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2019

The Origin of Disfranchisement: County Level Resistance to African American VThomtaisn W.g (W iinllia mP) oLosngt-Emancipation Florida

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

THE ORIGIN OF DISFRANCHISEMENT: COUNTY LEVEL RESISTANCE TO AFRICAN

AMERICAN VOTING IN POST - EMANCIPATION FLORIDA

By

THOMAS W. LONG

A Thesis submitted to the Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts

2019

Thomas W. Long defended this thesis on March 29, 2019. The members of the supervisory committee were:

Andrew K. Frank Professor Directing Thesis

G. Kurt Piehler Committee Member

Jonathan Grant Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the thesis has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii

To William J. Mitchell and Virginia M. Mitchell

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to than the members of my committee for their comments and guidance with special thanks to Dr. Grant for noting the formative strength of institutions.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Tables ...... vi Abstract ...... vii

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY ...... 1

CHAPTER 2: PLANNING THE FACADE...... 12

CHAPTER 3: BUILDING THE FACADE ...... 48

CHAPTER 4: COMPLETING THE FACADE ...... 68

CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSION ...... 100

References ...... 106

Biographical Sketch ...... 110

v LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Racial Distribution by County (1880) ...... 44

Table 2: Vote Distribution by County for Gubernatorial Election (1880) ...... 44

vi ABSTRACT

This thesis examines how divisions among Florida Democrats affected the Democratic

Party county organizations’ role in the suppression of African American political participation in

Florida. In post-emancipation Florida, white politicians overcame these divisions to create a framework in which the state technically met federal mandates established by the Fourteenth

Amendment, while it also ensured that de facto disfranchisement occurred statewide, a constitutional facade. In addition, it explores how this conversation created a government structure that marginalized the concerns of the state’s African American community. Four individuals epitomized the distinctive approaches to the post-Reconstruction political order.

Governor David S. Walker represents Florida’s Reconstruction Era lawmakers who met in

Tallahassee in 1866. Governor Walker assured legislators that Florida could return to the Union without having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, but he later told legislators that African

American suffrage was “fixed.” Unreconstructed rebels such as A.K. Allison urged violence to stop African American political participation during Reconstruction. Governor William D.

Bloxham personifies Democrat officeholders who promised to suppress vigilante violence but appealed for electoral support at a “Clan” rally. Senator Wilkinson Call embodies the racist populism that condemned railroads and African American “lust.” Each of them contributed to the evolution of the Democratic Party county organizations’ role in Florida’s constitutional facade.

Florida’s 1865 constitution denied African American suffrage. Florida’s lawmakers could not conceive of it. Governor Walker assured them it would not occur, but he accepted the reality that it had occurred. Allison represents a “boisterous” element of displaced aspiring white elites who violently repressed African American suffrage. Governor Bloxham represents the Democrat establishment that condemned vigilante violence as it relied on the Ku Klux Klan to maintain

vii white electoral solidarity. Patronage and paternalism illuminate the tension that existed between the establishment embodied by Governor Bloxham, and the “boisterous” element who aspired to the establishment or sought to reclaim their position in it. Those who had the power to dispense could afford paternalism, whereas those who aspired to that power saw African American political participation as a threat to their ability to distribute patronage. Senator Call’s

Confederate background, descent from Governor Richard Keith Call, and anti-railroad populism embodies divisions between the Democrat establishment conservatives who favored railroads and the anti-railroad populists who complained over their land policies, charges, and damage to livestock.

Shifting political coalitions of white anti-railroad populists and conservative railroad aligned Democrats bled into county Democrat organizations’ definition of the political as the social to exclude African Americans. Senator Call’ congressional tirade against African

American “lust” illuminates the abiding fear that moved Florida to use a denial African

Americans social citizenship to deny a political citizenship guaranteed by the Fourteenth

Amendment. Florida’s constitutional facade held: The state had not denied African American suffrage; the Democrat Party, the only relevant political organization, simply chose not to let them participate in primary elections. Senator Call’s tirade over African American “lust” moved disfranchisement’s spirit through the door that joined the political to the social. It completed

Florida’s constitutional facade that denied African Americans’ citizenship.

Beginning with the constitutional convention that drafted Florida’s 1868 constitution,

Democrats used gubernatorial appointments and apportionment to dilute African American political strength. During Reconstruction, a “boisterous” element, such as Allison, violently suppressed African American political participation. While Governor Bloxham vowed to

viii suppress vigilante violence, he joined Democrats in courting “Clan” support to turn back an electoral challenge from disaffected Democrats in Florida’s 1884 gubernatorial election. After

Florida’s 1885 constitutional convention and anti-railroad legislature had marginalized African

American political activity, the push to deny African American political citizenship intensified.

County Democrat organizations denied African Americans the right to participate in the only relevant political organization, and the Democratic Party combined their white only rule with a populist anti-business platform.

The dominance of the Democratic Party had blurred the social and the political. The exclusion of African Americans from the social organization, the Democratic Party, excluded them from the political. Their political exclusion further separated African Americans from white society. Florida had completed its constitutional facade: African Americans retained the right to vote, but their exclusion from political decision-making made that right meaningless.

ix CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION AND HISTORIOGRAPHY

I said that here is a resolution really flew right in the face almost. It was very contrary to every precept that we have professed to believe in so far as the strength of our union is concerned. Well where was the Bar association? The lawyers, who have a responsibility to see a sham or a pretense or something that's fakery, that deals with law, where, where, where were they? I said not a single Bar Association in the State of Florida or the State Bar Association would rise and say to the Legislature this is wrong for you to do. And don’t do this because it's wrong. 1

This thesis argues that Florida’s Reconstruction government’s empowerment of county

Democratic Party and government officials shines new light on Florida’s disfranchisement of

African Americans. A negotiation over political power between white majority counties and majority African American counties dominated by conservative (Bourbon) Democrats strengthened local Democratic Party and county organizations. 2 County Democratic Party organizations and government officials completed a constitutional facade that Florida had complied with the Fourteenth Amendment and Fifteenth Amendments as it excluded African

Americans from political and social citizenship. A struggle among Florida’s white political factions mirrored Reconstruction white political elites’ efforts to restrain aspiring Democratic elites’ violent suppression of African American political participation to preserve their claims to patronage, position, and place. Conservative, Reconstruction Era Democratic lawmakers had used gubernatorial appointments to restrict African American political participation, but those provisions also limited the political power of Democrats in majority white counties. The

1 Governor Leroy Collins Interview, Tallahassee Civil Rights Oral History Collection, Special Collections, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida. http://purl.fcla.edu/fsu/MSS_1990-001 2 The French interpretation of Bourbon refers to having forgotten nothing and having learned nothing. Charlton W. Tebeau, A History of Florida (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 273. 1 Constitutional Convention of 1885 and Florida’s Gilded Age legislature relied on a Democratic

Party, which had survived 1884’s Independent Party challenge, to empower white Democrats while disfranchising African Americans. Opposition to conservative, railroad aligned Democrats elected an anti-railroad populist legislature that combined anti-railroad legislation and expanded

African American political disfranchisement. Legislative history demonstrates the authoritative voice of the Democratic Party in calling on Florida’s legislators to exclude African Americans from political participation. Newspapers and the Congressional Record demonstrate that the

Democratic Party and county officials adapted electoral laws to exclude African Americans.

Unlike traditional approaches to local government that view counties as appendages to state government, this thesis argues research into the origins of Florida’s disfranchisement of African

Americans shows that the legal framework the State of Florida used to disfranchise African

Americans after Emancipation emanated from white political factions’ struggle within Florida’s counties.

Analysis of the local origins of Florida’s disfranchisement of African Americans demonstrates that fears over loss of patronage and enforced social equality motivated a white electorate. Democratic elites used white solidarity as a tool to spur their Party’s base, while local thugs broke their opponents. Democratic Party and county officials manipulated electoral machinery to assure Democratic dominance. Senator Wilkinson Call personifies the spirit of

Florida’s disfranchisement of African Americans, a spirit that rose from Florida’s counties.

While Florida’s Reconstruction elites, secure in position, privilege, and place paternalistically sought to subordinate African Americans, the Democrats who gathered at the

Party’s state convention in 1900 had imbibed a brew of racism that fixed African American political participation as an “incubus.” Democrats who gathered came as county representatives

2 of the Party that Reconstruction Era and Gilded Age politicians had strengthened to secure

Democratic Party dominance and white popular rule. County Democratic organizations in a state dominated by the Democratic Party epitomized the merger of the political and the social. Social exclusion and political exclusion reinforced each other and flowed from the headwaters of

Florida’s counties. County Democratic organizations pushed to exclude African Americans from participation in Democratic primaries. African Americans’ exclusion from the social completed their exclusion from the political. Florida’s white primary defined the political as the social to exclude African American from the only relevant political organization, the Democratic Party.

Florida’s Legislature completed its constitutional facade when it enlisted the Democratic Party as an arm of state government to preserve the position, privilege, and place of white Floridians while excluding African Americans from the citizenship guaranteed them by the Fourteenth

Amendment.

This thesis examines the counties’ role in Florida’s creation of a pretense of constitutional compliance so that it could restrict African American political participation without the loss of congressional representation under the Fourteenth Amendment or a violation of the Fifteenth Amendment after its adoption in 1869. Congress had required that Florida ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to regain membership in the Union. That Amendment provided states lose congressional representation if they abridged the right to vote. From Reconstruction through the Progressive Era, Florida’s legislators, delegates to constitutional conventions, and county officials strived to create a constitutional Potemkin village to allow Florida to restrict

African American suffrage without the loss of congressional representation or a violation of the

Fifteenth Amendment. The Reconstruction Era directors of this play began the facade in

Tallahassee, and shifting political currents moved center stage from Tallahassee to the counties.

3 Delegates to the 1868 constitutional convention used gubernatorial appointive power to restrict

African American political participation in majority African American counties, and those delegates apportioned the legislature to dilute African American legislative strength.

Gubernatorial appointments and apportionment became the foundation for Florida’s constitutional facade. During Reconstruction, aspiring Democrat county courthouse elites, who feared African American suffrage would bring a loss of patronage, position, and place, used vigilante groups such as the Young Men’s Democratic Clubs to secure Democrat dominance.

County officials manipulated electoral results to insure Democrat victory. Patronage motivated voters and politicians during the Gilded Age, and Democratic newspapers and politicians used it to rally white Democrats. This thesis traces the development of representative government’s creation of a constitutional Potemkin village through its political subdivisions, the counties that drove and enforced African American disfranchisement.

This thesis argues the importance of the counties in Florida’s development of a constitutional facade. Florida’s conservative, Reconstruction Era Democratic legislators used gubernatorial appointments and apportionment to create a constitutional facade to dilute African

Americans political citizenship during Reconstruction. During the Gilded Age, conservative

Democrats and their opposition negotiated gubernatorial appointments and apportionment to balance whites’ home rule and African American disfranchisement. Customary consultations between the governor and local Democrat Party officials on county appointments evolved into the Legislature’s transformation of the Democratic Party into an arm of state government charged with the suppression of African American political activity during the Progressive Era.

As shifts in political strength required conservative Democrats to share power with white, anti –

4 railroad Democrats, the Legislature’s increasing restrictions on African American political participation coincided with increasingly virulent denunciations of African Americans.

Solidification of Democrat control had mooted dangers to white control over patronage, but restrictions on African American political participation gathered momentum as Florida’s

Legislature followed the lead of the Democratic Party’s county organizations. Senator Wilkinson

Call personified an anti-railroad populism that warned of African American “lust” and used white outrage over the enforcement of electoral laws to apologize for racial murder. Senator

Call’s anti-railroad and virulently racist populism came from the farmers and shippers who opposed conservative Democrats’ railroad orientated policies. The 1900 Democrat Party platform reflects these concerns, which combined populism and African American disfranchisement. Florida’s election laws relied on local Democrat Party and county officials to exempt white Democrats from elections laws that excluded African Americans from political participation.

Florida’s Progressive Era re-defined the constitutional facade that Reconstruction legislators had created. The 1900 Democratic state convention adopted the positions of its county units that limited primary participation to whites. Florida’s Progressive Era Legislature empowered the Democratic Party, a private, social organization, to exclude African Americans from participation in the only relevant election in Florida, the Democratic primary. The Florida

Legislature reconfigured Florida’s constitutional facade by defining the political as the social.

Florida’s populist Democratic Party defined the political as the social to expand Florida’s constitutional facade to include a denial of social citizenship as well as a denial of political citizenship. The Florida Legislature’s definition of the political as the social shredded the

Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of African American citizenship.

5 This thesis originated in anomaly suggested by Paul Ortiz’s argument that Florida’s disfranchisement of African Americans contradicts V.O. Key’s “argument that Florida was

‘scarcely part of the South.”’ 3 How could Florida, the land of tourism and fun in the sun, have been the third state to secede from the Union? How could Florida have been one of the last states to have federal troops withdraw to end Reconstruction? This thesis argues that question from the perspective of Florida’s restrictions on African Americans’ political participation from

Reconstruction, through the Gilded Age, and to the Progressive Era. Florida's disfranchisement of African Americans equaled that of states, such as Alabama and Mississippi, traditionally classified as Southern. This thesis uses contemporary newspaper accounts, congressional testimony and the congressional record, legislative and constitutional convention records to create a political and social background to analyze the electoral laws and constitutional provisions that Florida’s legislators and constitutional delegates created to limit the political participation of African Americans. Its socio – legal approach identifies the origin of Florida’s disfranchisement movement to explain how Florida subverted principles of limited and republican government to create a constitutional facade.

Two fundamental research questions drove this inquiry. First, how Florida created an electoral system that denied the fundamental rights it claimed to defend. Second, it asks where the impetus for Florida’s disfranchisement originated. These questions are important because they inform how a popular majority can manipulate the law to deny its fundamental purpose. It illustrates the inseparable connection between the social and the political. While Florida’s

Democratic elites had erected the skeleton of Florida’s constitutional facade, completion of the

3 Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden Story of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), xxii. 6 facade originated in the counties’ definition of the political as the social. Elimination of political citizenship extinguished African Americans’ social citizenship and the promise of the Fourteenth

Amendment, which Florida had sworn to uphold.

Legislative records demonstrate that Florida’s Reconstruction Era legislators grudgingly acknowledged the reality of African American suffrage that the Fourteenth Amendment and later the Fifteenth Amendments had secured. Admission to the Union following the Civil War required Florida to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, and that

Amendment reduced the congressional representation of states that “denied … or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or other crime” male citizens’ right to vote. 4

Denial of those rights would cause Florida’s congressional representation and voice in national affairs to shrivel. Tallahassee’s leaders understood the effect of suffrage’s denial and used tools such as gubernatorial appointive powers to suppress African American political participation.

Local leaders, who believed that African American suffrage threatened their control over patronage, county government, and place in society, relied on violence and fraud to secure electoral victory. Achievement of the conflicting imperatives of constitutional compliance and the suppression of African American political participation required Florida to create a picture of constitutional compliance to satisfy the federal government, while diluting and then suppressing

African American political participation. This thesis analyzes counties’ crucial role in the building of this constitutional facade.

In a study of African American political activity in Florida between 1944 through 1954,

Hugh Douglas Price and William G. Carleton suggested a template of six criteria to use in

4 U.S. Const. Amendment XIV, section 2. The Nineteenth Amendment subsequently applied voting rights protection to women. That amendment provides: “ The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” 7 grouping southern states from Mississippi through Kentucky and Missouri. 5 Of those six criteria, only one, “Loyalty to Historic Democratic Party in both 1924 and 1928,” is without apparent linkage to race. Using this model, Florida joins North Carolina and Virginia in the third tier with

Alabama, South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana in the first group. Categorizations of

Southern states that exclude analysis of the historical and political process that restricted African

American political participation are incomplete because those restrictions maintained white supremacy, a defining characteristic of the Southern states. Examination of race from the perspective of African American political activity during Florida’s politically formative years after the Civil War to the beginning of the Progressive Era puts Florida at the head of the first tier of Southern states, alongside Alabama and Mississippi. This thesis adds historical perspective to categorizations of Florida’s professed commitment to constitutionally guaranteed

African American suffrage.

The argument of a constitutional facade tracks Henry Knight’s argument that Florida had created an image of opportunity to lure Northern setters and capital, 6 although this thesis’s socio- legal approach focuses on the counties’ role in fashioning Florida’s constitutional facade. This thesis’s argument complements scholarly studies such as Emancipation Betrayed by Paul Ortiz that focused on suppression of African American suffrage as a vehicle to secure a labor force. 7

This thesis uses local concerns such as the loss patronage that Democrats, such as elector R.C.

Long, warned would occur if white voters broke Democratic solidarity. This thesis argues the economic motivations of those who felt most threatened by African American political

5Hugh Douglas Price and William G. Carleton, The Negro and Southern Politics: A Chapter of Florida History (Washington Square: New York University Press, 1957), 6 - 10, table 1. 6 Henry Knight, “Southward Expansion: The Myth of the West in the Promotion of Florida, 1876-1900,” European Journal of American Culture , 29, no. 2 (July 2010): 111- 28. 7 Paul Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed , 10 - 11. 8 participation. Democrat incumbents’, such as Governor William D. Bloxham, official condemnations of violence supports this modification of Ortiz’ economic interpretation. Those office holders had the most to lose, if violence brought renewed federal intervention. Official condemnation combined with political calculation helped build the constitutional facade.

Florida senator Wilkinson Call’s use of feared African American attacks on white women and children evidences the “incubus” motif developed by Glenda Gilmore, who examined gender and segregation.8 Call warned of the threat posed by African American “lust.” During the 1900

Democratic state convention, newspapers warned African American political equality carried an

“incubus.” Suppression of the “incubus” required African Americans’ political exclusion.

Gilmore’s gender-based analysis within a modified Ortiz’ economic analysis enlightens the racist populism that used African Americans’ social exclusion from the Democratic Party to complete their political exclusion.

Call’s opposition to Florida’s business and railroad interests and county Democrat organizations’ push for the Whites only primary links the expansion of Florida’s constitutional facade to the white farmers Call championed. This thesis expands historiographical treatment of

Florida’s electoral silencing of African Americans by situating that responsibility in Florida’s county seats. This thesis develops patriarchal approach to an African American “incubus” into a socio-legal analytic to explain how Florida’s counties turned ostensibly racially neutral laws into vehicles for discriminations.

This thesis builds on Laura E. Free’s analysis of the Fourteenth Amendment and citizenship in Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era .

8 Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896 – 1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 9 Free argued gender’s had played a central role in the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment. 9

Democrats argued for “reunification of the white political brotherhood” and criticized efforts to restrict southerners’ rights as “unmanly.” 10 Republicans used gendered language to describe themselves as political fathers to align the Constitution with the Declaration of Independence, to embrace African American men as political brothers, to define African Americans as legitimate members of the political community, and to save the fallible founders from error. 11 Free argues that Democrats’ link of “the social and political power of manhood to white women” during the early days of Reconstruction linked “the rights of manhood”, the right “to control women”, and men’s “right to control property, labor, or politics.” 12 This argument supports this thesis’s interpretation that Senator’s Call tirade on asserted African American “lust” explains why

Florida’s counties defined the political as the social to extinguish the possibility that African

Americans might change the social.

This thesis develops Edward Williams’s history of Florida politics in the Gilded Age 13 , and expands Daniel R. Weinfeld’s The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in

Post-Civil War Florida . Williamson’s political history emphasizes the relationship among various white factions, rather than their common interest in suppressing African American political activity. This thesis contributes to Williams’s work by developing counties’ role in

African American disfranchisement. This thesis’s analysis of the moving force behind the legal structure of African American disfranchisement contrasts with Justin Behrend’s analysis of the

9 Laura E. Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015). 10 Free, Suffrage Reconstructed , 70 11 Free, Suffrage Reconstructed , 72 - 75 12 Free, Suffrage Reconstructed , 80 – 81. 13 Edward C. Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 1877 – 1893 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1976. 10 social aspect of political participation from the African American perspective in Natchez,

Mississippi.14 Weinfeld’s The Jackson County War placed the cause of Jackson County’s intense

Reconstruction violence with the changes in the white elite. 15 This thesis situates this displaced elite in the counties that completed Florida’s constitutional facade.

