The Disfranchisement of the Negro

nt was adopted. The Negro was thereby given the right which his Southern guardians proudly refused him--the right of citizenship--but not the right which is alone the guarantee of the privileges of citizenship--the right to a voice in the government of which he was declared a citizen. The power of conferring suffrage limited or universal, was left as the special privilege of the South. But the South proceeded to nullify the Fourteenth Amendment as it had nullified the Thirteenth and sent her captains of rebellion to make the nation's laws.

Impelled by the motive of self preservation, by the sheer necessity of saving itself from those who would have destroyed it, and of saving to the freedmen the simple inherent right of self-ownership, the nation was forced to confer upon the Negro the right to vote by the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. This step it is now popular to characterize as a blunder or as an act of revenge designed to humiliate the South. If it was, then the preservation of the Union an