A Liberal Republican Opposes Universal Suffrage

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS JR., The Protection of the Ballot in National Elections (1869)

Southerners like Frances Leigh were not the only ones who doubted the wisdom of granting former slaves the right to vote. Charles Francis Adams Jr., the grandson and great-grandson of presidents, penned an article in the 1869 issue of the Journal of Social Science advocating restrictions on voting rights, a timely issue as the Fifteenth Amendment was wending its way toward ratification in February 1870. Adams was sympathetic to the Republican Party’s liberal wing, a faction opposed to the continued federal presence in the South and to President Grant’s administration for its apparent corruption. Their ideal was government by the “best men,” which they hoped to achieve through civil service reforms and a more scientific approach to government administration. Restricting the vote to those with the education to understand its meaning, Adams assumed, ensured enlightened government.

If the study of social problems teaches any one lesson more distinctly than another, it is that political virtue and political corruption are never the peculiar property of any particular party in the State. Only the partisan believes that all virtue is to be found in one organization, and all vice in another. The observer soon discovers that an almost imperceptible line separates, in these respects, contemporary political organizations, and that the charges made against one faction existing in the State, with slight changes of form and detail, may, with equal justice, be made against every other. Fraud in one party begets fraud in another, and corruption begets corruption, if only under the plausible argument that the devil must be fought with the weapons of darkness.…

Government, through representation and suffrage, as at present developed into a system, is but one way, and a very imperfect and unsatisfactory one, of arriving at a given result. The object of every political system is to bring the loftiest development of moral and intellectual education which any given community affords to the direction of its affairs. Just at present it is the fashion to consider an extension of the suffrage, — a more elaborate and careful enumeration of noses as it were, — as the grand and effectual panacea for all political evils. This idea will certainly last out the present, and probably several succeeding generations. Without at all conceding that this system is the best that can, or, in process of time, will be devised, it is yet the system under which we and our children have perforce got to live, and the student of Social Science can devote himself to no better task than to the purifying and protecting of the system, however crude and unsatisfactory it at best may appear to him.…

An exciting and important national election has just been passed through, and the usual good fortune of the American people has presided over the result, in that it has not proved to be in result a disputed election. The popular verdict has been sufficiently decisive to cover any margin of fraud, on the one side or the other, and all parties concede that the new occupant will not be cheated into the Presidential Chair. This may not always be the case. The election was preceded by loud charges of wholesale fraud, made indiscriminately by each of the parties which divided the country, against the other, — the election day was marked by many scandalous incidents which well might have vitiated the results in important localities, and, finally, it has been succeeded by a general desire that something should be done, resulting in the usual unlimited suggestions of crude legislation. Two things seem likely to result from the agitation now dying away, — first, an extension of the suffrage, and, secondly, a renewed discussion of the long vexed question of the naturalization laws.

Both are important questions; in fact, without exaggeration, they might be spoken of as vital questions; and both are deserving of a calmer and more philosophical discussion, and of a decision more exempt from party exigencies, than they seem likely to receive. Yet it may possibly be that the immediate evil which presses upon the country does not lie in either of these directions; it may well be found more on the surface, a mere matter of detail or of defective organic law. The first question necessarily is, — what is the difficulty? That found, the remedy may not be far to seek. What is it that the popular instinct has been apprehensive of? What dangerous elements have developed, themselves, — what weak points in our system, which create this manifest uneasiness for the future, and the desire for change? It probably would be generally conceded that the real trouble has been that the mass of the people of all parties has been apprehensive that the purity of the ballot was not sufficiently protected; that somehow the election both could and would be carried by fraud; that the will of the people was to be corruptly set aside through some perversion of the forms of law. If this brief statement of the case is accepted as correct, it only remains to consider the manner in which, and the machinery through which the election was held, and the result arrived at, and then to suggest, if possible, some remedy for the evil experienced.…

Under the existing system … a premium is placed upon fraud. The violation of the ballot-box by one party, makes its violation by the other what is called, in the parlance of the day, a political necessity. This, indeed, is the saddest and most alarming feature of the whole system. The community not only becomes accustomed to political fraud, but it learns to excuse it as in some way a necessity. We are losing the moral sense, and censure failure alone. While the moral perceptions thus become blunted, the opportunity for fraud is more and more, in each successive election, localized and designated. The least astute politician knows just where votes are necessary and just where they are useless. The more astute know also just how many are wanted and how they are to be had, as well as where they are wanted. Fraud, — energetic, well-directed fraud, will probably soon decide every closely contested Presidential election, unless the system of Electoral Colleges is reformed out of existence.…