This thesis’s socio-legal approach extends Jerell Shofner’s Nor Is It Over Yet: Florida in the Era of Reconstruction 1863-1877 and his 1963 dissertation, “Florida’s Political

Reconstruction and the Presidential Election of 1876” to the Progressive Era. Shofner challenged historiographical treatments of Reconstruction such as William Watson Davis’s The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida. Davis’s sympathetic treatment of organized white violence and rapacious carpetbaggers and scalawags represented the “Dunning School.” 16 Shofner argued that

Davis’s biases had influenced his interpretation of Reconstruction and that he had never questioned the necessity of white supremacy.17 Shofner argued that “organized white resistance drove out” African American and white Republican leadership.” 18 This thesis expands Shofner’s argument to explain counties’ role in Florida’s excision of African Americans’ political and social citizenship. This thesis argues that counties’ enforcement of increasingly exclusionary electoral laws reflected Florida’s shifting political coalitions. These shifting political coalitions worked through county Democratic organizations to complete Florida’s constitutional facade.

14 Justin Behrend, Reconstructing Democracy: Grassroots Black Politics in the Deep South after the Civil War (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 2015). 15 Daniel R. Weinfeld, The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post-Civil War Florida (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 139 – 40. 16 William Watson Davis, The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, [1913] 1964). It was included in a “quadricentennial edition” of history books in 1964 with a message by Governor Farris Bryant. 17 Jerrell H. Shofner, preface to Nor Is It over Yet: Florida in the Era of Reconstruction 1863- 1877 (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1974), vii; See also Jerrell Harris Shofner “Florida’s Political Reconstruction and the Presidential Election of 1876” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1963). 18 Weinfeld, introduction to Jackson County , xiv. 11 CHAPTER 2

PLANNING THE FACADE

The Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution presented Florida’s Reconstruction

Era lawmakers with a dilemma: How could they comply with that Amendment without meeting its requirements? Florida’s 1865 constitution denied African American suffrage, but Florida’s ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment required that it recognize African American suffrage or suffer a reduction in its congressional representation. This chapter also explains how these provisions laid the groundwork for the county Democratic Party organizations to emerge as a hidden moving factor in Florida’s post – Emancipation disfranchisement of African Americans.

This chapter explains how lawmakers used ostensibly racially neutral constitutional provisions to reduce African Americans’ political influence. Florida’s 1868 Constitution began the facade that

Florida had complied with the Fourteenth Amendment.

The 1868 constitution granted African American suffrage, but it gave the governor the power to appoint county commissioners. Gubernatorial consultation with local Democrat leaders over appointments began a tradition of deference to county political organizations. Florida’s

1868 constitution also apportioned the legislature to dilute the legislative strength of counties that had majority African American populations. White counties had long opposed giving the governor such extensive appointive power. 19 Tensions between conservative Democrats in majority African American counties and Democrats in majority white counties later developed from gubernatorial appointments’ curtailment of home rule. Rural counties’ heightened sensitivity towards African American land ownership further illustrated divisions among

Florida’s white Democratic electorate.

19 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age , 25. 12 While apportionment and appointments diluted African American political strength without denying African American suffrage, Democrat officeholders denounced the violence of displaced aspiring white elites, a “boisterous” element, to maintain the pretense of African

American political participation, but courted Klan support to assure Democratic victory. Voters’ ratification of the 1868 constitution strengthened white resistance to African American suffrage.

The Ku Klux Klan violently suppressed African American political activity to preserve place, power, and patronage. Violence to preserve place, patronage, and position originated from the counties. Widespread vote fraud corrupted the electoral process. Patronage reduced electoral office to an emolument as it divided African Americans and united whites. Democrat office holders like Governor William D. Bloxham vowed to uphold the law, while they accepted the support of those who broke the law. By 1885, competing Democratic factions had set Florida’s constitutional facade. Differences among conservative, establishment Democrats from the black belt and majority white counties developed from the 1868 constitutional facade. These differences developed with the Florida Democratic Party’s multiple centers of power that corresponded with the jurisdictional limits of Florida’s counties.

On May 10, 1865, federal troops occupied the State Capital. Former federal Judge

William Marvin accepted, in July 1865, an invitation from President Andrew Johnson to serve as

Provisional Governor for Florida.20 Governor Marvin proclaimed an election for delegates to a constitutional convention to draft a new constitution, and the elected delegates met in

Tallahassee on October 25, 1865. The 1865 constitution abolished slavery, repudiated

20 William Marvin, “The Autobiography of William Marvin” ed. Kevin E. Kearney, Florida Historical Quarterly , 36, no. 3 (Jan. 1958): 179, 215. 13 Confederate debts and the right of a state to secede from the Union.21 Governor Martin told the delegates who had assembled that the newly emancipated slaves’ freedom did “not necessarily include the idea of a participation in the affairs of government”; the delegates alone had the duty to decide whether to grant African American suffrage, and that he knew of no opinion that

President Johnson had expressed on African American suffrage.22 He also told them that he believed congress would focus on African Americans’ “security for their persons and their property” in its decision whether to accept the newly elected congressional representatives and senators from Florida. The delegates subscribed their names to the constitution on November 7,

1865. Following Governor Marvin’s suggestion, the constitution granted suffrage only to “every free white male person of the age of twenty – one years and upwards.” 23

On December 20, 1865 in his inaugural, address to the Legislature, Governor David

Walker seemed more paternalistic than fearful of the freed slaves. He reminded the legislators that after Florida had dispatched more than her share of troops to the war and left many districts

“stripped … of their entire arms – bearing inhabitants” and “our females and infant children almost exclusively to the protection of our slaves. They [had] proved true to their trust.” He suggested the policy Florida “ought” to follow towards those who “for generations past have been our faithful, contented and happy slaves.” 24 He encouraged legislators to ratify the

Thirteenth Amendment because he thought neither President Johnson nor Congress would demand African American suffrage. 25 Governor Walker assured legislators that determination

21 Jerrell H. Shofner. “Reconstruction and Renewal, 1865 - 1877” in The New History of Florida , ed. Michael Gannon (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996): 249, 251. 22 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1865), 10 – 11. 23 Fla. CONST. of 1865, art. VI, § 1. 24 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 27. 25 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 34. 14 and patience could secure Florida the benefits of membership in the Union without the obligation to secure the suffrage of its formerly contended slaves. If radical Republicans used force to secure African American suffrage, “martial law” would eventually end with “civil law … fully restored and the authority and jurisdiction of the State Government [be] entirely reinstated.” 26

After having implied that the state could wait out any demand to extend suffrage to African

Americans, he reiterated, “We could never accede to the demand for negro suffrage.” 27 On

December 28, 1865, the Florida Legislature adopted “the proposed amendment to the

Constitution of the United States of America in relation to slavery” 28 , but the constitution continued to deny African Americans political participation.

Florida’s disfranchisement of African Americans assumed white superiority and the impossibility of affording equal political participation to a race believed inferior. On December

21, 1865, Governor Walker presented to the Legislature a report prepared by C.H. DuPont and

A.J. Peeler at the commission of Provisional Governor Marvin to “examine and report” on

“changes and amendments … to the existing statutes … to conform to the requisitions of the

Constitution … with reference especially to the altered condition of the colored race.”29 DuPont and Peeler were former slave owners from North Florida, 30 and their report concluded that the

War had not “worked any change in the … political status of such of the African race as were already free.” 31 Just as free African Americans could not vote before slavery’s abolition, free

African Americans could not vote after slavery’s abolition. Former Governor Marvin found

26 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 1-4th General Assembly (1866), 35. 27 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), (1866), 35. 28 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 73. 29 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 49. 30 Charlton W. Tebeau, A History of Florida (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), 244. 31 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 53. 15 similar attitudes throughout Florida. After he had left office, he traveled through Florida to make speeches. He described “whites everywhere” as ready to admit they were “a conquered people”,

“ready to recognize the overthrow of slavery”, but they found the idea of African American suffrage “abhorrent” and “could not entertain it for a moment.” 32 The report of DuPont and

Peeler rejected “fanatics” who suggested that emancipation placed African Americans “upon terms of perfect equality with the white man.” 33 The report proclaimed whites “as the superior and governing class,” obligated “to encourage and secure his [African Americans] moral and mental improvement,” while “they confine him to his appropriate sphere of social and political inferiority.” 34 The legislators and delegates’ views of emancipation without suffrage seemed to fit with the plan of presidential reconstruction.

Like other Southern states, Florida passed Black Codes that re-created slavery. On

November 4, 1865, the Constitutional Convention passed “An Ordinance on Vagrancy” that allowed the sale of individuals convicted of vagrancy.35 A verified complaint “that any person, able to work or otherwise to support himself in a reputable way is wandering or strolling about, or leading an idle or profligate or immoral course of law” allowed issuance of an arrest warrant.

An individual convicted of vagrancy had to post a bond not to exceed five hundred dollars to insure “good behavior and future industry for one year.” Failure to post this bond allowed either imprisonment for up to 12 months “or by [the prisoner’s] being sold for a term not exceeding

32 Marvin, “Autobiography,” 216 – 17. 33 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 53. 34 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 57. 35 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1865), “An Ordinance on Vagrancy” [No. 4], 161. 16 twelve months.” Vagrancy ordinances, such as Florida’s, outraged congressional Republicans, who saw them as an effort to return African Americans to slavery.36

Radical Republicans who had gained power in 1866 congressional elections demanded that the former Confederate states adopt the Fourteenth Amendment and initiated Congressional

Reconstruction that placed Florida in the Third Military District under General Pope, who voided the 1865 Constitution and called for a constitutional convention to draft a new constitution. 37 On

March 2, 1867, Congress overrode President Johnson’s veto of the Reconstruction Act that authorized states’ legislators’ admission to Congress and the end of military rule for only those states that had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. 38 According to that Amendment, if states denied or abridged “the right to vote … to any of the male inhabitants … twenty – one years of age,” those states would lose congressional representation. 39 Loss of congressional representation insured that replacement of the Constitution’s 3/5 clause would not create a Democrat majority to thwart congressional Republicans’ goals. Were states not threatened with the loss of congressional representation, states could count their African American population towards their congressional representation and restrict African Americans’ ability to elect those legislators. 40

Since African Americans would likely vote Republican, securing their vote would prevent the

Democrats from dominating the governments of the newly re-admitted states.

Loss of congressional representation would inevitably reduce Florida’s influence in national affairs and prejudice its development, but African American suffrage would threaten conservative Democratic rule. Representative James D. Westcott, Jr., chair of the Committee on

36 Tebeau, Florida , 244 - 45. 37 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age , 3. 38 David P. Currie, “The Reconstruction Congress,” 75 U.Chi.L.Rev. , 393, 411 (2008). 39 U.S. Const. amend. XIV, § 2. 40 Free, Suffrage Reconstructed , 61 – 62. 17 Federal Relations, reported that the Amendment “proposes to the Southern States either to deprive themselves of a great portion of their political power … or so change their present

Constitutions and laws as to invest the negro [sic] with the elective franchise.” 41 Mr. Westcott continued: “We must be shorn of our representation or give the inferior and unintelligent race the supremacy in the State government.” While he believed that Florida had “done everything … that is necessary to secure their [African American] practical advancement,” he also declared

African Americans “controlled by prejudice” that prevented Florida “at this time” from

“invest[ing] them with the elective franchise without restriction or qualification.” “No sane man would desire to extend the right of suffrage to these people without ‘abridgement’ who is familiar with their present condition.” He warned, “Control of the Southern States by the negro would result either in a war of races or the emigration of one or the other race, and a consequent total destruction of all interests.” The delegates who would draft Florida’s 1868 constitution would struggle to limit African American suffrage without a violation of the Fourteenth

Amendment. Adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 required that facade to avoid its violation and avoid the sanctions the Fourteenth Amendment required for states’ abridgement of the right to vote.

The Reconstruction Act limited those who could vote for delegates to the constitutional convention. Only those who had affirmed that they had not participated in “rebellion or civil war against the United States … or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof” and that they would

“faithfully support the Constitution and obey the laws of the United States, and … encourage

41 Assembly Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866),77. 18 others to do so” could vote. 42 Since most members of Confederate legislatures and the armed forces could not make the required affirmation, the Act effectively disfranchised former

Confederates. While the Act effectively disfranchised many white voters, the supplementary act of March 23, 1867 required military commanders to register voters, including African

Americans. 43 In the vote for delegates to the upcoming constitutional convention, 30 percent of

Florida’s white males failed to qualify as voters, and African Americans became the majority. 44

Democrats also sought the African American vote, but their condescension towards African

American voters made their efforts ineffectual. 45 Conservatives’ efforts to stymie a convention through a boycott of the election failed, and when the convention met in Tallahassee on January

20, 1868 of the 46 delegates, 43 were Republicans, three were conservatives, and 18 were

African American. 46

Emancipation brought a natural affinity between African Americans and Republicans,47 but divisions among Republicans appeared during the process of drafting the Constitution. While all carpetbaggers were northerners who had remained in the South after the war, and while many of them worked for African American suffrage, not all of them shared the same motives. For instance, Thomas W. Osborn illustrated the Northern Republicans who had remained in Florida to work for African American suffrage because it offered the path to equality. Others, such as

Dennis Eagan of Madison County, relied on African American voters to build political machines.

42 An Act: Supplementary to an act entitled “An Act supplementary to an Act entitled “An Act to provide for the more efficient Government of the Rebel States,” passed March second, eighteen hundred and sixty-seven, and to facilitate Restoration, ch. 6, 40 th Cong., Sess. 1, 15 Stat. 2, 2. 43 Joe Martin Richardson, “The Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1963), 226. 44 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age , 6. 45 Martin, “Negro in Florida Reconstruction,” 233. 46 Gordon C. Bond, “The First Negro Politicians of Florida,” Negro History Bulletin , 38, no. 8 (Dec. 1975): 486. 47 Martin, “Negro in Florida Reconstruction,” 226. 19 Osborn had helped organize the Lincoln Brotherhood to impress upon African Americans that the Republican Party wanted to help them. 48 A white carpetbagger from Illinois, Daniel

Richards, William U. Saunders, an African American barber from Baltimore, and Liberty

Billings, a white chaplain from New Hampshire, organized as a competing group a branch of the

Union League of America.

During the 1868 constitutional convention, residency requirements split African

American delegates into two factions. Former leaders of the Union League, considered more

“radical” than the Lincoln Brotherhood, debated the Lincoln Brotherhood over a requirement that eligibility for election to the convention required Florida residency for at least one-year. 49

“Radicals” eventually formed a “Rump Convention” that drafted a constitution, which disfranchised all who had aided the Confederacy. 50 Osborn led the opposition, 51 which withdrew to Monticello to prepare an alternative constitution. 52 African American delegates accepted this constitution because they lacked a good alternative. 53 The opposition of white leaders such as

Governor Walker, who had implied Florida could wait out federal occupation to insure white domination, placed African American leaders in the dilemma of either accepting a constitution that restricted African American political power or ceding the field to time and their implacable opponents.

The draft 1868 constitution’s limitations on African American political strength provided the catalyst for counties’ subsequent role in disenfranchisement. First, the 1868 Constitution

48 Bond, “Negro Politicians,” 486. 49 Bond, “Negro Politicians,” 486 - 87. 50 Jerrell H. Shofner, “The Constitution of 1868,” Florida Historical Quarterly , 41, no. 4 (Apr. 1963): 367 – 68. 51 Bond, “Negro Politicians,” 487. 52 Shofner, “Constitution of 1868,” 363– 66. 53 Shofner “Florida’s Political Reconstruction,” 52. Davis described this restriction as preventing these counties “from … Africanizing the state.” Davis, Civil War and Reconstruction , 511. 20 gave the governor the powers to appoint “a county treasurer, county surveyor, superintendent of common schools, and five county commissioners.”54 Conservatives in black belt counties favored this provision because it hindered African American control over local officials. 55

Without this provision, majority African American populations could elect local officials and control local government. Second, the 1868 constitution provided “no county shall have more than four representatives.”56 The 1865 constitution, which had denied African American suffrage, used the U.S. Constitution’s 3/5 formula to allot legislative representation “equally among the different counties.” 57 Since abolition had made the 3/5 clause anachronistic and the

Fourteenth Amendment required that Florida enact African American suffrage, the 1868 constitution reapportioned the legislature to limit counties’ representation to four. This provision diluted the legislative strength of the populous black belt counties where African American majorities could elect legislators.

According to the 1870 census, African American majorities dominated the black belt,

Florida’s most productive region. Jackson County’s population totaled 9,528 and its African

American population totaled 5,598 (59%); Gadsden County’s population totaled 9,802, and its

African American population totaled 6,038 (62%); Columbia County’s population totaled 7,335, and its African American population totaled 3,228 (44%); Jefferson County’s population totaled

13,398, and its African American population totaled 9,897 (74%); Madison County’s population

54 Fla. CONST. of 1868, art. V, § 19. 55 Shofner, “Constitution of 1868,” 368 – 69; see also William T. Cash, History of the Democratic Party in Florida (Tallahassee: Democratic Historical Foundation, 1936), 61. 56 Fla. CONST. of 1868, art. XIII, § 1. 57 Fla. CONST. of 1865, art. IX, § 1. 21 totaled 11,121, and its African American population was 6,692 (60%). 58 An African American population ready, willing, and able to vote in these populous counties could send more legislators to Tallahassee than less populous white counties, if the constitution apportioned legislative representation according to population. The 1868 cap on representation diluted the legislative strength of African Americans in these populous counties and gubernatorial appointive powers limited the power of the African American electorate in majority African American counties.

Gubernatorial appointive power strengthened the county Democrat Party organizations that drove Florida’s adoption of the white primary, and it raised local officials’ sensitivity to the potential loss of patronage. 59 Governor George “Millionaire” Drew (1877 – 1881) relied on

Democrat county executives’ recommendations for appointments in black belt counties, rather than rely on legislators whom the largely African American electorate had elected. 60 Governor

Drew began a tradition of deference to local officials. Rather than develop a political machine, he passed “the patronage to the politically starved autonomous Democratic county organizations.” 61 Drew’s adherence “strictly to the Democratic party framework” put “new life into the local Democratic groups.” 62 Perception of political office principally as a source of

58 U.S. Census Bureau; Population of Each State and Territory (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870); Table II, accessed May 16, 2018, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1870/population/1870a-05.pdf 59 Governor Leroy Collins noted the special role patronage has played in Florida politics during an interview when he discussed Charley Johns, the “kingpin” of the North Florida legislators known as the pork-chop gang. “Charley Johns was that man and he was sort of the kingpin among the pork choppers. They were the legislators largely from the rural areas of the state who believed in the old fashioned concept of give it a good thing, of to the victor belongs the spoils, the person in public office was there to help get his cousins and friends jobs and get a new road….” Governor Leroy Collins Interview, Tallahassee Civil Rights Oral History Collection, Special Collections, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida. http://purl.fcla.edu/fsu/MSS_1990-001 60 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 25 - 26. 61 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 25. 62 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 25. 22 income can raise a conflict of interest between officials’ focus on retaining the graces of party officials and servicing the needs of the citizens. For example, legislative history demonstrates legislators defended their vote for an electoral rule that raised the risk of disfranchising illiterate white voters, the multiple-ballot-box law, because the Democratic Party had announced for the law. 63 This obedience to Democratic Party commands illustrates how party control over patronage strengthened county Democratic leaders at the expense of constituent needs. Demands for white political control included the need to retain control over patronage. This control contributed to the independence and strength of the county party organizations that voted to exclude African Americans at the 1900 Democrat state convention. Gubernatorial consultations began the transformation of the Democratic Party’s county organizations from a transmission belt between the electorate and government into an appendage of state government.

