be discerned in the lightly veiled insinuations of newspaper editors who promoted the poll tax as a means to “protect” black majority counties “from the dangers of ignorant voters who take no interest in public affairs.” [Pensacola Commercial, July 11, 1885]. Mandating that the poll tax needed to be paid for multiple years prior to the electoral year prevented Republican operatives from distributing poll tax payment money to voters on the eve of the election. The additional requirement of presenting a receipt as proof of payment targeted blacks who, presumably illiterate, might be assumed not to safeguard such paperwork.
Unlike the chaotic 1876 election, Florida Democrats, led by William D. Bloxham, triumphed easily four years later. In the ensuing 1881 legislative session, white Democrats, now safely in control of both houses, quickly passed laws prohibiting interracial cohabitation (Ch. 3282, No. 64) and “intermarriage of white persons with persons of color” (“colored” defined as 1/8 negro blood) (Ch. 3283, No. 65). In the same session, a resolution to amend the state constitution to mandate payment of a $1 capitation tax in the year preceding an election as a prerequisite to voting passed both houses. The barrier to enacting the poll tax, however, remained Article XIV of the 1868 “Carpetbagger” constitution which provided voting rights as follows:
Section 1. Every male person of the age of twenty-one years and upwards, of whatever race, color, nationality, or previous condition, who shall, at the time of offering to vote, be a citizen of the United States, or who shall have declared his intention to become such in conformity to the laws of the United States, and who shall have resided and had his habitation, domicil, home, and place of permanent abode in Florida for one year, and in the county for six months, next preceding the election at which he shall offer to vote, shall in such county be deemed a qualified elector at all elections under this Constitution.
In addition, the 1868 constitution’s drafters inserted safeguards (Article XVII) making amendments difficult by requiring passage by successive legislatures before submittal to the voters for approval. A poll tax would have to wait until at least the 1886 election.
In the ensuing years, newspaper editors increasingly clamored for the poll tax. In 1880, Florida voters had rejected a referendum to hold a convention to revise the constitution but four years later the Democratic campaign plank called for a convention to discard the 1868 “carpetbagger” constitution and pass a poll tax. The coalition formed in 1884 by white “Independent” defectors and black Republicans appeared to vindicate Democratic leadership fears that the declining black population might exploit white divisions to take power. The Democrats rallied behind war-hero candidate General Edward A. Perry who defeated his renegade white challenger. Motivated whites also reversed the 1880 rejection by handily voting to approve a convention to revise the state constitution.
At the 1885 Constitutional convention, the poll tax became the subject of a complicated negotiation. Some whites recognized that the poll tax would inevitably impact poor white voters and fought against its passage. White laborers from Jacksonville submitted a petition to protest the poll tax. Other arguments ensued over details such as the amount of the tax and the number of years’ payments necessary. In a compromise that surprised all, the convention allowed for but refrained from imposing the poll tax in the revised constitution: the job of implementation was kicked down the road to the 1887 legislative session. A handful of black convention delegates agreed to the poll tax provision in the new constitution probably as a trade-off for stronger education guarantees and confidence that the legislature would continue to be too divided to pass a poll tax. (Brown, Florida’s Black Public Officials, p. 59).
Temporarily at least, the calculation of black delegates proved correct. The 1887 legislature again failed to unite on a single poll tax bill and the proposal fizzled. In the same session, however, the dominant Democrats passed another strict registration law which reduced black voting and also Florida’s first segregation law by mandating that railroads provide first-class railroad cars “for the separate and exclusive use of colored persons.”
The November 1888 election proved to be the last time for decades that Florida’s blacks voted in significant numbers. On May 27, 1889, Governor Francis Fleming signed a poll tax law requiring that all males 21 and over pay an annual capitation tax of $1 for the two years preceding the election as a prerequisite for voting (Ch. 3850 Sec. 1). The final clump of dirt tossed on the grave of black voting in Florida came in the same session when Jackson County’s William H. Milton Jr, grandson of Florida’s Confederate governor, introduced an “eight ballot box” measure (Ch. 3879, Sect. 25) which created a complicated voting scheme at polling stations with separate boxes for each office. Essentially a literacy test (that local white voting supervisors could easily help white voters maneuver), the new law targeted those black voters who might have accumulated the cash to pay the poll tax and present the receipts.
The impact of these two new laws on voting, particularly black voting, was catastrophic. Applying regression analysis, J. Morgan Kousser has calculated that black turnout declined from 87% in 1884 to 62% in 1888 to 11% in 1892 to 5% in 1896 [Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics, p. 102]. White voting also diminished (from 86% in 1888 to 59% in 1892) as state-wide turn out fell from 74% to 33% in one presidential election cycle. The 8 ballot box measure was abandoned in 1895 for the secret ballot but the damage had been inflicted. Conservative whites, who, beginning with Reconstruction era violence in Jackson County, had sought to eliminate voting rights granted blacks in 1867, finally achieved their long, sought goal. The poll tax would continue in Florida until 1937.
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