Hitherto the discussion has looked solely to the removal from our system of the great fictitious incentive to fraud at the polls, — that which unconsciously makes the whole community approach this question with an instinctive sense of its importance. It now remains to say a few words of the fraud itself, as we see and feel it, and to consider if anything can be done to insure to the ballot exemption from it.…

As society develops itself, and wealth, population and ignorance increase, — as the struggle for existence becomes more and more severe, the inherent difficulties of a broadly extended suffrage will make themselves felt. Starving men and women care very little for abstract questions of the general good. Political power becomes one means simply of private subsistence. In any case there are, however, but two ways of perverting the expression of the popular will, — one by the corruption of the individual voter, the other by the falsification of votes. The first of these methods is easily disposed of. It is useless and almost silly to try to prevent bribery and corruption by law. There is, in fact, no sound distinction between the citizen who sells his vote for cash, and the citizen who makes his political course subserve his personal ambition, or lends himself to some demagogue who bribes by an agrarian law.… No real protection to the ballot lies in that direction.

Though the law, however, cannot well prevent a man from selling his own single vote, and no penalty can reach him who does, the law can prevent a man from multiplying ballots at his own will, and selling himself for a day’s steady voting, from early dawn to dewy eve, unlimited by any eight-hour law, and for every recurring election. Men cannot by law be made to respect their own rights, but they can be made not to violate those of other people. In this point of view again, the suffrage question is a national one. Under the present system, a single fraudulent vote in New York or Philadelphia is of infinitely greater public interest than a score of such votes in Boston or Chicago. Yet the control of the citizen over this question, upon which more than upon any other, his rights as a citizen depend, is limited to his own immediate neighborhood, and just beyond that, neighborhood, within his sight almost, he is conscious that he is defrauded to an unlimited extent, and yet has no power for reform. Such a condition of affairs is not a healthy one. It is one thing as regards local and State, and another as regards National elections. If certain local communities are willing to live under a lax and unregulated system of suffrage, if they do not object to seeing the franchise rendered valueless by fraud within their own limits, of course they have a right to gratify their inclinations; but they have not a right to extend that system beyond their own limits to the grave prejudice of their neighbors.

The only real protection of the purity of the ballot, under an extended system of suffrage, must, of necessity, be found in some arrangement for the careful registration of voters.… In view of our vastly, increasing emigration, and of the direct bearing of the naturalization laws upon every National election, it may become a serious question whether the United States will not ultimately be obliged to take the whole management of National elections into the hands of National officers. One uniform law and day for such elections, once in two years, conducted by officers of the United States for the time being, under a well digested system of registration, and with an effective law for the detection and punishment of fraud, would, while in itself open to grave objections, yet strike at the root of many of the most crying evils of the present system.…

For the first time in the history of mankind, America seems now approaching a practical trial of universal suffrage. It is not manhood suffrage, as at present; nor white suffrage, as formerly; nor impartial suffrage, as sometimes proposed; nor educational suffrage; — but universal suffrage in the largest sense of the term. All signs point that way. One day we hear of a Womans Rights Convention, and some Legislature barely fails to concede the principle of female suffrage; the next day some Senator proposes the total repeal of the naturalization laws, while the adopted citizen demands that he shall no longer be legally excluded from the chair of Washington. It is then proposed to extend the ballot to children, as it has already been given to freedmen. Presently impartial suffrage is suggested, and party organs at once declare it to be a dogma of American faith, that the ballot is the inherent right of all white men, “be they rich or poor, learned or unlearned.” Finally the Senate of the United States, that body to which all the political wisdom of the country is supposed to gravitate, has recently, after long discussion, proposed to submit to the Legislatures an amendment to the Constitution, prohibiting all discrimination for the future among the citizens of the United States, in the right to hold office or in the exercise of the elective franchise, because “of race, color, nativity, property, education or creed.” Had the single word “sex” but been included in this amendment, the bars would have been wholly thrown down, and the experiment of universal suffrage, incorporated into the organic law, would have been tried in its full simplicity.