After the Osborn faction had drafted its constitution, it nominated Harrison Reed for governor. 64 Once Congress had accepted the Monticello constitution, influential Republicans such as Jonathan C. Gibbs called on Republicans to support Reed. 65 Radicals’ nomination of

Samuel Walker led conservatives to hope that the Republican split could bring conservative victory, and they nominated George W. Scott, an ex – Confederate, for governor. 66

Congressional approval of the draft constitution led to elections scheduled for May 4 – May 6,

1868. 67 The proposed 1868 constitution removed the 1865 constitution’s limitation of suffrage to whites to extend suffrage to “every male person of the age of twenty – one years and upwards, of

63 See n. 281 and accompanying text. 64 Shofner “Florida’s Political Reconstruction,” 54. 65 Shofner “Florida’s Political Reconstruction,” 56. 66 Shofner “Florida’s Political Reconstruction,” 56 - 59. 67 Shofner “Florida’s Political Reconstruction,” 51. 23 whatever race, color, nationality, or previous condition.” 68 Unlike the Reconstruction Acts,

Florida’s proposed 1868 constitution required only that citizens swear allegiance to the constitutions and governments of the United States and Florida. 69 Supporters and opponents of the proposed constitution accused each other of fraud during the election, but a “Conservative committee” investigated the allegations and concluded that ascertaining “the number and quality of frauds” impossible. 70 Voters ratified the new constitution May 1868. 71

Columbia and Calhoun counties’ records illustrate the strength of the divisions over

African American suffrage. The 1870 census shows Calhoun County’s population totaled 998, and its “free colored” population totaled 244 (24%). 72 In Calhoun County, 195 whites were registered voters and 73 “colored” were registered voters. Registered voter percentages relative to population equaled 26% and 30%, respectively. 73 Ratification failed in Calhoun County by almost a 2:1 margin: 70 voted for and 145 voted against ratification, and the turnout ratio among registered voters was 80%. Columbia County’ population totaled 7,335, and its “free colored” totaled 3,228 (44%). In Columbia County, 545 whites were registered voters, and 619 “colored” were registered voters. Registered voter percentages relative to population equaled 13% and

19%, respectively. Ratification passed in Columbia County 712 to 179, and the turnout ratio among registered voters was 77%. 74 Both counties were majority white counties, but Columbia

68 Fla. CONST. of 1868, art. XIV, § 1. 69 Fla. CONST. of 1868, art. XIV, § 1. 70 Shofner, “Constitution of 1868,” 369. 71 “Constitution of 1868,” Florida Memory: State Library & Archives of Florida, accessed May 7, 2018, https://www.floridamemory.com/items/show/189095?id=22 72 U.S. Census Bureau; Population of Each State and Territory (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870); Table II, accessed May 11, 2018, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1870/population/1870a-05.pdf 73 State Archives of Florida, Calhoun County Voting Records 1868, Series 21, box 4, ff 28. Population totals include individuals such as women who were not eligible to vote. 74 State Archives of Florida, Columbia County Voting Records 1868, Series 21, box 7, ff 12. 24 County’s African American population percentage was double Calhoun County’s African

American population. Columbia County’s registered African American voters exceeded the number of white registered voters. Comparison of the vote against ratification in Calhoun County

(145) with its white registered voters (195) and the vote for ratification in Columbia County

(712) with its registered African American voters (619) suggests race strongly influenced the ratification vote. Democrat politicians could have concluded that even in majority white counties, heavy African American turnout could swing elections. For the next several decades,

Florida’s politicians worked to deny African Americans the political offices their voting population merited.

On June 9, 1868, the Florida Senate adopted the Fourteenth Amendment by a vote of 10 –

3, 75 and that same date, the Florida House of Representatives adopted the Amendment by a vote of 23 – 6. 76 The following month, in identical messages to the Florida Senate and House,

Governor Walker stated, “We say to the majority of the white people of this State who opposed secession, and who have yet opposed our constitution on account of the suffrage question: it was but justice, and we freely gave it to the colored man. But again, we say the suffrage question is settled – it is fixed.” 77

Adoption of the 1868 constitution and African American suffrage hardened white attitudes. Vigilante efforts to suppress African Americans’ political activity took center stage as

“Young Men Democratic” clubs and “regulators” violently suppressed African American political participation. During congressional hearings that investigated the violence (the Ku Klux

75 Journal of the Florida Senate , 1st Sess., 15 th General Assembly (1866), 8 - 9 76 Assembly Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , 1st Sess., General Assembly (1866), 8 - 9. 77 Assembly Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , 1st Sess., General Assembly (1866), 54; Journal of the Florida Senate , 1st Sess., 15 th General Assembly (1866), 38 - 39. 25 Klan hearings), witnesses described the opposition to African American suffrage. Emanuel

Fortune on November 10, 1871 testified he was “a common laborer, not much more,” but others thought him “a leading man in politics”, member of the legislature and the 1868 constitutional convention; some regarded him as “very obnoxious.” 78 One of Jackson County’s representatives in Florida’s 1868 House, he testified whites in the counties accepted “that this was a ‘white man’s government,’ and that ‘the colored men had no right that white men were bound to respect.” 79 Fortune testified whites’ “strong feeling of opposition” to African American suffrage

“seemed to have died out” after “they … adopted their bogus constitution [1865], and … everything they wanted and became reconciled.” 80 After Congressional rejection of the 1865

Constitution, “they became very much opposed to the rights of suffrage; that seemed to make them very bitter; they took everything better than that.” Florida’s status as a frontier area where men prided themselves on the vehemence of their political opinion, the amount of liquor they could drink, and the weapons they carried contributed to a volatile atmosphere. 81

Despite white resistance, African Americans voted and held political office “on a fairly large scale” from the end of African Americans’ legal disfranchisement in the 1865 constitution through the election of 1876. 82 White Northerners such as M.L. Stearns used African American voters to develop political machines in “a static rural society economically dominated by whites firmly committed to white supremacy.” 83 African Americans’ willingness to brave white

78 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 94. 79 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 94 80 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 95. 81 Martin, “Negro in Florida Reconstruction,” 256 - 57. 82 Price and Carleton, Negro and Southern Politics , 11. 83 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 4. 26 intimidation to vote empowered those political machines. It made white politicians cognizant of

African Americans and their political participation meaningful.

Jackson County experienced some of the most widely reported violence. Weinfeld’s analysis of the Jackson County wars led him to conclude that Jackson County had more homicides from the beginning of Reconstruction until 1872 than all other Florida counties combined. 84 Florida’s first African American Secretary of State, Jonathan Gibbs, estimated the number of African Americans assassinated in Jackson County between 1868 and 1871 at 153. 85

Charles H. Pearce, who lived in Tallahassee and was a minister of the African Methodist church and state senator from that area, 86 told the Committee that Jackson County was, “where Satan has his seat; he reigns in Jackson County.” 87 Pearce told Congress that threats and violence to intimidate African American voters had led to arrests in Gadsden and Columbia counties but “in

Jackson County they had everything all their own way.” 88 Part of the black belt of Florida, which contained North Florida’s best farming land, Jackson County, formerly under the political direction of the planters, was home to the Republican Party. 89 Jackson County’s African

Americans, 5,598, outnumbered whites, 3,930, by approximately 17%.90 Jackson County’s three representatives to the 1868 Florida House were, Jesse Robinson, Emmanuel Fortune, and James

84 Weinfeld, Jackson County , 135. 85 Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed , 24. 86 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 165. 87 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 174. 88 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 169. 89 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 22. 90 U.S. Census Bureau; Population of Each State and Territory (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870); Table II, accessed May 15, 2018, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1870/population/1870a-05.pdf 27 McMillan.91 Robinson and Fortune were African American, and McMillan was a white long – time resident of Jackson County. 92 Pearce testified that the Republican vote the preceding

November had decreased because of the “threats and intimidation” that “a great many” had described to him. 93 Political violence broke Republican control. 94 White violence effected no changes in the laws that had empowered African American voters, but it stifled their voice. For example, B.F. Tidwell, Madison County Judge performed about 25 “inquisitions” over murder victims in Madison County and testified that these murders had intimidated Republican Party members. 95 W.J. Purman, an attorney, testified that “murderous political opposition” had driven him from his home in Marianna, Jackson County. 96

Marcellus L. Stearns, who ran as the Republican candidate for governor in 1876, 97 served as the Speaker of the House of Assemble and resided in Quincy, Gadsden County. 98

Stearns described the murders of Republican Major Purman, Jackson County State Senator, and

Dr. Finlayson in March 1869. According to Stearns, “They were walking arm in arm” when a

“shot struck Purman in the neck and Finlayson in the temple.” 99 Stearns read into the record a

“Memoranda of occurrence relating to the assassinations in Jackson County, September 28,

91 Assembly Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , 1st Sess., General Assembly (1868), 3. 92 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 97. 93 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 176. 94 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 9. 95 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 114 - 16. 96 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 144. 97 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 12. 98 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 75. 99 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 78. 28 1869, and following.” 100 According to that memorandum, “John R. Ely and Seaton A. Calhoun told Richard Pooser and other negroes that they had got to vote right … or they would make them do so; that Hamilton,” who was a white Florida congressman, 101 warned “Purman should not return; that they had the upper hand and meant to keep it.” 102 He testified that the authorities never apprehended Purman and Finlayson’s killers and described the degree of mob control in

Jackson as unique. 103 Stearns testified that the organization he “supposed exists through the state” was “based entirely upon politics” because “the murders … have been universally republicans, excepting in cases of personal difficulty.” 104

Jackson County’s level of violence may have been unique, but organized violence occurred throughout the state. During the November 1871 Jacksonville hearings of the Joint

Select Committee that investigated Southern Reconstruction violence, Frank Myers testified the

Klan in Alachua County, which operated as the “Young Men’s Democratic Club,” “used force or violence to prevent certain parties from exerting too great an influence with the colored population in that county.” 105 Stearns’s testimony that the mob appeared to act in “concert,” and that a “political friend” of Allison had threatened him evidenced organized voter suppression to achieve a Democrat victory. “All Democrats may not have been Klan members, but all member

100 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 78. 101 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 99. 102 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 81. 103 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 90, 99. 104 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 84. 105 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 156 - 57. 29 of the Klan were Democrats”, and its violence was so political it seemed to function as an arm of the Democrat Party. 106

Congressional testimony showed aspiring elites instigated electoral violence. Fortune testified that before this election he had canvassed the state and spoken to “large audiences”

“without hindrance or molestation,” although there “was disposition in Monticello to make a disturbance, but the better citizens soon suppressed it.” 107 W.J. Purman, an attorney, described the agents of violence as “the chivalry; … It was not the poorer people … but the better sort of people mostly the young men.” 108 According to Purman, “the older citizens, the property – holders, were under intimidation …. They were afraid to … stop this lawless, boisterous, and chivalrous element, who … controlled public opinion and public action.” Stearns described

“considerable” disturbance during the last election and a specific incident he had witnessed.

After whites had tried to swamp the African American voting poll to prevent them from voting, the sheriff authorized a police officer to clear the polling area. One of the crowd “said that was not what they were going to permit, and then struck him over the head with a cane.” Stearns testified that he and “Colonel Davidson, the democratic candidate for the senate” quieted the matter “after a time.” “Mr. A.K. Allison, president of the Florida senate during the war, and acting governor of the state when Governor Milton [Confederate governor] committed suicide just before the war – rushed out and called to those about him to shoot me down.” Colonel

Davidson called on the crowd or mob to listen to the witness, and “both parties gradually fell

106 Martin, “Negro in Florida Reconstruction,” 264. 107 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 98. 108 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 147. 30 back a little.” A federal court indicted and convicted Allison, who received a new trial.109

Davidson’s actions illustrate the tension between the offices of a Democrat controlled government and a “boisterous” element that helped to sustain it.

The terror occurred in the context of what Weinfeld described as the displacement of the antebellum oligarchy with a new generation of leaders, the “boisterous” element. 110 Sons of the planters and professional class, who scorned farming, 111 prominently stood in this “boisterous” element. 112 Weinfeld’s use of “boisterous” to describe these local thugs suggests he sourced

Purman’s congressional testimony that described the local thugs, who drove Jackson County’s violence, as the “lawless, boisterous, and chivalrous element.” Comparison of the actions of A.K.

Allison and Colonel Davidson informs on the possible motives of this “boisterous” element.

Some of those unreconstructed rebels, such as A.K. Allison, urged violence, but others such as

Democratic senate candidate Colonel Davidson sought to suppress it. While violence could have prompted congressional investigations to threaten Colonel Davidson’s Democratic campaign, the

“boisterous,” “chivalrous” element had less to lose. Antebellum sons of privilege who lived in a

Reconstruction present, this “boisterous” element saw life from the courthouse square where politics became a contest to maintain a spot of shade. The narrow confines of the courthouse square magnified the importance of local patronage. This magnification helps explain county

Democrat organizations pivotal role in preserving its leaders’ position and place.

Divisions between courthouse and statehouse contrast the racist paternalism of

Reconstruction Era lawmakers with the virulent racism of Florida’s Gilded Age legislature. If the

109 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 76 – 77, 87. 110 Weinfeld, Jackson County , 139. 111 Weinfeld, Jackson County , 25. 112 Weinfeld, Jackson County , 70. 31 virtue of local government lies in its proximity to the electorate, then its vice similarly lies in that proximity. Governments’ touch on people’s immediate circumstances displaces less palpable considerations, and strengthened Democratic county organizations, gubernatorial appointments, and shifting political currents pulled the force for Florida’s post – Emancipation disfranchisement of African Americas towards Florida’s county seats.

Land’s heightened importance in less populated counties evidences a causal connection between local economics and violence to strengthen the connection between counties and

African Americans’ disfranchisement. The economic motivation to suppress African American political participation intensified as the economic base narrowed. Landownership provided

African Americans with an escape from white domination, 113 and the Florida Klan or regulators targeted Negro landownership. 114 Congressional testimony showed how white attitudes had hardened in rural areas. Rural communities with fewer economic bases to compete with land viewed African American land ownership more antagonistically than larger communities viewed it. Charles H. Pearce testified white attitudes varied according to the size of the county: “In those large counties they talk very favorable; …. But in the small and sparsely settled counties they are very much opposed to their having land and settling upon them.” 115 Fortune testified that the greatest obstacle to African American ownership of land lay in whites’ refusal to sell small tracts that African Americans could afford, although in Alachua and Marion counties “they do better.”

113 Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed , 18 - 20. 114 Allen W. Trelease, White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 242. 115 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 167. 32 Fortune believed the refusal to sell African Americans smaller tracts was an “understanding.” 116

An “understanding” may be understood more plainly in a smaller, less populated, more remote county. While whites would not sell land to African Americans who had to buy it from the government, they would not interfere with African Americans owing land. 117 On the other hand,

Hannah Tutson, wife of Samuel Tutson and a resident of Clay County testified she received a whipping to make her give up her land. 118 Mrs. Tutson testified that the men who had whipped her told her that the land belonged to someone else. According the 1870 Census, Alachua County had a population of 17,328, Marion County 10,804, and Clay County 2,908. 119 Census figures are consistent with congressional testimony that centered violence in less populated or rural counties where the “boisterous” element stood taller.

White attitudes towards African American land ownership help situate the origin of

African American disfranchisement in the counties. Landownership’s allocation of valuable resources addresses a fundamental purpose of government, the equitable allocation of productive resources. Records from the 1866 Legislature contrast the views of the legislators in Tallahassee with the attitudes and actions in rural counties. The Legislators who met in 1866 in Tallahassee viewed African American land ownership within the reality of emancipation. Governor Walker

116 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 100; see also the testimony of Robert Meacham, 101. 117 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 94 - 95. 118 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 59 - 64. Newspaper coverage documents Clay County Democratic Party’s decision to push for a white – only primary at the 1900 State Democratic Convention. “Green Cove Springs-Clay County Democratic Executive Committee to Meet-County Convention,” The Florida Times-Union and Citizen , May 3, 1900. 119 U.S. Census Bureau; Population of Each State and Territory (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Ninth Census (June 1, 1870); Table II, accessed June27, 2018, https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1870/population/1870a-05.pdf 33 urged the Legislature to prefer the state’s “laboring class” before consideration of “the importation of white labor.” 120 Similarly, C.H. DuPont and A.J. Peeler reported to the General

Assembly that the state’s “cultivable lands” required efforts “to make the emancipated slave an efficient laborer” before resorting to European immigration. 121 Before Florida could seek “as a last alternative resort … to the teeming population of over-crowded Europe,” it must have exhausted all efforts to make the African American “an efficient laborer.” In a July 1868 message to the Legislature, Governor Walker attributed poor agricultural performance to the newly freed slaves’ inexperience and advocated a homestead system. 122 Congressional testimony contrasts the rural counties’ opposition to African American land ownership with legislators’ focus on the improvement of African American farming efficiency. Opposition to

African American land ownership and the violent suppression of African American political activity centered in the rural counties and originated with those most directly affected by African

Americans’ changed status.

The Tallahassee lawmakers and the “boisterous” element differed in their willingness to shake the facade that Florida had begun to build. Gubernatorial appointments and apportionment diminished threats to white rule without directly restricting African American suffrage.

Unchecked violence risked congressional investigations to uncover how Florida had diluted and suppressed African American political activity. Colonel Davidson’s efforts to prevent mayhem helped avoid congressional scrutiny. Allison’s trial and conviction evidenced official action to prosecute violent acts. 123 The “boisterous” element imbued with more aspiration than means

120 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 29. 121 Journal of the Florida Senate , 2d Sess., 14 th General Assembly (1866), 57. 122 Journal of the Florida Senate , 1 st Sess., 15 th General Assembly (1868), 56 – 57. 123 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 87. 34 occupied a position of uncertainty in Reconstruction Florida. Preservation of a sense of place contributed to and in the case of the “boisterous” element possibly eclipsed economic concerns.

The “boisterous” element suppressed African American political activity and land ownership to avoid loss more than they acted to gain.

The economic interest of the “boisterous” element in courthouse squares included the power to allocate patronage. In the Gilded Age, the relative lack of federal aid to individuals or groups, other than Civil War veterans, contributed to elite driven political system in which government largess took the form of jobs for party members who mobilized the rank-and-file. 124

Bipartisan consensus on the importance of patronage separated politics from ideals. A view of government as a source of spoils for the winner drained the idealism of the Republicans who saw political participation as a right, and it spurred Democrats, who sought to exclude African

Americans from those spoils. For instance, the staunchly Democrat Weekly Floridian’s claimed that African Americans supported Independent candidate Frank W. Pope over the Democrat candidate Edward Perry in Florida’s 1884 gubernatorial election because he had promised, “to give them half of the offices as the price of their support.” 125 Patronage benefited local Democrat politicians in at least two ways. First, patronage brought the intangible aspect of status for the person who grants the office. Second, patronage touched on economic interests. Since its direct effect is limited to the office holder or appointee, its effect on the wider political audience likely resulted from other issues such as status or political elites’ use of patronage to motivate voters. A spoils approach to politics had left policy secondary to personal considerations to further divide

Republicans.

124 Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863 – 1877 , updated ed. (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014), 484. 125 “The Republican State Convention,” Weekly Floridian , July 29, 1884. 35 A Republican national administration and minority status in Florida made the ability to control political appointments of greater practical concern than winning elections. 126 For instance, Harold Bisbee, Jr. was a prominent white Republican who had settled in Florida after the Civil War to create a successful law practice before entering politics. 127 The incumbent collector of internal revenue at Jacksonville, A.A. Knight, had incurred Bisbee’s displeasure after having accepted a retainer to defend Bisbee’s opponent, Noble Hull, in an 1878 election contests. 128 Knight, Eagan, and Simon B. Conover, 1880 Republican gubernatorial candidate, competed against each other for this single position. Hays’ policy of reconciliation intensified these concerns. Republican Party membership could prove insufficient against local white

Democratic claims. W.G. Steward, the African American postmaster of Tallahassee, complained to William E. Chandler. Chandler was a critic of Hays’s reconciliation strategy, President

Chester A. Arthur’s naval chief and “unofficial minister for Southern Affairs”, and Republican

Senator from New Hampshire. 129 Steward feared for his position even through the only ground for his dismissal Democrats could cite was his race. 130 James T. Magbee, scalawag editor of the

Tampa Guardian, complained to John Sherman, Hays’ Secretary of the Treasury, over Hays’ appointment of Democrats. 131 A national administration that used patronage to reconcile with

Southern Democrats and Republican competition for patronage weakened Florida’s Republicans, while patronage unified their Democrat opposition. Most broadly, patronage reduces public

126 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 90. 127 Peter D. Klingman, “Inside the Ring: Bisbee-Lee Correspondence, February-April 1880,” Florida Historical Quarterly , 57, no. 2 (Oct.1978): 188. 128 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 52 - 53. 129 J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 24. 130 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 52. 131 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 54. 36 office to an emolument. More narrowly, patronage divided and weakened Republicans in a culture that regarded them as foreign.

