Jack of Harts

The Democrats established a firm control of Texas politics after Reconstruction ended, and their local paramilitary white supremacy organizations continued to suppress the vote of the former slaves. But when the freedmen pushed a Republican to the federal House of Representatives in the 1890s, despite everything they did, the Democrats were done playing nice. They were the rightful rulers of Texas, not the Northern Carpetbaggers, not the so-called Southern Scalawags, and definitely not those Negroes who needed to be shown their place again. If assassinations and terror tactics did not do the job, then they would just have to change the laws so it would be illegal to vote. They added poll tax requirements, instituted White Primaries, and added literacy tests all while making certain that the segregated schools would not teach the skills needed to pass them. They banned Negroes from jury duty and law enforcement, which also banned them from carrying weapons of any kind, and turned them, once again, into second-class citizens not fit to show their faces in polite society.

Nearly 90% of the Texas Republican Party membership was freedmen in the 1870s. It was literally called the Negro Party because of this, though there was a small mixture of Northern Carpetbaggers and Southern Scalawags, what proper Southern gentlemen called those who had been more loyal to the Union than their own Confederacy. Nearly all respectable Southern white gentlemen belonged to the Democrat Party, who of course were only looking to protect the rights and privileges of the State they had helped mold. Unlike the Northerners and their lazy allies who just wanted to buy up the land of loyal locals and turn them out like beggars. The problem for the Republicans was that there were more whites living in Texas than blacks, and as voting rates approached 90% of all eligible voters, despite the violent voter suppression efforts going on, the Democrats simply had more votes to fall back on. They used their majority to enact segregated schools, poll taxes, laws to disallow the carrying of weapons, and other measures designed to make it harder for freedmen to live and vote as other people. And yet the freedmen continued to vote.

The Republicans were worried as 1870 approached. The Three Fifths Compromise of the Constitution limited how many Representatives the Southern States received from their slave population, but they had still managed to greatly influence national politics in the half century since the Democrats had split from the First Republican Party. The Third Republican Party feared that if the Democrats continued to seek ways to disenfranchise their freedmen, the 1870 census would simply give them what they had always wanted. Full representation accounting for all the people in their States, but with the votes controlled entirely by the former slave owners. The combined population of the Southern States would grant them domination of national politics should that happen. And Texas, Mississippi, and Virginia were about to reenter the Union and add their representatives to the mix. The Republicans had to stave off the disenfranchisement of the former slaves if they were going to have any chance of placing a cork in the Democrats’ political machine. So they passed the 15th Amendment that banned taking away anybody’s vote based on race, color, or their former status as slaves.