It may well be questioned whether the American people fully appreciate the logical conclusions of the present tendency to make the suffrage a free gift to all comers. The new experiment will indeed eradicate the last vestige of caste from our institutions, and in so far is consistent with reason and experience. The future has nothing to fear from that quarter. In avoiding one danger, however, there is no absolute necessity of running into another. Caste will have been eradicated at a fearful price, if the elements leading directly to a proletariat are introduced in its place. Now universal suffrage necessarily introduces three new and untried influences into the action of the body politic. Of these the female is the first; for, though in order of time she must be enfranchised after the African and the alien, yet only those who believe in that strange political science which is evolved from party exigencies, can bow to a logic, which, while pretending to eradicate caste, refuses to grant to the Anglo-Saxon female what has been thrust on the African male. Opinions differ more as to the expediency of female suffrage than as to its logic. Experience has seemed to indicate that a certain vigorous, masculine, common-sense and self-control, — a faculty of restraint under excitement — a certain persistence and belief in the wisdom of biding his time, which characteristics have hitherto more especially developed themselves in the Anglo-Saxon race, have everywhere proved the only real safe-guards of popular liberty. Excitable natures rarely strengthen free institutions. How far a large infusion of the more voluble, demonstrative and impulsive female element into the arena of politics will tend to affect what little of calmness and reason is still found therein, remains to be seen. The white female, however, is at least of the same blood and education as the white male. This cannot be said of the African, the second of the untried influences now to be introduced. Whatever may be his latent faculty of development, however high he now should or ultimately may stand in the scale of created beings, it is safe to say that the sudden and indiscriminate elevation of his whole race to the ballot is a portentous experiment. The Anglo-Saxon was not educated to his efforts at self-government, at best but partially successful, by two centuries of Slavery superimposed on unnumbered centuries of barbarism.

The third influence about to be infused by wholesale into our system, is that of the aliens. Of the workings and tendency of this influence we have already enjoyed some experience. We now appreciate to a degree how much the purity and the significance of the suffrage have deteriorated with us through the irruption of those swarms of foreigners, who have within forty years landed on our shores. While the experience of the past throws some light on the future in this respect, it, in all probability, very inadequately foreshadows it. We have as yet witnessed only the day of small things in the way of emigration. Take the Irish exodus as an example. It has been no easy thing for us to deplete the Celtic race from one small island, and to absorb it into our body politic: still it has been done, and has resulted only in deterioration, not in catastrophe. But how is it for the future, as regards China and the East? . . .

Working upon such a mass as must result from the blending of all these incongruous elements, Universal Suffrage can only mean in plain English the government of ignorance and vice: — it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic coast; an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf, and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific. One only of these has developed itself as yet and acquired firm political power, — the Celtic proletariat has possessed itself of the New York City Government and will soon be in control of that of the State; — those who wish to study the early development of the system will find ample food for reflection in the daily columns of the New York press. Those who choose may then strive to extend it.

If then the proletariat, — the organization of ignorance and vice to obtain political control, — is destructive both to the purity and significance of the ballot; — if Universal Suffrage inevitably tends with an advancing civilization to bring about such a vicious combination, then no one who believes in a Social Science as applied to the study of permanence in free institutions, can place any faith in that form of suffrage. The tendency of the day is clearly in a wrong direction.…

Education then only remains. A knowledge of the language of our laws and the faculty of informing oneself without aid of their provisions, would in itself constitute a test, if rigorously enforced, incompatible with the existence of a proletariat. Our efforts should be devoted to the practical development of these two principles of intelligence and impartiality in the suffrage, and of the kindred theory of the just representation of minorities. In the ideal Government, founded on the popular consent, every voice will be audible through a system of perfect representation. No barrier to a purified suffrage will be recognized which cannot be surmounted by the moderate efforts of average humanity, and the highest privilege of the citizen, at once a right and a reward, will be given or refused on the principles of even justice and stern regard for the common good.

CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS JR.

Charles Francis Adams Jr., “The Protection of the Ballot in National Elections,” Journal of Social Science, vol. I (June 1869): 91–93, 97–98, 101–111.

READING AND DISCUSSION QUESTIONS