Violence and fraud contributed to Rutherford B. Hays’s 1876 election, and his policy of

Southern reconciliation paved the way for Democrat ascendency and the exclusion of African

Americans from meaningful political participation. The 1876 election between Republican

Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel Tilden seemed to have brought a Democrat victory on election night until “someone” at Republican headquarters noticed that if Hays lost no more

Northern states and carried Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana Hays would have enough electoral votes to claim victory. 132 Republican election boards in Florida, South Carolina, and

Louisiana had invalidated enough returns from counties rife with violence, Democrat challenges, and submission of rival electoral certificates to create an electoral crisis.

Hays tacitly approved negotiations with Louisiana and South Carolina Democrats to peel off enough Southern Democrat representatives to assure his election. In return, the South received “discrete assurances” that a Hayes administration would adopt a policy that would treat the South with ‘“kind considerations.”’ From a February 26, 1877 meeting among four Southern

Democrats and five Ohio Republicans at Washington’s Wormley House emerged Hayes’

Southern policy: The federal government would pursue a policy of “noninterference in Southern affairs.” After the “‘Great Compromise’” between national Republicans and Democrats had delivered Florida’s contested electoral votes to the Republicans in the 1876 election, 133 the withdrawal of federal troops from Florida ended Reconstruction to return Democrat control in

Florida. 134 Foner concluded, “1877 marked a decisive retreat from the idea born during the Civil

132 Eric Foner, Reconstruction , 575 – 77. 133 Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed , 92. 134 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 24. 37 War, of a powerful national state protecting the fundamental rights of American citizens.” 135

According to Cash’s History of the Democratic Party in Florida , one of the effects of the 1876 election was that “the Democratic Party was back in power” and “that the white man would from henceforth control state elections.” 136 It is ironic that the African Americans who braved violence to vote Republican in 1876 brought to power the Republicans who began the policy of reconciliation that left the South in the hands of the Democrats, although Republican president

Rutherford B. Hays vetoed Democrat attempts to repeal election laws that “safeguarded African

American rights in the South.” 137

Continuous electoral fraud after the 1876 shows the techniques local officials used to suppress African American political activity. A New York Times article recounted the experiences of United States Commissioner, John P. Varnum, dispatched to prevent a

“repetition” of the 1878 “bulldozing.” The 1878 “bulldozing” included the Madison County

Sheriff having forcibly prevented African Americans from voting so that by the time the polls closed 200 Republicans had not voted. 138 Varnum described how Democrats used “tissue” ballots stuffed inside each other to stuff ballot boxes. 139 Election officials’ refusal to let

Varnum’s “go inside the booth when the counting began” led him to remark, “It isn’t so much the way the votes go into the box as the way they come out.” Without control of electoral

135 Foner, Reconstruction, 582. 136 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 69. 137 Lewis L. Gould. “Party Conflict: Republicans versus Democrats, 1877 - 1901” in The Gilded Age , ed. Charles W. Calhoun (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007): 270. 138 “Fraud’s Work in Florida, How the Democrats Carried Madison County. A Republican’s Exciting Experience – Pluckily Watching the Polls until Forced to Flee to a Swamp – Shot at when on a Train – How the Prisoners were rescued from a Marshal,” New York Times , November 17, 1880. 139 “Fraud’s Work in Florida,” New York Times , November 17, 1880. 38 machinery, African American voters relied on peer pressure to enforce Republican Party discipline among African American voters. 140

Numbers and arms led to direct efforts by whites to control the election. Varnum described “a young “‘cracker”’ who said, “that ‘they boxed three or four United States Marshals at Tallahassee the night before.’” The “cracker,” “said that they [had] put them on the train and made them leave.” Varnum described attempted assaults by a white named Zack Hines,

“crackers” with shotguns who cried, ‘“Murder! Murder! United States Marshals!”’, and “a man dressed in a strange garb of white, with a sort of flap or cowl … thrown over the head.” Deputy

Shelly reported to United States Marshal Joseph A. Durkee, that “a body of masked men” had taken from his custody several men he had arrested in Madison for violations of the law. Election officials control over electoral machinery was one thing, but assaults of federal marshals was something else. Just as Colonel Davidson had calmed the Jackson County mob, “prominent

Democrats” who learned of what had occurred “telegraphed … their friends in Madison

[County] that they ‘deprecated’ their action.” The “friends” in Madison took the advice and turned themselves and had their bail posted.

County electoral officials rather than voters often decided elections. A Florida Supreme

Court case spawned by the 1878 election for the Second Congressional District of Florida in

1878 illustrated how government officials affected electoral results. The Court found that the

Alachua County Board of County Canvassers Board had improperly determined certain “marked ballots were not lawful ballots.” 141 The Court reasoned that the Board of Canvassers could only determine the validity of the official signatures on the return and the number of votes cast for the candidates. The Board’s determination of the validity of the votes cast put it in a judicial

140 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 42. 141 Bisbee v. Board of County Canvassers of Alachua County , 17 Fla. 9, 18 (1878). 39 capacity, outside its mandated role. Electoral misconduct at the electoral sites accompanied actions by County Canvassing Boards. County control over electoral machinery privileged a role that proved crucial in Florida’s disfranchisement of African Americans during the 1890s.

An 1880 election contest, Hughes v. Fildes , for a seat in Alachua County’ delegation to the General Assembly of the Florida Legislature informs how county officials manipulated election machinery and how the Florida Legislature muffled cries of foul. 142 In a formal notice of protest sent to the victor, Charles L. Fildes, the contestant, Francis Hughes, alleged “the

Republican electors … who are in the majority … were deprived of any voice or choice in the appointment of the inspectors of election at the different precincts [sic].” Since African

Americans had a 20% population advantage and overwhelmingly supported Republicans, his claim of a majority Republican electorate is reasonable. Hughes contended Democrat partisans had arranged the appointment of inspectors who were intoxicated on election – day and had refused the Republicans any representatives inside the polling place. Inspectors at district number 12 concealed the ballot box “from public view” Misconduct included the creation of two sets of returns and use of armed militia around polling places “to intimidate, hinder, prevent, and deter Republican electors.” Hughes alleged that about one and one – half miles from the polling site, one of the Democrat inspectors had sole possession of the ballot box and key after the polls had closed.

Hughes detailed the fraud described in the New York Times article that discussed the experience of the U.S. Marshall Varnum. That article described Democrat ballots folded together. When the number of ballots inside the box exceeded the names on the register, the poll inspectors avoided the differently sized ballots folded together in choosing the excess ballots to

142 State Archives of Florida, Series 21, Box (Carton) 2, ff 6. 40 discard: “In the end the drawn ballots were Republican ballots.” 143 Ignoring the fraudulent

Democrat ballots, inspectors more likely selected Republican ballots for destruction. Hughes explained that “because there were forty – eight more ballots found in the box at district number three than there were names on the clerks’ list of persons who voted … the votes taken out and destroyed were largely Republican.” In a formal letter to the Florida Assembly, Hughes requested that it make “a thorough investigation … into the means employed and used to make it appear that” the elected officials had “received the apparent vote,” and he described the County

Canvassing Board’s actions as a “ private canvass [emphasis in original].” Despite Hughes’ notice of protest to Fildes, the Assembly’s Committee on Privileges and Elections reported on

January 13, 1881 that Hughes had “failed or neglected to give the legal notice” and recommended the Legislature dismiss the contest; the Legislature concurred and dismissed

Hughes’ appeal. 144 The Legislators’ silence sealed what the county officials had done. The machinery of African American disfranchisement took root at the county level. County officials’ power over the electoral machinery flowed from county officials’ role in the appointment of county officials.

After William D. Bloxham had taken the oath of office as governor January 4, 1881, accusations of fraud in the 1880 congressional election between white, Republican Bisbee and the Democrat Finley ended in a murder that linked official denunciation of violence and

Democratic use of the Klan calling card. Accusations of fraud at a hearing Madison County

Republican boss Dennis Eagan had conducted in the Bisbee-Finley contest led to Charles

143 “Fraud’s Work in Florida,” New York Times , November 17, 1880. If the inspector disregards the “tissue” ballots, which were differently sized, real Republican ballots are replaced with fraudulent Democrat ballots. See also Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age , 67. 144 Assembly Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , Eleventh Sess., General Assembly (1881), 68 – 69. 41 Savage’s, an Eagan lieutenant, shooting of Frank Patterson, a prominent Madison County

Democrat. Howard James, another of Eagan’s lieutenants, came to Savage’s assistance. The sheriff arrested Savage and James in the courtroom where Savage had shot Patterson. An all- white Jacksonville jury had convicted both men and sentenced them to death, but the state supreme court ordered a new trial. 145 While the Hamilton County sheriff transported Savage and

James from Jacksonville to Madison for a new trial, a mob stormed the railroad car, which contained the two men, and murdered them. 146 No jury sat to punish Savage and James’ killers. 147 Florida’s response to these murders highlights how officials condemned electoral violence and accepted its benefits.

While Williamson has described Bloxham’s racial opinion as “noblesse oblige,” rather than racial extremism, 148 such descriptions mask how Florida’s political elite used the Ku Klux

Klan as an electoral tool. While the Governor’s official correspondence opposed Klan lawlessness, that correspondence masks the Governor’s Klan connection. First, in a letter to the

Daily Times of Jacksonville, Governor Bloxham enclosed a copy of his proclamation of an award for the arrest of the murderers of James and Savage. 149 Second, in a Sept. 16 letter to the state attorney for the 3 rd judicial district, Bloxham assured of his “hearty and vigorous cooperation ... in any and all of your efforts to bring to justice the violators of the law in Madison

County,” vowed to protect witnesses, and offered prosecutorial assistance. 150 Third, during the

1884 gubernatorial race between the Democrat, Edward Perry, and the Independent, Frank W.

145 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 80 - 81. 146 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 86. 147 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 87. 148 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 64. 149 State Archives of Florida, Territorial and State Governor’s Letter books - Governor Bloxham, Series 32, Vol. 12, Part One of Four, doc. 75. 150 State Archives of Florida, Territorial and State Governor’s Letter books, - Governor Bloxham, Series 32, Vol. 12, Part One of Four, doc. 82 - 83 42 Pope, The Weekly Floridian identified Governor Bloxham as a speaker at “a ‘Grand Rally of the

Clans’ of the Midland of West Florida.” 151 Governor Bloxham’s willingness to speak at an electoral “Clans” rally and his condemnation of vigilante violence contrasts an official denunciation of Klan violence with a political calculation to use its practitioners to mobilize voters.

Table 1 and Table 2 show that Bloxham’s narrow margin in Madison County during the

1880 gubernatorial election supports arguments that voter fraud and violence contributed to

Democrat victory. Democrat control over county election machinery, Bloxham’s strong appeal to

African American voters, and divisions within the Republican Party had all contributed to

Democratic victory. 152 Bloxham’s narrow margin over Conover demonstrates the likely effect of

Democrat violence.

These murders had weakened Dennis Eagan’s Madison County Republican “Negro machine.” 153 African American voters followed instructions of county Republican leaders. 154

Eagan had promised Republican President Hays “that he would cause no discord in Florida

Republican ranks in the next election,” after an 1879 rebuff over a patronage appointment. 155 In majority African American Madison County, united Republican leadership should have brought

Republican voters to the polls. Since the murders of Eagan’s lieutenants had struck at the

Madison Republican organization and Eagan had pledged to work for Republican victory, violence and Democrat voter mobilization contributed more to Democrat victory than

Republican divisions had.

151 See n. 191 and accompanying text. 152 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 66. 153 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 42. 154 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 57. 155 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 53. 43 Table 1: Racial Distribution by County (1880) 156

Alachua – Madison are African American majority counties, and Hamilton – Walton are white majority counties:

Alachua (white population 6,440 – 39%, and African American population 10,016 - 61%); Gadsden (white population 4,115 – 34%, and African American population 8,055 – 66%); Madison (white population 5,600 – 38%, and African American population 9,184 -62%);

Hamilton (white population 4,472 – 68%, and African American population 2,318 – 32%); Hillsborough (white population 4, 899 – 84%, and African American population 915 – 16%); Walton (white population 3,685 – 88%, and African American population 516 – 12%)

Table 2: Vote Distribution by County for Gubernatorial Election (1880)

Certificates of the County Canvassers for the 1880 gubernatorial election in these counties between the Democrat Bloxham and the Republican Conover show:

Alachua County, 3,353 for Bloxham (69%) and 1,534 for Conover (32%); 157 Gadsden County, Bloxham with 1,230 (54%) and Conover with 1,067 (46%); 158 Madison County, Bloxham with 1,053 (51%) and Conover with 1,012 (49%); 159 Hamilton County, Bloxham with 754 (63%) and Conover with 449 (37%); 160 Hillsborough County, Bloxham with 1,153 (55%) and Conover with 960 (45%); 161 Walton County, Bloxham with 647 (90%) and Conover with 72 (10%); 162

Republican divisions weakened the opposition. Correspondence between Bisbee and

Joseph E. Lee, a “powerful African American Jacksonville Republican, who controlled much of the Negro vote in the second district,” shows how “intra-party feuding”, weakened the

156 U.S. Census Bureau; Population by States and Territories-1880 (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880); Table V, accessed May 18, 2018, https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html 157 State Archives of Florida, Alachua County Voting Records 1880, Series 21, box 2, ff 6. 158 State Archives of Florida, Gadsden County Voting Records 1880, Series 21, box 15, ff 18. 159 State Archives of Florida, Madison County Voting Records 1880, Series 21, box 29, ff 1. 160 State Archives of Florida, Hamilton County Voting Records 1880, Series 21, Box 17, ff 1. 161 State Archives of Florida, Hillsborough County Voting Records 1880, Series 21, Box 18, ff 35. 162 State Archives of Florida, Walton County Voting Records 1880, Series 21, Box 44, ff 30. 44 Republican Party. 163 These divisions festered, even though Republicans knew their fate in a

Democratic Florida. Bisbee believed “a democratic President would, I fear, make the South a hell for you & me.”164 Lee concurred: “Whoever is nominated … we must all support or elect if possible.” 165 Despite this common tie, rivalries split Republicans. Bisbee opposed William

Ledwith’s campaign for the Republican gubernatorial nomination. Bisbee’s request to Joseph E.

Lee, to “remain inactive as to Ledwith’s nomination until I can see you” illustrates the pivotal role African Americans played in Republican politics. 166 Were African American support not important, Bisbee would not have requested Lee’s silence.

Patronage fractured Republicans as it united Democrats. Bisbee and Lee “were members of the ‘ring’ faction of the state Republican party [sic] … generally opposed to the patronage powers of the governor.” 167 An African American faction led by white candidate Simon B.

Conover, the 1880 Republican gubernatorial candidate, and the black belt carpetbaggers opposed the “Ring” faction. 168 In Alachua County, Republicans split between a faction controlled by white Northerner Leonard G. Dennis and a faction controlled African American representative

Josiah T. Walls. 169 Bisbee described “personal hostilities, bitterness of feeling, and a complete vilification of the influence of Duval’s delegation in conventions” and “the alienation from our cause of two or three hundred voters in Duval County.” 170 A divided Republican Party carried the hopes of African Americans who sought political participation. Conover’s victory

“discouraged” a faction of Republicans who believed it a triumph for “the Negro faction of the

163 Klingman, “Inside the Ring,” 188. 164 Klingman, “Inside the Ring,” 200. 165 Klingman, “Inside the Ring,” 201. 166 Klingman, “Inside the Ring,” 192n13, 201. 167 Klingman, “Inside the Ring,” 188. 168 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 61. 169 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 65. 170 Klingman, “Inside the Ring,” 194. 45 party,” 171 and this belief illustrated Republicans’ dilemma. They needed African American votes to win, but their appeals for those votes alienated whites.

The need to appeal to white Democrats helps explain compromises that reduced African

Americans’ political influence. Lee wrote, “I came to the conclusion long since that we must have as our gubernatorial standard bearer, one to the manner born…. We are the ‘outs’ and what that means … and we must get as many supporters and direct and indirect friends as possible.” 172

This perceived need to compromise with opponents, such as Governor Walker, who had intimated Florida’s willingness to wait out federal occupation to avoid African American suffrage, helps to explain African American support for the 1868 constitution, despite its dilution of African American political power. African American demographics had not improved since

1865. The 1880 census shows the white population of Florida as 142,665, and the African

American population as 126,690. 173 Belief in the inevitable withdrawal of federal protection in a white supremacist culture required either independent majority status or a majority coalition. In this political climate, African Americans became a tool to maintain power.

Legislative history and congressional testimony evidenced differences between

Tallahassee lawmakers and those at the county level. The former saw uncontrolled violence as a threat to the semblance of constitutionality that they had created, whereas the latter saw it as a way to preserve claims to patronage, position, and place. The 1868 constitution’s gubernatorial appointive powers eliminated African American political strength at the local level, and

Legislative apportionment diluted African Americans’ legislative strength. The tradition of

171 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 64. 172 Klingman, “Inside the Ring,” 192. 173 U.S. Census Bureau; Population by States and Territories-1880 (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880); Table Ia, accessed May 15, 2018, https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html 46 deference to county officials strengthened the position of county Democratic officials. County officials’ manipulation of electoral machinery eroded the legitimacy of elections and reinforced the pivotal electoral role of county and Democratic Party officials. Patronage sapped a divided

Republican Party of its idealism and combined with the threat of the loss of patronage and loss of position and place to stir Florida’s unstable Reconstruction society. The threat to the facade of constitutionality posed by uncontrolled violence resurfaced in the 1884 gubernatorial election with the Independent Party, whose promises included replacement of the facade of meaningful political participation with fair elections. The 1868 constitutional framework and the intensity of the opposition within Florida’s counties to African American aspirations privilege the role of the counties in Florida’s post – Emancipation disfranchisement of African Americans.

47 CHAPTER 3

BUILDING THE FACADE

Democrats used the threat of African American suffrage to turn out their base during the

1884 gubernatorial election. Democrat divisions over conservative Democrat policies had led to an Independent Party that challenged Democrat rule. Conservative (Democrat) newspaper coverage of the 1884 gubernatorial election evidenced Democrats cynically appealed to African

American voters as they played to their base’s prejudices and fears. Warnings the Independent candidate, Frank W. Pope, would use patronage and political spoils to reward his African

American supporters motivated white Democrats. Conservative organs such as The Weekly

Floridian cast African Americans as dupes in disgruntled Democrats’ nomination of Pope to oppose Democrat nominee Edward Perry. Newspapers’ equivalency of Independents with

African American support silently called on white Democrats to rally around the party’s banner.

Democrat victory paved the way to the 1885 constitutional convention. That convention authorized a poll tax designed to exclude African Americans and used senatorial consent to preserve the political strength of whites and limit the political strength of African Americans.

The end of organized political opposition to Democratic rule solidified the hold of county

Democratic organizations over electoral machinery and paved the way to its emergence as an arm of state government charged with the suppression of African American political activity.

Critics of Governor Bloxham’s administration decried its support for railroads. Railroad development occurred in the context of Florida leaders’ recognition that a purely agrarian society lacked the development needed to compete in an industrializing economy. 174 Criticisms included railroads having sold land to non-resident speculators, complaints over railroads’ rates, services,

174 Tebeau, Florida , 273 - 74. 48 and killing of livestock. 175 The Disston land sale, an effort to clear the state’s title to land it had pledged to secure railroad development bonds, provoked additional opposition. Complaints had arisen because the state had sold the land to Hamilton Disston, a northern investor, who proposed draining the land, for what many considered an inadequate price and without sufficient protection for the squatters who lived on the land.176 The New York Times carried a Macon

Telegraph article with the headline: “Florida A Doubtful State – A Prominent Democrat Tells

Why It Has Become So.” The “dissatisfaction” of “some young men who are and have been highly useful to the Democracy” stemmed from dissatisfaction with the Bloxham administration, the Disston sale of public lands, and the monopoly on office held by men either born in the South or who had served in the Confederate Army. 177 Railroad opponents complained that the sale of the public lands had “narrowed the pastures and crippled the cattle business of ‘crackers.’”

The 1884 gubernatorial election pitted Democrats not against their Reconstruction,

Republican nemesis but against an Independent Party. Democrats dissatisfied with administration policies had gathered under the banner of an independent Party. The Independent platform’s call for railroad regulation and increased aid to public education contrasted with policies of previous conservative administrations that had emphasized economy in state government and the offering of the state’s natural resources to developers. 178 Independents also,

“called for a free ballot, a full vote, and a fair count.” 179 Calls for fair elections implicitly

175 Tebeau, Florida , 287 -88. 176 Tebeau, Florida , 278 – 79. 177 “Florida A Doubtful State,” New York Times , July 8, 1884. According to Cash, dissatisfaction with Bloxham included the view had had “double-crossed” ex-Governor Drew to obtain the 1880 gubernatorial nomination. Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 75. 178 Tebeau, Florida , 274 – 75, 288. 179 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 105. 49 acknowledged earlier frauds. Independents called for vigilance to prevent Democratic theft of the

1884 election, and warned of the dangers of one party control of election machinery.

African Americans had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the Republican Party’s

“white, largely patronage-orientated, carpetbag leadership,” and at a February 5, 1884 meeting of

African American leaders in Gainesville, African American representative, Josiah T. Walls supported a coalition of African American voters with independent Democrats. 180 Negro

Republicans, reform white Republicans, and independent Democrats met at the Independent state convention at Live Oak on June 18, 1884 to nominate Frank W. Pope for governor. 181 Pope, a fierce critic of the Bloxham administration, was a scion of a leading Madison County family and a skilled attorney. 182 Democrats nominated Edward Perry, former Confederate general, who had commanded the Florida Brigade in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, 183

Charles L. Fildes illustrates the difficulties in defining this multifaceted election in broad, unambiguous terms. Fildes, whom Hughes had accused of electoral fraud for the Democrats,

“was a cousin of Pope and editor of the Gainesville Weekly Bee.” Fildes assaulted a Perry partisan, Charles H. Jones, who had challenged Fildes’s right to be a delegate, after Fildes had tried to give a pro-Independent speech at the Democrats’ congressional convention.184 An unfortunate incident from Pope’s youth, when he had shot one of his teachers, furthered

Independents’ troubles to complicate analysis. 185

180 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 96. 181 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 104. 182 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 77. 183 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 107. 184 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 110. 185 “How Pope Killed Bristow, Statement of One Who Was an Eye-Witness [sic] of the Occurrence,” Weekly Floridian , July 29, 1884. 50 As patronage divided Republicans, it combined with prejudice to unify Democrats. In the eyes of the Weekly Floridian , Pope offered African American voters, “fawning flattery of the

‘race’ and appeals to their prejudices” in exchange for promises of “half of the offices as the price of their support.” 186 The Weekly Floridian reinforced Republicans’ identification as African

Americans, who “want to support a straight Republican, not a mongrel” ticket. Patronage spurred

Pope’s opposition. At an Independent politically rally, The Weekly Floridian saw but “a few whites, a greater part of whom were prominent in the Radical party of 1876, the rest of the whites were new disciples, converted to Independentism by the glittering promise of office.” 187

Race fueled economic anxieties over the loss of patronage, and these anxieties provided a motive for party leaders to play on whites’ concerns that Independent victory would bring African

Americans tax paid sinecures.

Opposition to African American patronage implied their unsuitability for public office.

In a February 12, 1884 article, “Political Miscegenation,” the conservative Weekly Floridian described an election “drawn on race issues” after the “Colored Conference” in Gainesville. 188

The Floridian carried an article from the Lake City Star whose description of a Pope rally witnesses the contempt with which its readers regarded the African American electorate. When

Pope had “said that the Democratic party [sic] would not give the negro their rights, he was interrupted by cries of ‘dat’s so! yes, yes!, and one darky, African American as Erebus, full of bad whiskey and Independentism, jumped up and proposed ‘three cheers for Floriday [sic] and

186 “The Republican State Convention,” Weekly Floridian , July 29, 1884. 187 “The Independent Pow-Wow,” Weekly Floridian , August 12, 1884. 188 “Political Miscegenation,” Weekly Floridian , February 12, 1884. 51 all de counties,” 189 By The Weekly Floridian’s implication, drunken African Americans supported the Independents.

Since the Legislature had not yet curtailed African American suffrage, Democrat politicians cynically appealed to African Americans. In an article captioned, “Facts for Colored

Voters,” The Weekly Floridian noted African Americans had often acted as “hewers of wood and drawers of water for the Republican party … without getting anything [unreadable word] for their loyalty.” The paper cited the People’s Journal to charge Pope as “the bitterest enemy the colored man has in the State of Florida…. He now ‘laughs in his sleeve’ at those of our race who support him and inwardly entertains for them the greatest contempt.” The Weekly Floridian carried an article from the Tavares Herald that described Pope as “one of that class of Democrats which regards the killing of a negro as a very trifling matter.” His support came not from “the patriotic among Southern Democrats, but of the violent and lawless element which made Ku-

Kluxism possible, and which traded in tissue ballots and negro slaying as political factors.” 190

The last charge is particularly ironic since a Weekly Floridian article, “West Florida Blazing”, listed Governor Bloxham as a speaker at “a ‘Grand Rally of the Clans’ of the Midland of West

Florida.” 191 The Pensacola and Atlantic Railroad furnished “transportation at nominal rates” to what the paper hoped “will be the largest events of the campaign” where “Middle Floridians will join the West Florida Democrats … and get better acquainted.” The West Florida location of this

“Clans” rally foreshadows the growing importance of white rural counties outside the black belt.

The forced resignation of Democrat R.C. Long, a candidate for elector, illustrated the

Democrats’ cynically nuanced approach toward African American voters. Newspapers

189 “The Independent Pow-Wow,” Weekly Floridian , August 12, 1884. 190 “Mr. Pope’s Canvass,” W eekly Floridian , September 23, 1884. 191 “West Florida Blazing,” Weekly Floridian , October 7, 1884. 52 editorialized against an “anti-Negro” speech given by R.C. Long. 192 According to the Weekly

Floridian , a “garbled report of Mr. Long’s Madison speech was received with ridicule, laughter, comical responses, &c.” Long’s description of “the negro ancestor crawling out of a cave with a club in his hand to kill a lizard for breakfast” had elicited “responses from the colored people” that “No he didn’t.’ ‘I know Mr. Long,’ He never said dat.’” 193 In accepting Long’s resignation, the Chairman of the State Executive Committee, Samuel Pasco, future president of the constitutional convention and a United States Senator from Florida, wrote, “ the committee does not “deem it necessary to make any lengthy reference to the public criticism upon your Madison speech. No accurate report of it exists, and the injustice done you, and the party through you, of misrepresenting your views cannot be met by a fair defense before the election, and we think you have acted in a wise and patriotic manner in withdrawing the subject from the field of public discussion.” 194 Ortiz cited Long’s response to a voice from the crowd that opposed African

American immigration to Florida as evidence of an economic motivation in Florida’s plan for

African American Disenfranchisement. 195 The New York Globe article Ortiz referenced, quoted

Long: “There are thousands of niggers in Georgia and Alabama who are working from 25 to 50 cents per day, while in South Florida especially, we are being compelled to pay from one dollar and a quarter to two dollars a day.” 196 Long vowed the Democrat Party would not “turn this government over to Pope … who has promised you half the offices.” African Americans had

“opposed us [white Democrats] in everything we have undertaken since your emancipation”, and

African American “hands have been at our [white Democrat] throats to retard us.” He assured

192 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 122. 193 “Pope’s Day at Tallahassee – A Ridiculous Failure,” Weekly Floridian , September 16, 1884. 194 “Meeting of State Democratic Committee,” Weekly Floridian , September 23, 1884. 195 Ortiz, Emancipation Betrayed , 44. 196 “Democratic Doctrine: How the Bourbons of the South Regard the Negro,” New York Globe , September 20. 1884. 53 that out of “a multiplicity of political parties … there can be but two words spelled –one of these is ‘white men’ and the other ‘nigger’ – and this practically is the only question which the white men of this state are called upon to solve at the coming election.” The article offers no further light on the relative weight of Long’s push for low cost labor or his vow to preserve white control over patronage, but it unmistakably tells of Long’s promise to efface the facade of

African American political participation. That this admission made its way into a New York paper raised the danger to those white Democrats who had orchestrated the constitutional facade.

For this act, the Democrat Party forced Long to resign.

As election - day approached, The Weekly Floridian drew sharper divisions between the white Democratic Party of Perry, and the “colored” supporters of Pope. The October 13, 1884 edition carried an article from Marianna, county seat of Jackson County, to ridicule Pope’s references to himself as a “cracker” to try to win white voters. According to the paper, “the places of honor at Mr. Pope’s political meetings are taken by colored matrons … and the

‘Crackers,’ as he calls respectable whites.… don’t like Ethiopian ‘extracts….”’197 The electorate had devolved into respectable whites who supported Perry and the disreputable whites and

African Americans who supported Pope. Overwhelming and visible white support for Perry tempered African American enthusiasm for Pope and foreshadowed Klan marches through

Orlando and Jacksonville during the Progressive Era. The Weekly Floridian described Perry rallies in Lake City, Live Oak, Madison, and Monticello as showing “unanimous [support] among the whites – while the colored felt the force of the predominant sentiment and realized

197 “A Cracker,” Weekly Floridian , October 21, 1884 54 their minority position as a class....” 198 The white electorate responded to warnings of a loss of position, place, and patronage by handing the Democrats victory.

While the size of the Independent vote (27,845 – 46 percent) compared to the Democrat vote (32,087 – 53 percent) indicated dissatisfaction with Conservative rule, The Weekly

Floridian’s election coverage had painted a picture of an electorate faced with a binary choice, the party of the white Democrats and all others. Pope carried his home county, Madison. 199 As in

1880, the Democrats won the black belt county of Gadsden, 200 but in Alachua County Perry received 1,785 and Pope received 2,041. 201 Though Pope carried Washington County in West

Florida, 202 he lost Walton County 458-421. 203 Both counties had majority white populations:

Walton’s white population was 3,685, and its African American population was 516;

Washington’s white population was 3,171, and its African American population 918. 204 Pope’s split result in the majority white counties of Walton and Washington and The Weekly Floridian’s headline, “West Florida Blazing”, to advertise a West Florida “Clan” rally suggests Democrats had chosen West Florida because they doubted their strength there. The Weekly Floridian’s , a

Democrat paper, publicizing of the rally implies that the Democrat Party intentionally relied on

KKK electoral support. The Weekly Floridian’s election coverage showed it had converted the election to a binary choice between whites and African Americans. That this theme came from the organ of the Democrat Party drops this strategy at the feet of that party. Democrat electoral

198 “The Canvas in Middle Florida,” Weekly Floridian , October 7, 1884. 199 State Archives of Florida, Madison County Voting Records 1884, Series 21, box 25, ff 3. 200 State Archives of Florida, Gadsden County Voting Records 1884, Series 21, box 15, ff 20. 201 State Archives of Florida, Alachua County Voting Records 1884, Series 21, box 2, ff 8. 202 State Archives of Florida, Washington County Voting Records 1884, Series 21, box 44, ff 42. 203 State Archives of Florida, Walton County Voting Records 1884, Series 21, box 44, ff 32. 204 U.S. Census Bureau; Population by States and Territories-1880 (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880); Table V, accessed May 22, 2018, https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html 55 victory in 1884 led to Democrat dominance at the 1885 constitutional convention where

Democrats balanced opposing factions to adjust the constitutional facade so that it accommodated the demands of Pope’s erstwhile white supporters.

The 1885 constitutional convention balanced Conservatives and their opponents around a common goal, exclusion of African Americans. The Weekly Floridian identified the exclusion of

African American voters as the moving force behind senatorial consent to gubernatorial appointments and a poll tax. Senatorial consent to appointment of local officials reconciled the conflict between the conservatives and their opposition and maintained African American political marginalization. Conservatives wanted continued gubernatorial appointments, but voters in majority white counties wanted to elect their own officials. Senatorial consent used an overwhelmingly white, Democratic legislature to circumscribe African American political strength. The poll tax’s explicit economic bar to political citizenship exacerbated class differences among white voters so directly that the convention passed the decision on the tax to the legislature. The Florida Legislature’s authorization of the poll tax helped meld the

Democratic Party to state election law to enhance its power as a non-state actor able to determine

Floridians’ political citizenship. The convention’s accommodation of predominately white counties’ demands for home rule demonstrates the political power shift towards those counties.

The poll tax privileged the position of the Democrat Party in fashioning Florida’s constitutional facade to disfranchise African Americans.

The constitutional convention of 1885, which convened at Tallahassee on Tuesday, June

9, 1885, gave the conservative Democrats the tools to secure their power in counties with

African American majorities. Standing committees included a Committee on the Right of

Suffrage and Qualification of Officers with 11 members and chaired by Austin S. “Farmer”

56 Mann. The Committee’s members included Thomas V. Gibbs, an African American attorney from Jacksonville and the son of the late secretary of state, Jonathan C. Gibbs.205 Delegates to the convention numbered 108, 206 and seven of these delegates were African American. 207 Racial views ranged from Jackson County delegate, James P. Coker, described during the congressional hearings on the Ku Klux Klan as “generalissimo”, to David S. Walker, Jr., an Independent, who had encouraged African American participation in Leon County politics. 208

Two principle issues affected African American political participation. The first concerned the governor’s power to appoint local officials. The second involved the poll tax. The governor’s power to appoint local officials insured that white county officials with whom he consulted controlled local government. 209 Cash’s History of the Democratic Party’s described the appointment of circuit judges and county commissioners as an effort to guard against any

“contingency” that might arise from “certain districts ... that were politically uncertain on account of the negro [sic] vote.”210 The disfranchising poll tax assumed African Americans’ lack of funds to pay the tax would remove them from the electorate. The convention’s adoption of the requirement that the senate consent to gubernatorial appointments responded to calls for popular rule and continued to excise African Americans from political life. Authorization of the poll tax strengthened the electoral role of the Democrat Party that exempted whites from the tax.

The 1886 constitution’s requirement that the senate consent to gubernatorial appointment of local officials empowered the white Democrat electorate at the expense of the African

205 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age , 135. 206 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 5 – 6. 207 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age , 133. 208 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 134. 209 See 22nn 59 - 62. 210 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 80 - 81. 57 American electorate. The 1868 convention had given the governor the power to appoint five county commissioners. 211 The 1886 constitution required the Senate’s consent to those appointments. 212 Republicans’ marginalization because of their association with Reconstruction and African American voters, the Independent Party’s defeat, and the flow of federal patronage under the Democrat president Cleveland to Florida Democrats had made Florida a one – party state. 213 The appointive power gave the executive branch the power to ignore the voice of

African Americans in black belt counties, and the requirement for senatorial consent empowered the white electorate who elected the legislators in an overwhelmingly Democratic state.

Gubernatorial appointments checked the popular will, and legislative consent checked the executive branch. Florida used an ostensibly racially neutral tool designed to limit the executive into a tool to disfranchise African Americans.

On Monday, June 29, 1885, J.E. Yonge from Escambia County, chair of the Committee on County, Township, and City Organization, reported to Samuel Pasco, President of the

Convention, that the Committee had considered two competing resolutions on gubernatorial appointive power for county commissioners. Wellman, of Volusia County had introduced

Resolution No. 114, and Randell, of Madison County had introduced Resolution No. 126. 214

While the convention’s record contains no details of the content of these resolutions, the 1880 census suggests that Representative Randell specified gubernatorial appointment, while

Representative Wellman specified popular election: Madison’s ratio of African American population to white population in 1880 was 62 percent (9,184/14,793), while Volusia’s ratio was

211 Fla. CONST. of 1868, art. V, § 19. 212 Fla. CONST. of 1886, art. VIII, § 5. 213 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 126 - 27. 214 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 168. 58 16 percent (538/3,294). 215 Volusia County’s overwhelmingly white population had little concern that African Americans would control local government. The Committee recommended that

Article VIII provide for “the election, by qualified electors … of five County Commissioners.” 216

Undeterred, black belt delegates continued to push for gubernatorial appointment. The next day, Tuesday, June 30, 1885, R.C. Parkhill, a Jefferson County delegate, offered Article No.

63, to provide for gubernatorial appointment of five County Commissioners. 217 The 1880 census lists Jefferson County’s African American population as 79 percent. On Tuesday, July 14, 1885,

Yonge reported to Senator Pasco that the Committee had approved of Parkhill’s proposed appointive provision. 218 Committee members Henry C. Hicks (Franklin County) and Philip

Walter (Duval County) offered a minority report to stress that the Committee had previously

“unanimously [emphasis in original]” recommended election of county officials and that the minority members “adhere[d]” to “the principle expressed in the original report.” 219 The following day, July 15, 1885, W. N. Sheats from Alachua County requested removal of his name

215 U.S. Census Bureau; Population by States and Territories-1880 (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880); Table V, accessed May 22, 2018, https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html Escambia County, Representative Yonge’s district, had a African American population of 44 percent. 216 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 169. 217 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 185. 218 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 319 - 20. 219 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 320. Although Senator W.B, Carr of Leon County is listed as a member of the Committee, neither the majority nor the minority report bears his name, and there is no record in the convention’s proceeding of his having transferred from the Committee. 59 from the majority report. 220 Sheats’ removal left the vote on the majority report in favor of appointive positions five in favor and three opposed.

Demographics and political history shows black belt legislators’ pushed for gubernatorial appointments to muffle African American political activity. One of the minority report’s authors,

Hicks, represented Franklin County, a majority white county, and the other minority member,

Walter, represented Duval County, a majority African American county with a long history of

African American political participation. Hicks later warned the poll tax violated the Fourteenth

Amendment. Sheats’s work to strengthen the public school system had earned him conservatives’ enmity. 221 Former governor Bloxham corroborates Florida’s use of checks and balances to sustain the facade that Florida had complied with the Fourteenth Amendment and

Fifteenth Amendment.

In an interview with The Weekly Floridian , Governor Bloxham discussed “safeguards” to protect local officials in black belt counties from an empowered majority African American electorate. 222 The interviewer began by noting that “many truly patriotic citizens outside of the

‘Black Belt’ … have felt that the danger to those communities involved in full electoral privileges constituted an objection which outweighed all arguments in favor …, even though those arguments are backed by the foundation principles of democratic institutions.” Governor

Bloxham described a constitutional convention as “the salvation of what is termed the ‘Black

Belt.’” He posed a rhetorical question: “Is it not better to call a Convention that may throw around the election of county officers some safeguards” than to risk the legislature’s likely

220 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 330. 221 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 138. 222 “Constitutional Convention – Governor Bloxham Interviewed,” Weekly Floridian , October 7, 1884. 60 “adoption” of constitutional amendments for “the election of county officials by the people” without those safeguards. Governor Bloxham, who had spoken at the West Florida “Clan” rally advertised by The Weekly Floridian , admitted that the convention intended to disfranchise

African American voters in local elections, while it protected the suffrage of white Floridians.

Defeat of the popular election of county officials removed a threat to the Democrat Party’s role in the appointment of local officials. Senatorial consent’s accommodation of white demands for home rule evidences the political currents’ shift toward predominately white, rural counties within a framework that privileged the county Democrat Party organizations.

The poll tax proved one of the most divisive issues before the convention. First, it restricted the suffrage of African Americans and whites. Second, its having conditioned the right to vote starkly presented Florida’s constitutional facade: It restricted African American suffrage.

Third, its tie to economics and class divided white delegates. The idea of property or wealth qualifications to vote did not spring from the constitutional convention. During the congressional

Ku Klux Klan hearings, Malachi Martin, former warden of the state prison and Republican office holder, testified, “they [whites] say they are the owners of the property … they are the parties who pay taxes … they are the owners of the soil, and they are the parties who are responsible.” 223

A belief that only those who hold property have an interest in the state sufficient to entitle them to a voice contrasts with the belief that those affected by the state should have a voice in its actions. The former emphasizes government’s effect on property, while the latter emphasizes government’s effect on people. Property qualifications comported with the interests of the holders of wealth, principally land in agricultural Florida, whereas the removal of wealth restrictions on suffrage offers more air for the view that the resources that merit protection and

223 Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42 nd Cong. (1872): 195. 61 development include the state’s human capital. As wealthy Democrats, conservatives had an economic and ideological affinity for the poll tax.

As a staunchly Democratic paper, The Weekly Floridian carries weight in assessing the motives behind the poll tax. An article, “Qualified Suffrage,” from the Palatka News , described the poll tax as a measure to protect Florida from “a class of voters” whose “passion, ignorance and political prejudices” would make majority rule “ruinous.” 224 The author of this opinion piece believed that the tax protected Florida from these voters “if county officers are elected.” The tax also protected Florida from “the autocratic power now wielded by the Florida executive.” The author’s mixture of gubernatorial appointments and the poll tax illustrates their common purpose

- to disfranchise African Americans. The poll tax or property qualification would serve as another of the “safeguards” described by Governor Bloxham to disfranchise African

Americans. 225

On July 17, 1885, the chair of the Committee on Suffrage and Eligibility, Hernando

County delegate, Austin S. “Farmer” Mann, reported that the Committee considered the poll tax

“a dangerous clause” and recommended its consideration as “a separate ordinance that voters could adopt or reject without affecting the ratification of the Constitution.” 226 Were voters to consider the poll tax as a separate ordinance, the convention could continue its deliberations.

Representatives E.L. Odom of Bradford County and S.J. Turnbull of Jefferson County dissented from the majority report to argue the poll tax provision should be part of the constitution and not

224 “Qualified Suffrage,” Weekly Floridian , May 13, 1884. 225 “Constitutional Convention – Governor Bloxham Interviewed,” Weekly Floridian , October 7, 1884. 226 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 346. 62 submitted as a separate ordinance. 227 On Saturday, July 18, 1885, Duval County representative

Thomas V. Gibbs, who was one of the convention’s African American Republicans, offered a minority report to recommend that “the Ordinance imposing a poll tax as a pre-requisite to the right to vote … not pass.” 228 On Wednesday, July 22, 1885, former Chief Justice Randall presented to the convention the voice of the laboring population. 229

A convention “of the working people of Jacksonville and vicinity” had prepared “a solemn protest” to the proposal for a poll tax. 230 The protest cited Georgia’s poll tax that had concentrated “the duties and privileges of citizenship among a privileged class … who can pay the tax without any effort.” The protest warned that Georgia’s tax had “served to pervert … a democracy into an aristocracy.” The protest accepted the idea of “a $1capitation tax … applied to the Common School Fund” but objected to the conditioning of the right to vote upon the payment of the tax. Such a condition “looks too much like forcing a citizen of a reputed free country to buy the privilege of exercising his prerogatives” and “savors too much of aristocracy and despotism … contrary to the spirit and genius of American institutions.” In an illustration of the conservative and “cracker” or rural, white county poll tax divide, of the 17 delegates who opposed the tax, 16 came from majority white counties. 231

Convention debate over the poll tax as ordinance or constitutional requirement often seemed mired in pettifogging obfuscations at the expense of larger issues. For instance, on

Tuesday, July 28, 1885, Senator Blount from Escambia County offered a substitute for the

227 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 348 - 49. 228 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 361 - 62. 229 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 137 - 38. 230 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 402 - 04. 231 Kousser, Suffrage Restriction , 97 - 98. 63 proposed Article XIV that provided for a poll tax, unlike the proposed provision that the

Committee of Suffrage and Eligibility had reported.232 Senator Mann, chair of the suffrage and eligibility committee, moved to “indefinitely postpone” consideration of Senator Blount’s proposal; Senator Blount withdrew the substitute and proposed a resolution “that the payment of a poll tax … be a prerequisite to voting.” 233 While consideration of the poll tax as a separate ordinance could allow the divided convention to approve a constitution, a larger issue was whether the legislature or the voters should determine suffrage eligibility.

The following day, July 29, 1885, legislators considered amendments that put the poll tax at issue. The first amendment made the proposed poll tax subject to legislative enactment. Polk

County Senator Wilson’s motion to add, “ Provided , [emphasis in original], The Legislature shall so prescribe” required the Legislature to pass separately the poll tax. Against Senator Wilson’s proposal, Senator Yonge offered an amendment that limited voting to those “who, if he be liable to pay a poll tax, shall have paid the same for the year in which such election shall be held, and for the year preceding if he were then subject to such tax.” The convention rejected the proposal by Senator Wilson by a vote of 50 to 44, and it approved, by a vote of 53 to 43, Senator Yonge’s amendment to strengthen the poll tax; the convention adopted it, 54 to 47. 234

Later that afternoon, Hicks, who had previously urged election rather than appointment of county commissioners, moved to “strike out the words ‘shall have paid his poll tax’” as in

“contravention of the act of the Congress of the United States, June 25, 1868, admitting Florida

232 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 500. 233 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 501. 234 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 509 – 11. 64 to representation in Congress, and Article XIV of the Constitution of the United States.” 235 The convention tabled or declined to adopt the amendment by a vote of 53 to 33. 236 Defeat of Hicks’s amendment left only whether the voters or the Legislature would authorize the tax. In a nod to earlier outbreaks of Floridian vote fraud, the convention tabled or defeated an amendment that prohibited the disqualification as voters of those who had feloniously committed election fraud or intimidated voters. 237 Similarly, motions to prescribe uniform ballots to address “tissue ballot[s]”, require uniformly sized ballots, and prohibit elections inspectors from folding or turning down ballot corners were defeated or tabled. 238 The convention had defeated measures to correct the electoral frauds and abuses that had plagued Florida, and the convention declined to disfranchise individuals who had received felony convictions for electoral fraud or intimidation.

Senator Mann’s majority report given during the 4:00 p.m. session on July 31, 1885 conceded the preference for submitting the poll tax question to the Legislature, but doubted the

Legislature would have a greater clarity than the convention. The majority recommended that the voters decide the poll tax in an ordinance separate from the constitution’s ratification. 239 The minority report substituted section eight to give “the Legislature … the power to make the payment of the poll tax a prerequisite for voting.”240 The minority report resembles Senator

Wilson’s amendment, which the convention had earlier defeated. On August 1, delegates

235 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 513. 236 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 513 - 14. 237 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 514. 238 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 521 - 22. 239 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 557. 240 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 561. 65 Turnbull and Randell of Madison County moved to amend the minority report to require the

Legislature to institute a poll tax, whereas the minority report simply gave it the power to institute a poll tax. 241 This motion from Madison County, one of the black belt counties, demonstrates the black belt counties’ interest in strengthening the poll tax; its mandate that the legislature pass the tax lay just outside the extreme version of a constitutional mandate. The convention voted 51 – 47 in favor of Senator Mann’s motion to table (defeat) the amendment, and to adopt the minority report, which authorized the legislature to adopt the tax.242 Since the minority report’s sponsors included W.T. Orman of Franklin County, who had voted against tabling Hicks’s amendment to strike the tax as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment, discrimination seems to have played a lesser role in passing responsibility to the legislature than the sponsors’ statement that the legislature as the people’s representatives should decide the issue. Senator Mann moved to give Article XIV its final reading, and the convention adopted

Article XIV as amended by a vote of 86 – 12. 243 The final version of the 1868 constitution in

Article VI, Suffrage and Eligibility” did not condition the right to vote upon payment of a poll or capitation tax, but section eight gave the Legislature the “power to make the payment of the capitation tax a prerequisite for voting.” 244 The parliamentary peregrinations of the poll tax demonstrate the currents of white populism and African American disfranchisement.

The gubernatorial election of 1884 and the constitutional convention of 1885 added the voice of white, yeoman farmers to Reconstruction’s struggles over position, place and patronage.

241 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 566. 242 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 566. 243 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 566 - 69. 244 Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida (1885), 608 - 09. 66 Dissatisfaction with Conservative rule had brought an Independent challenge that Democrats defeated with racially inspired warnings of African Americans’ threat to white’s hold on the levers of patronage and power. Delegates to the 1885 constitutional convention resolved conflicting demands for popular rule and African Americans’ political marginalization. Florida’s

Democratic Legislature would “safeguard” white rule in the black belt counties as it strengthened county Democrat Party organizations. Elimination of electoral alternatives to the Democrat Party allowed the constitutional convention to continue to rely on county Democrat organizations to

“safeguard” white rule as it relied on a Democrat controlled legislature’s use of senatorial consent to shift some of the power from the executive branch. The authority of the county

Democrat organizations in decisions on appointments now received the backing of Florida’s legislature. County Democratic organizations would assure continued white suffrage and suppress African American political activity. During the 1890s and the Progressive Era, Florida’s legislature would complete a constitutional facade that combined populism and relied on county

Democrat Party organizations and county election officers to disfranchise African Americans.

67 CHAPTER 4

COMPLETING THE FACADE

This chapter examines the counties’ role in the completion of the constitutional facade.

The end of electoral opposition to the Democrat Party and senatorial consent brought rural anti - railroad opposition to conservative Democrats within the architecture of Florida’s constitutional

Potemkin village. The struggle over African American suffrage was a three-part struggle that balanced conservatives, yeomen farmers, and African American voters with the finger of the county Democratic organizations on the scale. Gubernatorial appointments that relied on county party officials’ consent combined with legislative apportionment increased the influence of county Democratic organizations outside the conservative dominated black belt. The Florida

Legislature combined anti-railroad populism with electoral laws that discriminated against the poor and illiterate, and it relied on the Democratic Party’s county organizations and county election officials to exempt white Democrats from Florida’s disfranchising electoral laws.

Democrat control of Florida’s politics mooted concerns over patronage, but African American marginalization picked up steam as county Democratic organizations moved the state party towards a white only rule.

Senator Wilkinson Call personified the populist, anti-railroad voters who challenged the conservatives. Senator Call’s tirade against African American lust reinforced the call for African

Americans’ excision from Florida’s white society. Excluded from political participation and socially isolated, African Americans retained only a shell of the citizenship guaranteed by the

Fourteenth Amendment and the right to vote guaranteed by the Fifteenth Amendment. Patronage, gender, and protection of position and place all contributed to Florida’s disfranchisement of

African Americans. Shifting political currents had moved the seats at the table of government,

68 but the counties continued to set the table. County Democrat organizations played an integral role in the corrupt enforcement of cynically written electoral laws.

The railroads that carried Florida’s development in the Democratic plan also carried the seeds of division. Governor Perry in his message to the legislature had described “the interests of the railroads and of the people” as “identical.”245 The legislature disagreed. People complained over the amount of railroad charges and discrimination in imposing those charges. The Florida

House of Representatives unanimously passed “an act to provide for the regulation of railroad freight and passenger tariffs.” 246 In a May 3, 1889 petition the shippers and growers union of

Polk County complained to the Florida Senate that “the people” had been “additionally taxed” to pay for a Railroad Commission to “have their freights lightened” but had been “compelled to pay.…. more for the same classes than before.” 247 The petitioners claimed that the railroads had shirked their responsibility for freight damage and had required shippers “to make claims to distant and unknown connecting lines.” Railroads had paid “so called ‘land agents’ and employees for lobby and other similar ‘diplomatic’ work … out of the treasury … supplied and created only by the travelers and shippers .” [Emphasis in original] Petitioners demanded “a keen, searching investigation in the hands of an expert committee … of the ‘inner wheel’ of the railroad companies.” On February 28, 1890, Florida’s U.S. Senator Wilkinson Call submitted a resolution that the Attorney-General prevent further land sales until Congress had provided for

“patents to all actual settlers for 160 acres and to all purchasers in good faith.” 248 Senator Call,

245 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , (1887), 22. 246 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , (1887), 857 - 58. 247 Journal of the Florida Senate , regular sess., (1889), 314 - 17 248 21 Cong. Rec. 1794 (1890). 69 who was a nephew of former Florida governor, Richard Keith Call,249 personified Florida’s populist blend of opposition to railroads, big business, with racism. Call, who had served in the

Adjutant-General’s Department of the Confederacy and participated in the battle of Olustee in

February 1864, had served as a Tallahassee delegate to the 1867 County Democratic or

Conservative Convention and decried Reconstruction’s “scheme to Africanize the Southern

States.” 250 Call took “the poor settlers’ part against the railroads.” 251 In the 1890s, Florida created an electoral system that relied on the county Democratic Party organizations to balance anti- railroad populism and the racism that had marked the 1884 gubernatorial election.

If the convention’s authorization of a legislative enactment of a poll or capitation tax demonstrated the conservative’s power, the convention’s reduction of counties’ maximum representation suggests limitations on that power. The 1868 constitution had set the maximum number of a county’s legislators as four. The 1886 constitution reduced that number to three.252

This reduction further diluted whatever African American political strength had survived the fraud and violence in the black belt counties and increased the legislative strength of predominately-white counties. For example, Santa Rosa County, a West Florida County, had a white majority of 71 percent and a population of 6,650, while Alachua County had an African

American majority of 61 percent and a population of 16,662. 253 Santa Rose County would send the same number of legislators to Tallahassee as Alachua County. 254 Senatorial consent in a

249 Edward C. Williamson, “Wilkinson Call, A Pioneer in Progressive Democracy,” (master’s thesis, University of Florida, 1946): 205. 250 Williamson, “Wilkinson Call,” 45 – 46 251 Williamson, “Wilkinson Call,” 207 252 Fla. CONST. of 1885, art. VII, § 3. 253 U.S. Census Bureau; Population by States and Territories-1880 (By Counties) in the Aggregate, From the Original Returns of the Tenth Census (June 1, 1880); Table V, accessed May 28, 2018, https://www.census.gov/prod/www/decennial.html 254 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 152. 70 reapportioned legislature indicated the developing strength of the conservative opposition. For instance, the first legislature to meet, after the convention, rejected the poll tax. 255

Alongside developing opposition to the conservative’s economic aristocracy, restrictions on African American political activity picked up steam in the late 1880s. On Tuesday, May 7,

1889, the Florida House of Representatives passed, 43 – 10, “an act to provide for the payment of a capitation or poll tax, as a prerequisite for voting”, 256 and on May 16, 1889, the Speaker of the Florida House informed that body that the Florida Senate had passed the poll tax act. 257 The enacted statute specified that only voters “who have paid their capitation or poll taxes … shall be

… authorized to vote at any general, special or municipal election” and required voters to produce a poll tax receipt if challenged. 258 The poll tax imposed an equal burden on African

Americans and whites, but African Americans had less ability to pay the tax than whites had. 259

Newspaper accounts show how the Democratic Party’s county organizations helped white

Democrats avoid these restrictions.

Had the poll tax explicitly exempted white voters, it likely would have cracked Florida’s facade of constitutional compliance. Local officials, county Democrat officials, and interest groups informally maintained the constitutional facade.260 Political factions paid their supporters’ poll taxes.261 These payments simultaneously nullified the tax’s rationale of insuring voters’ stake in political questions and empowered local Democrat organizations. Local governments administered the tax to favor Democrats. Senator William Chandler placed into the

255 E.g., House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , (1887), 135. 256 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , regular session, (1889), 589 - 90. 257 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , regular session, (1889), 826. 258 Act of May 25, 1889, Fla. Laws ch. 3850, 13, 13 – 14. 259 Price and Carleton, Negro and Southern Politics , 13. 260 Kousser, Suffrage Restrictions , 68. 261 “Tampa-Contesting Political Factions Pay $4,500 in Poll Taxes,” Florida Times-Union and Citizen , April 19, 1900. 71 Congressional Record a special from the December 8, 1890 edition of Ocala’s Mail and Express by W.A. Platt. Platt had described how the failure to appoint needed tax collectors had left

Republican voters in long lines without the needed poll tax receipts. 262 Democratic run businesses “crowded” in line to pay their business licenses the month before the election, and the

Duval County tax collector allowed “Democratic managers … a book of tax receipts, antedated and signed in blank by the collector” with which they paid the poll taxes of Democratic voters who had fallen delinquent in those payments. The tax collector allowed Democratic managers to pay their members’ taxes, but required Republicans to pay individually.

The poll tax was not the only step towards constitutional disfranchisement taken by the

1889 Florida Legislature. The Legislature reached back to 1843 when it designed the multiple- ballot-box law. 263 The “multiple-ballot-box law” required the county commissioners to place in each polling place ballot boxes “labeled in plain and distinct Roman letters, or in a plainly written handwriting, with the office or officers to be therein voted for.” 264 It mandated that “no vote for any office other than that for which such box shall be designated and labeled shall be counted.” In order for their votes to count, voters had to place them in the correct ballot box. For example, a vote for “governor” incorrectly placed into the “congressional representative” ballot box would not count. 265 The statute also required voters to use uniformly sized ballots that

262 21 Cong. Rec. 1866 (1894). 263 James Owen Knauss, “The Growth of Florida’s Election Laws,” Florida Historical Society Quarterly , 5, no. 1 (July, 1926), 10. 264 Act of June 4, 1889, Fla. Laws ch. 3879, 88, 102, repealed by Act of May 25, 1895, Fla Laws ch. 4328, 56. 265 Kousser, Suffrage Restriction , 50. 72 contained only the name of the office and the candidate. 266 Election inspectors, whom the county commissioners had appointed, had the duty to maintain “good order at the polls.” 267

Unlike the poll tax, which equally burdened African American and white voters, the multiple-ballot-box law particularly burdened African American voters. Price and Carlton point out that the 1890 census listed as illiterate 50.6 percent of the African American population but only 11.3 percent of the white population. 268 African American voters’ illiteracy translated into a one-in-two chance of having their votes discarded, whereas whites had but a one in ten chance.

Further illustrating the disparity between white and African American illiteracy, a report from the Evening Post inserted into the congressional record listed the number of illiterate white

Floridians over 21 in 1880 as 10,885 and the number of illiterate African American Floridians over 21 as 39,753. 269 West Virginia Senator Faulkner cited a report that estimated the percentages of white and African American illiteracy over age 21 as 20 and 71 percent, respectively. 270 Concern over the effect on illiterate whites likely influenced nine white county legislators to join Republicans in opposing the measure. 271 The multiple-ballot-box law, which served as a covert literacy test to discriminate against African Americans, came from a political culture that considered money spent on African American education as wasted. During the 1884 gubernatorial election, in the speech that drew his censure, R.C. Long had harangued against

African American education: “Morally and socially there has been no [educational]

266 Act of June 4, 1889, Fla. Laws ch. 3879, 88, 101 - 02. 267 Act of June 4, 1889, Fla. Laws ch. 3879, 88, 100, 103. 268 Price and Carleton, Negro and Southern Politics , 13 - 14. 269 21 Cong. Rec. 1685 (1890). 270 21 Cong. Rec. 1875 (1890). 271 Kousser, Suffrage Restriction , 100 - 01. 73 advancement, and there are a lot of Democrats who are getting tired of this school tax.” 272

Florida’s demography and history removed any pretense of plausibility that veiled Florida’s use of ostensibly racially neutral provisions to discriminate against African Americans. The counties helped carry out the effective disfranchisement of at least one-half of the African American electorate without an explicit violation of the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments.273

Contemporary newspaper coverage shows how Florida looked to other Southern states for guidance in disfranchising African Americans. According to a May 31, 1900 Times-Union article that described South Carolina’s effort to maintain white supremacy, the “‘Eight box law’

... was a modified form of educational qualification” to ensure that “all organized effort to overthrow the white or Democratic party ceased.” 274 The Times-Union lauded the South

Carolina law because “very many of them [African Americans] never took the trouble to go to the polls at all, and when they did go it made no difference.” The Times-Union declared, “those who participated in the struggle to wrest the State from the hands of robbers who had used the ignorant and debased negro vote to ... destroy our civilization have no apologies to make.” In the mind of white Southerners, fear of African American political power, white supremacy, “The

272 “Democratic Doctrine: How the Bourbons of the South Regard the Negro,” New York Globe , September 20. 1884. 273 Kousser, Suffrage Restriction , 32. Florida’s Legislature replaced the multiple-ballot-box in 1895 with the “Australian ballot”, which contained only candidates’ names, grouped according to office, and without any provision for vote a straight party ticket. Charles D. Farris, “The Re- Enfranchisement of Negroes in Florida,” Journal of Negro History , 39, no. 4 (Oct. 1954): 261. While Farris described the Australian ballot as another method of discriminating against illiterate Negroes, Carter Brown described it as a way to allow voters to cast their ballots secretly. Canter Brown Jr. “Prelude to the Poll Tax: African American Republicans and the Knights of Labor in 1880s Florida” in Florida’s Heritage of Diversity: Essays in Honor of Samuel Proctor , eds. Mark I. Greenberg, William Warren Rogers, and Canter Brown, Jr. (Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 1997): 89. 274 “White Supremacy in the South-Struggle that Overthrew Carpetbag Rule in South Carolina,” Florida Times-Union and Citizen , May 31, 1900. 74 Lost Cause,” and the restoration of governmental integrity required the dominance of the white,

Democrat Party and justified election measures to secure that dominance. 275

While the poll tax at least allowed a challenged prospective voter to produce a poll tax receipt, placing a ballot into the wrong box allowed no corrective action. The multiple-ballot-box law showed how a discriminatory effect may render an ostensibly non-discriminatory law unconstitutional. First, local officials administered the law to favor whites. For example, election workers placed Democrat ballots on top of the correct ballot boxes but kept Republican ballots off the correct boxes. 276 Second, while the law’s requirements applied to all races, R.C. Long’s denunciation of spending for African American education demonstrates a legacy of slavery that uniquely burdened African Americans. Political history and culture combined with demographics can evidence a law’s unconstitutionality. Florida’s counties enforced the legislature’s duplication of the constitutional convention’s use of ostensibly constitutional provisions to create a constitutional facade.

The legislative record demonstrates the partnership of Florida and the Democratic Party in passing the multiple-ballot-box law. Senator W.H. Milton Jr. of Jackson County introduced

House Bill No. 250 on May 7, 1889. 277 Section 25 of the law as passed provided for “separate and distinct ballots” for offices from Governor to Presidential Electors. 278 On May 17, 1889,

Representative E.C. Morgan of Orange County moved to amend Section 25 of the bill to require

“one ballot box for all State and county offices.” 279 Orange County’s total population was

275 For a review of the use of the myth of the Lost Cause, see Seth Weitz, “Defending the Old South: The Myth of the Lost Cause and Political Immorality in Florida, 1865-1968,” Historian , 71, no 1 (2009): 79 – 92. 276 21 Cong. Rec. 1866 (1890). 277 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , regular session, (1889), 591. 278 Act of June 4, 1889, Fla. Laws ch. 3879, 88, 101 - 02. 279 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , regular session, (1889), 833. 75 11,036, and its African American population was 1,997 (18%). 280 Representative J.F. Stapler of

Hamilton County moved to adopt the amendment, and Representative E. Christie of Leon

County moved to table the Amendment. Hamilton County’s population totaled 8,507 and its

African American population totaled 3,170 (37%). Leon County’s population totaled 17,752, and its African American population totaled 14,631 (82%). The Legislature tabled or defeated the proposed amendment. Opposition to and support for the operative portion of the multiple-ballot- box law correlated with racial demographies. House Bill No. 250 passed the House of

Representatives May 23, 1889 on its third reading, and the vote was 44 “Yeas” and 13 “Nays.” 281

Representative Morgan qualified his “Yea” vote with the statement that he continued to find its operative provision “objectionable” but voted for it “as a matter of expediency, notwithstanding the objectional [sic] features” because he believed the election laws required revision and he found the bills other provisions “satisfactory.” Representatives John B. Walton and B.N. Mathers from Hillsborough County explained their support for the bill as follows: “This bill emanates from a Democratic caucus, the highest tribunal known to party organization, and having in its wisdom decreed that the bill do pass, we recognize the authority as both mandatory and supreme.” 282 Hillsborough County’s total population was 14,913, and its African American population was 2,917 (20%). While the legislative records do not contain the text of the bills, comparison of section numbers with the bill as enacted combine with the statement of disapproval by Senator Coulter of Levy County show the tension between the imperative of

African American disfranchisement and the white demands for home rule. Senator Coulter said,

280 U.S. Census Bureau; Sex, General Nativity, and Color, Native and Foreign Born and White and Negro Population, by Counties 1870 to 1890 (October 29, 1894); Table 15, accessed February 19, 2019, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1895/dec/volume-1.html 281 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , regular session, (1889), 995. 282 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , regular session, (1889), 995 – 96. 76 “The eight ballot boxes will be likely to confuse many good men and cause them to lose their votes.” He also believed it gave “too much power to certain election officers,” and he felt

“confident, a large number of Democrats in my county do not approve.” 283 Levy County’s total population was 6,587, and its African American population totaled 2,130 (32%). Legislators such as Senator Coulter from majority white districts opposed measures that could threaten their constituents’ vote, but the votes of the Hillsborough legislators and their accompanying statement show that fealty to the Democratic Party outweighed other factors. County Democrat organizations and electoral officials worked hand – in – glove to disfranchise African Americans as they empowered white Democrats. The Democratic Party had metastasized into a state agency charged with voter suppression.

State electoral returns showed discriminatory effect. 284 The 1880 election between

Bloxham (Democrat) and Conover (Republican) showed the former with 28,378 and the latter with 23,297: a difference of 5,081 or 10 percent of the total vote cast. The 1884 election between

Perry (Democrat) and Pope (Independent) showed the former with 32,087 and the latter with

27,845: a difference of 4,242 or seven percent of the total vote cast. Similar tabulations for the respective Democrat and Republican gubernatorial candidates for 1888 through 1896 show percentage differences of 20, 59, and 53. Between 1880 and 1896, the difference between the

Democrat and the Republican vote increased approximately 500 percent. Florida’s Legislature combined anti-railroad populism and the suppression of African American political activity to create voting restrictions had secured Democrat dominance “at the cost of popular government.” 285

283 Senate Journal, Proceedings of the Senate , regular sess., (1891), 766 - 67. 284 State Archives of Florida, Election Return Canvasses, Series 1258, vol. 2, page 195. 285 Kousser, Suffrage Restriction , 103. 77 The Florida Legislature repealed the multiple – ballot – box statute in 1895. The

Amended statute required that the county commissioners provide “one ballot box for each polling place in their respective counties,”286 while the multiple-ballot- box law required a separate ballot box for eight different offices. 287 Figure 1 illustrates the 1895 statute’s single pre

– printed ballot.288 The 1889 statute required separate blank ballots for eight separate offices, which included

Presidential Electors, and required that these ballots contain only the name of names of the person or persons voted for and the office. 289

Legislative intent to discriminate rings clearly through the silence of repeal’s scant legislative Figure 1: 1895 Ballot history. On May 1, 1895, Lee County

Representative Francis A. Herndry explained, “There are but few illiterates in the county, and they are patriotic enough to sacrifice their votes rather than have the State go into the hands of

286 Act of May 25, 1895, Fla Laws ch. 4328, 56, 69. 287 Act of June 4, 1889, Fla. Laws ch. 3879, 88, 102. 288 Act of May 25, 1895, Fla Laws ch. 4328, 56, 74 - 75. 289 Act of June 4, 1889, Fla. Laws ch. 3879, 88, 101. 78 the negroes [sic] and radicals.” 290 According to the 1890 census, Lee County had a total population of 1,423, and an African American population of 89, (6.25%). 291 White rural solidarity had driven white Democratic representatives to risk disfranchising some white voters to insure that they had disfranchised all African American voters.

The people’s champion, Senator Call, offers insight into the motivations that made suppression of African American political participation the loadstone for Florida’s legislators.

Florida’s use of election laws to circumvent the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments drew congressional attention that showed Florida’s populist racism. On February 5, 1894 at the conclusion of a debate over revenue and bonds, Senator William E. Chandler’s (Rep. N.H.) asked the Senate to “turn away from the inferior question of money and its uses to the supreme question of man and his liberty.” 292 Senator Chandler’s description of Southern election fraud and violence included a petition that described, “a systematic reign of terror… in Union County,

Arkansas, for … terrorizing the whites and whipping and shooting at colored voters.” 293 Senator

Chandler’s presentation included letters from Palatka and Fruitland, Florida, and Platt’s article in

Ocala’s The Mail and Express .294 These writings explain how county officials and the

Democratic Party used the electoral machinery to disfranchise African Americans. Platt’s article recounted “a pile of Democratic ballots … on each box” that allowed Democrat voters to deposit them in the appropriate box, but election officials’ refusal to supply Republican ballots and the unexplained disappearance of ballots that Republicans had supplied. Since the law requires

290 House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , regular session, (1895), 454. 291 U.S. Census Bureau; Sex, General Nativity, and Color, Native and Foreign Born and White and Negro Population, by Counties 1870 to 1890 (October 29, 1894); Table 15, accessed February 25, 2019, https://www.census.gov/library/publications/1895/dec/volume-1.html 292 21 Cong. Rec. 1859 (1894). 293 21 Cong. Rec. 1714 (1890). 294 21 Cong. Rec. 1865-66 (1894). 79 election inspectors’ presence before balloting could commence, Democrat election officials in strongly Republican precincts in Madison and Gadsden Counties would not “appear, and no votes could be cast.”

A speech by Senator Call, who had defeated General Robert Bullock to win election to the senate in 1881, 295 illustrated the racist populism behind Florida’s constitutional facade.

Senator Call’s opposition to the railroad aligned conservatives and Florida Senate’s 1891 decision to return him to the U.S. Senate showed anti-railroad populism and conservative rule revolved around their common axis of African American disfranchisement. Democrat divisions over appointment of local officials and the poll tax turned on their effect of white voters and not discrimination against African Americans. The sentiments expressed by Senator Call would bubble up from the counties during the 1900 Democrat state convention that created the white primary to excise African American political participation in the only relevant statewide political organization.

Senator Call began with investigations by Judge Charles Swayne of the Northern District of Florida and U.S Attorney General, W. H.H. Miller, into alleged Democrat voter intimidation in the 1888 election, which had brought Francis P. Fleming to the governor’s mansion. 296 The murder of John Bird of Madison County had brought these investigations to the Senate floor. 297

Senator Chandler introduced a February 17, 1890 resolution that the Attorney-General “transmit to the Senate any information … with reference to the recent assassination at Quincy, Fla., of

W.B. Saunders, United States deputy marshal for the district of Florida.” 298 In response, Senator

Call described the federal officials as, “men, desperate, and reckless, and lawless” who had been

295 Tebeau, Florida , 277. 296 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 159. 297 21 Cong. Rec. 1533 (1890). 298 21 Cong. Rec. 1380, 1533 (1890). 80 “sent throughout the entire country to stir up in peaceful communities a war of races, and rape and the outrage of women and children.” According to Senator Call, these agents’ “indiscreet partisan zeal, indirectly prompt[ed] these acts” to make the agents “ particeps criminis [emphasis in original] in the outraging of women and the murder of infant life … inciting the use of the torch and the dagger.” 299 Senator Call had turned the issue from the murder of a federal official investigating election fraud to the need “to purge the judicial office of its corruption and impurity” as “you can not [sic] execute the law with the ministers of crime.” 300

Senator Call apologized for white violence and placed the responsibility for that violence on the agents who had journeyed south to investigate Southern racially motivated electoral violence. In communities, “where the colored people … acknowledge … that prosperity, peace, and good feeling exist between them and the white people” “wicked and evil-minded men” had

“incite[d] those easily misguided people to acts of crime and violence.” The resulting violence made “every man’s household a place of danger and insecurity, not only to life, but to the virtue of the wife and the child that he is bound to protect.” 301 Federal agents had incited, “acts of fiendish malevolence” that would “move any people to the profoundest depths of feeling” and

“spread like fire to the bold and restless spirits to whose excited minds and inflamed feeling acts of violence and blood may appear in the seductive forms of resistance to wrong and to the corrupt tyrannies….” With this apology for Southern murder, Senator Call had turned responsibility for “the outraging” upon “the Senator from New Hampshire…. The blood of these people rests with him.”

299 21 Cong. Rec. 1532 (1890). 300 In his description of this exchange, Williamson concluded, “It is clear that some of the lawlessness in Florida ... was due to the very poor grade of men appointed by the Republicans to enforce the law.” Williamson, “Wilkinson Call,” 145 – 46. 301 21 Cong. Rec. 1533 (1890). 81 On February 24, 1890, Senator Chandler requested the censure of Senator Call for having added the following to the congressional record: “”The shrieking ghosts of the hundreds of outraged and murdered women and children, the victims of the wild lust and passions of a race who owe all that they know of religion and civilization to the Southern white people…. Like

Banquo’s ghost … the ocean will not wash his [Saunders] blood-stained hands from the guilt of the rape and murder of these tender white women and children.” 302 Senator Call replied,

“Substantially every expression or idea contained in that report was used by me.” Senator Call’s apology for Florida’s electoral violence defended the tools of disfranchisement in the voice of the “crackers,” who The Weekly Floridian had assured did not choose “Ethiopian ‘extracts.”’

Senator Call personifies the moving spirit of African American disfranchisement that had moved from the black belt counties during Reconstruction to dwell in the counties of anti-railroad populism.

Senator Call’s re-election to the Senate came despite conservative opposition. 303

According to April 30, 1891 Florida House records, J.R. Newlen, who was an anti-Call lobbyist, 304 testified, “I cannot support Senator Call from the fact that I feel morally sure that he was the instigator and supporter to some extent of the independent movement in my county.” 305

Geographical balance further complicated the issue.306 On October 15, 1891, Governor Fleming had instructed Florida’s Attorney General, W.B. Lamar, to obtain a writ of mandamus to compel

Florida’s Secretary of State to transmit the appointment of R.M. Davidson, whom he had

302 21 Cong. Rec. 1640 (1890). 303 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 178. 304 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 175. 305 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Florida , 3 rd sess., (1891), 840. 306 Journal of the House of Representatives of the State of Florida , 3 rd sess., (1891), 848. 82 appointed September 22, 1891 upon the expiration of Senator Call’s term. 307 While Florida’s

Legislature re-elected Call to the Senate on May 26, 1891, 308 varied currents that often ran in conflicting directions shaped the journey, and arguments that Senator Call’s racial views turned his election exaggerate or distort the evidence. For instance, the Farmers Alliance refused to support Senator Call’s re-election. 309 The U.S. Senate voted to seat Senator Call on December 8,

1891. 310

Senator Call’s rant offers insight into how the motivations for Florida’s disfranchisement of African Americans had changed over time. The “boisterous” element described the perpetrators of Reconstruction Era violence. The 1885 constitutional convention’s adoption of senatorial consent to check gubernatorial appointments evidenced the shifting political currents that flowed power to county seats. The multiple-ballot-box law and the poll tax show how

Florida’s Legislature wrote election laws that relied upon the Democratic Party’s county organizations to protect white voters’ franchise and to extinguish African Americans’ franchise.

Since The Weekly Floridian and the papers whose stories it carried associated the Independent

Party with African American voters, Newlen’s belief that Call supported Independents offers only ambiguity on the role of race. In analysis of motivation’s change over time, the relevant variable is the attitude towards African American political participation, and the relevant inquiry is how Florida’s shifting political coalitions affected that variable. Senator Call espoused a racism that forsook the paternalism of Florida’s Reconstruction Era lawmakers for a virulent racism that emphasized African American rapine. This racism came from a senator who

307 State Archives of Florida , Territorial and State Governor’s Letter books - Governor Fleming, Series 32, Vol. 33, Part Five of Nine, doc.482. 308 Senate Journal, Proceedings of the Senate , regular sess., (1891), 609. 309 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 177. 310 Williamson, Florida Politics in the Gilded Age, 178. 83 supported white, yeomen farmers and opposed railroads and conservatives. The racism that had feted Governor Bloxham during a West Florida “Clan” rally came into the U.S. Senate chamber from a champion of the anti-railroad and conservative faction in Florida politics. Florida’s shifting political coalitions had moved African American disfranchisement beyond

Reconstruction’s paternalism and fight for political spoils. The votes of the Hillsborough County representatives on the multiple-ballot-box law show that the Democratic Party embodied this perceived existential need to excise African American political participation. Evidence shows that the county Democratic organizations and electoral officials enforced it.

Florida’s push for to excise African Americans politically portended a more profound denial of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship. The Fourteenth Amendment

(1868) had made African Americans citizens of the United States, and it provided for the loss of congressional representation of those states that had abridged the right to vote. The Fifteenth

Amendment (1869) guaranteed the right to vote against efforts to restrict it because of

“race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Contemporary newspaper coverage during the

Democrat state convention in 1900 and Senator Call’s tirade interpreted within Glenda Gilmore and Laura Free’s framework of gender and political rights demonstrates that Florida’s constitutional facade extended beyond the denial of African Americans’ political citizenship. Not all citizens have political rights, but all those with political rights are citizens.

The Democratic Party’s county organizations began a process that linked political and social citizenship. Florida’s electoral laws and constitutional provisions had excised African

Americans from political life. County Democratic organizations’ push to adopt a white only primary used a denial of African Americans’ right to participate in society as a vehicle to extinguish African Americans’ political citizenship. Denial of African American political

84 participation and a legacy of slavery and discrimination had removed African Americans’ ability to effect change in a political system and society that sought their exclusion. Denial of political power and a legacy of discrimination had excised African Americans’ citizenship.

Democrat control and African American disfranchisement had mooted considerations of patronage. Senator Call’s tirade against African Americans’ “wild lust and passions” foreshadowed the warning “of the African American incubus” contained in an article, “The

Republican Color Line,” in the June 1900 Times-Union .311 This article’s appearance during the

Democratic State Convention suggests that the spirit that bubbled up from the county organizations at that meeting saw a threat greater than the loss of patronage and a reason more compelling than the assurance of docile labor. The internal logic of white supremacy linked the

Times-Union’s “incubus” to restrictions of African Americans’ political participation.

Before Hays’ policy of Southern reconciliation, Republicans had considered those “who made discrimination on account of race or color as something worse than [a] traitor.” For instance, “the barber who refused to shave a negro [sic] in the same chair prepared for his white customer might be sent to jail.” 312 The Times-Union linked these laws to the power of the state that underpinned them. Republican power in the South to enforce these measures had relied on the “national Treasury” and the “grace of negro votes,” but now “Senator [Mark] Hanna seems inclined to assist white Republicans of the South to free themselves of the African American incubus.” The Times-Union created a syllogism that used African American political participation as a middle term to define the relationship between African Americans’ social

311 Incubus 1: an evil spirit that lies on persons in their sleep: esp: one that has sexual intercourse with women while they are sleeping … 2: NIGHTMARE 2 3: one that oppresses or burdens like a nightmare .” Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary , 11 th ed., s.v. “incubus.” Glenda Gilmore developed this idea in Gender and Jim Crow (see n. 4). 312 “The Republican Color Line,” Florida Times-Union and Citizen , June 21, 1900. 85 equality and the power of the state. The article’s “incubus” implied another syllogism. This syllogism used “incubus” to relate African American equality to the “wild lust and passion” that

Senator Call had denounced.

The Times-Union claimed that Republicans’ support for African American rights depended on their need for African American votes, rather than a commitment to equality. For example, when Republican support for African American rights had brought Republicans into

“antagonism” in Northern states, Republicans would say to “the negro … he must look out for himself.” The policy of Southern reconciliation demonstrated the fair weather nature of

Republicans’ loyalty towards African American voters. Republican concession “of the negro’s franchise to the States” and Republicans’ assumption that the “Southern people and politicians were the political enemies of the negro” rendered doubtful the “old political creed: ‘The

Republican party is the friend of the negro.”’ Freed from the need for African American votes, a re-elected McKinley would consider what he could to so that “he may wipe his record clean of the appointments forced on Southern communities.” If Southern voting restrictions caused

Southern states to lose congressional representation, “Republicans may consent to the repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment.” The “Republican Color Line” echoed Governor Walker’s assurances that time would allow Florida to remain within the union on its own terms, without need for a constitutional facade.

Prejudice against African Americans’ rendered impossible their political role. Since

Northern prejudice would force the Republicans to abandon Northern Negroes, “why, then should the negro continue Republican, except to furnish proof that he is not fit to be an American citizen.” Unwelcome in Republican and Democrat parties, African Americans’ efforts at political participation showed them “not fit to be an American citizen,” a citizenship guaranteed by the

86 Fourteenth Amendment. African Americans’ efforts at political participation in a society where the perception of inequality produced inequality demonstrated their unfitness for citizenship and reduced the Fourteenth Amendment to a logical absurdity. Without exclusion, the “incubus” of

African American political participation could threaten the separation that preserved white supremacy. 313 County Democrats’ push to restrict participation in Democratic primaries to whites sought to resolve the logical absurdity that their reasoning had made of the Fourteenth

Amendment.

The Florida Democratic Party’s white primary epitomized the role that county

Democratic organizations played in African Americans’ disfranchisement. 314 Steps to silence

African Americans’ political voice in the 1890s culminated in an ironic twist of progressivism.

Originally developed to amplify the popular political voice, the primary system became the final nail in the denial of African Americans’ political participation. While the poll tax, the multiple- ballot-box, and gubernatorial appointive powers had limited African Americans ability to affect

Florida’s political system, African Americans who managed to navigate these obstacles could participate in it. The white primary qualitatively differed for it prohibited all African American participation in the Democratic Party’s selection of candidates. Since the Republican Party had ceased to play a significant role in Floridian politics, the white primary barred African American political participation in the only relevant political organization in Florida. The Democrat Party

313 The logic of this position is laid out in a pamphlet from later generations of white supremacists. Were barriers on segregation in education relaxed, young people could develop the idea that interracial dating was acceptable, and the resulting miscegenation would undermine the purity of the white race. State Archives of Florida, Florida Legislative Investigation Commission records, Series 517, box 9, Mixed Schools – Mixed Blood . 314 South Carolina federal courts recognized the importance of control over the electoral process when they invalidated South Carolina’s attempt to resuscitate the white primary. Charles D. Farris, “Effects of Negro Voting Upon the Politics of a Southern City: An Intensive Study, 1946 – 48” (PhD diss., The University of Chicago, 1953), 105 – 06. 87 had effectively nullified African Americans’ right to vote guaranteed under the Fourteenth and

Fifteenth Amendments. While supporters of the poll tax could claim that voters’ ability to affect property rights required those voters to own property, and supporters of the multiple-ballot-box law could claim that the ability to distinguish the office of governor from representative justified multiple-ballot-boxes, the white primary excluded all African Americans, regardless of wealth or literacy. It removed all pretenses to anything other than the excision of the African American

“incubus.” Cash in his History of the Democrat Party echoed the Times-Union’s praise of the

South Carolinian origins of the multiple ballot box law. 315 Cash wrote, the white primary

“excluded [African Americans] by party rule, and … colored men would stop taking the trouble to vote in general elections.” 316 The white primary capped Florida’s facade of constitutional compliance because Florida had hidden its exclusions behind a non-state actor, the Democrat

Party. That an African American might navigate the obstacles to formal political participation was irrelevant because white Democrats had usurped control over the electoral system.

The legislative history of Florida’s statutory authorization for primaries and the platforms of the Democratic Party show the state and Party worked in unison to pave the road for county

Democratic Party organizations to maintain white political control and for Florida to avoid loss of congressional representation. The Democratic Party’s role in the formal exclusion of African

Americans from political participation developed from its role as a supporting beam in Florida’s constitutional facade. County party organizations’ power conformed to the practice of deference that had developed during Reconstruction to avoid gubernatorial consultation with legislators from majority African American districts. 317 The part played by county party organizations

315 See n. 274 and accompanying text. 316 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 106. 317 See nn. 59 – 62 and accompanying text. 88 highlights their pivotal role in the completion of the constitutional facade. Consistently with earlier practice, the 1888 Democratic Party platform had “pledged” the party’s gubernatorial nominee “to regard the recommendations of the different counties … through their party organization for that most vital of all positions, their county commissioner.” 318 The 1892 platform resolved that the Party’s gubernatorial nominee “pledged to regard the recommendations of the Democrats of the several counties in the state in the matter of executive appointments.” 319 In each county the executive committees “shall in such manner as may by them be deemed expedient ascertain the wishes of the people of their respective counties” in connection with those appointments. The Democratic Party had formalized the consultation that had begun during Reconstruction.

After the Democratic Party had formalized the consultations between the governor and the Democratic Party county organizations, the legislature formalized the ability of the parties to determine who could participate in the selection of candidates. In 1897, Florida had authorized

“the executive or standing committee of any political party … to take by primary election, the sense of the members of said party” on potential nominees for county officials, delegates to state conventions, and choice for U.S. Senator. 320 The statute limited primary participation to individuals who had paid their poll taxes, but it allowed the “executive or standing committee” of the party to decide “the terms and conditions” by which potential voters “shall be regarded and taken as proper members of the party … entitled to vote … as a member of that party.” 321 The

Senate’s consideration of each section of the bill contained only an amendment that restricts potential electors to those who had paid the poll tax; there is no discussion of the right of the

318 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 169. 319 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 171 – 72. 320 Act of June 11, 1897, Fla. Laws ch. 4535, 62. 321 Act of June 11, 1897, Fla. Laws ch. 4535, 62. 89 parties to determine eligibility to vote in the primary. 322 While the Legislature did not limit the right to vote to whites, it allowed political parties to limit participation to whites. Gubernatorial appointments had taken the meaning of the vote in local elections. The white primary extended that electoral theft by removing African Americans’ ability to vote in the only meaningful election to select candidates for state – wide office in Florida.

The white primary developed from the Party’s county organizations. 323 Democratic Party county organizations had provided a means for white Democrats to remove enfranchised African

Americans’ ability to elect local officials. These organizations developed into appendages of state government to allow white Democrats to exclude enfranchised African Americans from any meaningful electoral role. As the state had delegated to the parties the right to determine party membership, the state party had allowed county organizations to select delegates “in any manner

... considered best by the people acting through the party organizations as recognized by the last

State convention.” 324 The 1892 platform acknowledged “much difference of opinion” over how county organizations determined eligibility to participate in primaries, and it only resolved on the importance of uniformity. 325 The 1896 majority report on the platform dropped all references to primaries, although the minority report urged the use of primaries for all state offices. 326

322 Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the Regular sess. of the Legislature of the State of Florida , (1897), 1007-08. 323 “The origin of the white primary proper in Southern states is … in the local or county party rules of the Democratic Party.” O. Douglas Weeks, “The White Primary,” 8 Miss. L.J. 135 (1935): 136. 324 “Call for State Democratic Convention,” Florida Times-Union and Citizen , April 11, 1900. 325 “Resolved, That in all primary elections … in any Democratic primary … the same qualifications shall be required of others in such primaries as are necessary to qualify an elector for Democratic nomination, or to admit them to the full confidence and counsel of the Democratic party.” Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 171. 326 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 172 - 74. The platform also supported the permanent creation of separate schools for the races “without any discrimination of race, color or previous condition.” 90 Newspaper coverage of the county conventions that led up to the 1900 Democratic state convention revealed the fractures that had developed within the county organizations over racial criteria. The 1901 platform’s support for the “nomination of all candidates … by a majority in white Democratic primary elections” resolved the issue. 327 The Democratic Party’s reliance on county organizations combined with the tradition of gubernatorial deference to county organizations indicates the crucial role of county party organizations in the white primary’s development.

The movement for African American electoral disfranchisement came from autonomous county party organizations. Newspaper notices throughout April announced the Democratic

Party’s State Convention in Jacksonville on June 19, 1900. 328 A typical announcement described the convention’s purpose as the selection of delegates to the national convention, the nomination of candidates for state offices, and the transaction of “such other business as may come before the convention.” Local organizations’ power extended beyond who should vote to include how they should vote. In West Palm Beach, delegates to the Dade County Democratic convention debated whether to vote by secret ballot or voice vote. 329 These county organizations also debated whether African Americans could participate in Democratic primaries. At a meeting of the Clay County Democratic executive committee at Green Cove Spring, after passage of a motion to conduct the primaries in accordance with state law, “the qualification of voters was discussed at length”, and “a resolution was finally adopted that only white known Democrats

327 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 176 - 78. 328 “Call for State Democratic Convention,” Florida Times-Union and Citizen , April 1, 1900. 329 “Dade County-Democrat Convention at West Palm Beach on Tuesday-Delegates Elected to State and Congressional Conventions-Instructed for Beggs,” Florida Times-Union and Citizen , May 4, 1900. 91 were eligible to vote at the primaries.” 330 In keeping with Duval County’s history of African

American political participation, the Duval County Democratic Party issued an amended call for a primary without any racial restrictions to elect delegates to a county convention. 331 In Tampa, the county Democratic convention spent “considerable time” on resolutions, including “a white primary for county offices June 5.” 332 Counties’ demands for local rule had checked gubernatorial appointment with senatorial consent. County Democrat organizations empowered by the Florida Legislature now spearheaded the party’s adoption of the white primary.

The Party’s 1901 platform asked that state senator Emmett Wolf of Escambia work with

J. Walter Kehoe and J.M. Barrs to prepare a primary statute to submit to the Florida

Legislature. 333 On April 22, 1901, the Senate appointed Wolf to the joint committee that considered the primary election bills. 334 The 1901 primary legislation tracked the 1897 legislation’s grant to “the Executive or Standing Committee” the authority to “declare” who should be considered “as proper members of the party” that had called the primary. 335 The statute included within the “Executive or Standing Committee” the state party, congressional district or county committees. 336 These various committees appointed inspectors from a list of qualified

330 “Green Cove Springs-Clay County Democratic Executive Committee to Meet-County Convention,” Florida Times-Union and Citizen , May 3, 1900. 331 “Corrected Call for Convention-County Committee Convened to Amend it-Omitted Offices Inserted-Plans for City Polling Places-Chairman Triay Will Meet Inspectors from All Precincts on Wednesday and Thursday at Headquarters,” Florida Times-Union and Citizen , May 13, 1900. 332 “Tampa-Democratic County Convention Under Modified Conditions-The Effect of the Recent Landslide Plainly Visible-State and Congressional Delegates Named,” Florida Times- Union and Citizen , May 4, 1900. 333 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 180. 334 Journal of the Proceedings of the Senate of the Regular sess. of the Legislature of the State of Florida , (1901), 335 - 36. 335 Act of May 31, 1901, Fla. Laws ch. 5014, 160, 161. 336 Act of May 31, 1901, Fla. Laws ch. 5014, 160, 160. 92 voters agreed upon by a majority of candidates running in the primary. 337 These inspectors’ duties included weighing the evidence to judge challenges that party members had raised against anyone offering to vote, and they could require a voter to give under oath the facts that authorized him to vote. 338 These provisions allowed the majority to exclude African Americans from participation in the enforcement of electoral rules designed to exclude African Americans from the political process.

The “County Executive or Standing Committee” had the power to determine only challenges brought “by any county candidate.” 339 Candidates for state or congressional offices who were dissatisfied with the ruling of any “county committee affecting his candidacy” in that county could file a protest with the “State or Congressional Executive Committee,” and the chair of that committee could request the “County Executive Committee” to forward a copy of the evidence and its rulings on that evidence. 340 This procedure left the county organizations of the

Democrat Party as the final tribunal on the ability of Floridians, including African Americans, to challenge a denial of their right to vote. Florida had made the Democratic Party’s county organizations the arbiter of voters’ challenges to its constitutional facade.341

The state Democratic convention in Jacksonville in 1900 adopted a platform that combined populism and suffrage restrictions in a mixture that attenuates linkages between imperialism, domestic racism, economic elites, and Florida’s restrictions on African American suffrage. Attenuation of these links shows that the rise of anti – railroad sentiment had washed

337 Act of May 31, 1901, Fla. Laws ch. 5014, 160, 163. 338 Act of May 31, 1901, Fla. Laws ch. 5014, 160, 161. 339 Act of May 31, 1901, Fla. Laws ch. 5014, 160, 164. 340 Act of May 31, 1901, Fla. Laws ch. 5014, 160, 164. 341 That the system was eventually declared unconstitutional in Smith v. Allwright , 321 U.S. 649 (1944) illustrated its constitutional deficiencies. For a review of the case law surrounding that decision, see Michael J. Klarman, “The White Primary Rulings: A Case Study in the Consequences of Supreme Court Decisionmaking,” 29 Fla. St. U.L. Rev. (2014). 93 away Florida’s paternalistic racism and effaced economic conservatism. The platform described as “utterly subversive of the principles of liberty” efforts “to establish an imperial government over millions of people thousands of miles from our shores ….” 342 On the domestic front, the platform echoed populist attacks on monopoly and privilege. It considered “the power of the trusts … next to imperialism … the most vital question” because it “chokes the prosperity of the masses of the people” and “threatens the integrity and permanency of our institutions.” 343 The platform sympathized with “the brave Boers” in their fight “against the criminal aggressions of the monarchical government”, supported a constitutional amendment for the direct, popular election of senators, and favored the “municipal ownership of all public utilities.” 344 While the county units of Florida’s Democratic Party supported the everyday laborer and the right of foreign peoples to self - government, those units excluded African Americans from political participation in the Democratic primary, the primary linkage between the “people” and their government. County organizations determined the delegates to the state conventions that wrote a platform tinged with populism and grounded the legislation that guaranteed white dominance.

While local elites may have dominated county organizations, the decentralized party structure that supported white supremacy and voting restrictions illustrates the moving force of the county organizations. The organizational model that Florida used to disfranchise African Americans consisted of separate spheres of independent centers of power, the Democratic Party’s county units, under an umbrella organization, the state Democratic Party, which responded to their demands. While African Americans retained suffrage, the Florida Legislature and county

342 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 174 - 75. 343 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 175. 344 Cash, History of the Democratic Party , 176 - 78. 94 Democratic Party units had devised a system in which that suffrage counted for little because a white electorate committed to white supremacy had already decided the candidates.

The ghost of Reconstruction violence appeared in Ocoee, a small town twelve miles from

Orlando, on election - day, November 2, 1920. The violence followed local officials’ denial of

African Americans suffrage. FBI reports on Ocoee documented local officials’ discriminatory application of election law and Ku Klux Klan intimidation of African American voters. Ocoee shows that cynically drafted laws to deny its citizens’ rights ultimately depend upon force unrestrained by law. The manipulation of the law to sustain an illusion had lost the law’s moral authority to leave only an underpinning of force, a legacy of the “boisterous” element.

The deaths of at least five people and the lynching of two African American males in

Ocoee began after Moses Norman had insisted on voting. 345 Norman and July Perry were

“bosses” of the African American community. 346 Special Agents of the FBI interviewed P.

Blakely, an election inspector at precinct number 10, who said election challenges to African

American voters had begun around 11:00 a.m., and that the Judge of Elections had told those voters that they needed to go before the justice of the peace to give an affidavit. 347 None of the

African American voters returned, except for Moses Norman. Norman, who had had his vote challenged earlier in the day, walked toward his automobile and said ,‘“That by God he would vote”’ and reached into his car for a shotgun that lay on the seat underneath a cover. The FBI report has an unnamed white male striking Norman on the head with a revolver, but other reports

345 Statement of Operations, Evidence Collected, Names and Assessment of Persons Interviewed, Places visited, Etc., [Electronic Record]; Investigative Case Files of the Bureau of Investigation; Records of the Federal Bureau of Investigation Record Group 65, Bureau Section case 180337- 10; “The Disfranchisement of Colored People in the South” Microfilm Publication M1085; National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD: 4. 346 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 4. 347 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 3. 95 described witnesses’ subsequent statements that Constable Bernie Cannon had seized the shotgun at Hoyle Pounds’ garage and struck Norman with the revolver. 348 Sam Salisbury told the

FBI that after Deputy Sheriff Wittie had deputized him to keep order on election day, Wittie told him at 9:30 p.m. that African Americans were gathering at July Perry’s home and that he should go to the house to arrest him. 349 After Salisbury and Perry had struggled in Perry’s home, whites in the posse and African Americans in the house exchanged gunfire before the house burned. 350

While witness versions of Perry’s fate differ, all agree that the white “posse” seized and lynched him. Before calm returned, fire had destroyed much of the African American community.

The FBI report corroborates findings that the perpetrators of the violence and the enforcers of Democrat domination no longer made up the “chivalrous element.” Estelle Perry told the FBI that men from Winter Garden, Florida had challenged the African American voters. 351 In his thesis on the Ocoee massacre, Lester Dabbs’s interviews documented the

“headquarters” of a Klan unit in Winter Garden. 352 While the unit’s earliest “membership … was of the highest caliber”, ‘“riff raff”” from Orlando had ‘“infiltrated’” the local unit. Overtime, the reliance on fraud and violence had attracted its most adept practitioners.

348 Dabbs, Lester Jr., “A Report of the Circumstances and Events of the Race Riot on November 2, 1920 in Ocoee, Florida” (master’s thesis, Stetson University, 1969), 24. The New York Times identified the challenged voter as July Perry. “Kill Two Whites and Six Negroes in Florida Rios- Negro, Barred from Polls, Gathers comrades, Who Perish When Posse Burns House-One Caught and Lynched-Victim Had Threatened Trouble, Taking Shotgun to Booth-Had Not Paid Tax,” New York Times , November 4, 1920. 349 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 6. 350 “Kill Two Whites and Six Negroes in Florida Rios-Negro, Barred from Polls, Gathers comrades, Who Perish When Posse Burns House-One Caught and Lynched-Victim Had Threatened Trouble, Taking Shotgun to Booth-Had Not Paid Tax,” New York Times , November 4, 1920. 351 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 7 352 Dabbs, “A Report on Ocoee,” 18 – 19. 96 The New York Times documented similar intimidations. In Lake City, “unknown parties” tied “a noose” around the neck of B.J. Jones, the African American chair of the Columbia

County Republican Club, before they put him “into an automobile in his night clothes.” 353

Jones’s organization of “churches, lodges, and night schools” “to instruct negro women how to vote” included “carrying on a propaganda to have negro women expelled if they failed to exercise the franchise.” According to the New York Times , the right of African American women to vote had created “tense” conditions in other parts of Florida and reported the likely need to call in “State troops … to Baker County to guard the election there in November.”

The FBI report detailed African Americans’ resistance to efforts to enforce white political dominance. African American voter education efforts that drew vigilante violence in Lake City mirrored Estelle Perry’s, wife of July Perry, description of Ocoee before the election violence.

She told the FBI that an African American man names H.B. Lester from Orange County had opened a school of instruction for African Americans shortly before election - day. 354 Special

Agent Leon E. Howe’s interview of J.W. Floyd, chair of the investigating committee of a local chapter of the NAACP, led him to conclude that a Ku Klux Klan rally held two days before the general election had served “to intimidate negro voters.” 355 The agent determined that the poll tax had “deterred male negro voters.”356 It seemed that “white voters were being given every preference over colored voters.” 357 White voters needed only their name and the statement that they had registered, whereas African American voters had to present their registration certificates and answer questions on age, place of residence, and often “immaterial matters.” Poll workers

353 “Try to Intimidate Negro Politician – Florida Band Hauls Him from Bed and Puts Noose Around His Neck,” New York Times , October 7, 1920. 354 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 8 - 9. 355 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 10 - 11. 356 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 12. 357 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 12. 97 told the agent that they had registered white over African Americans at the rate of four to one, and Floyd told the agent that large number of African Americans had left the polls after it had become apparent a few minutes before the polls closed that they were not going to vote. 358

Repression created resistance. Floyd said they intended to send “their people to the polls with instructions to stay in line until the polls were closed.” 359 Floyd said the NAACP had “ample” funds and intended to use the courts to protect African Americans voting rights, up to and including the Supreme Court.

The heritage of the past came alive during the 1920s. Local patronage raised resentments similar to those that The Weekly Floridian had fanned in 1884. After a bomb had destroyed the home of the African American postmaster at Live Oak, T.S. Harris, the postmaster’s son told the agent that many of the whites had resented Harris’s appointment. 360 A Ku Klux Klan parade through Daytona the night before the election to intimidate African American voters reprised the heritage of white solidarity that The Weekly Floridian had championed 36 years earlier during rallies for Governor Perry in communities such as Live Oak, Lake City, and Madison. 361 In this heritage, “the colored felt the force of the predominant sentiment and realized their minority position as a class.” 362 Those committed to maintaining the white supremacy that the Florida

Legislature had subcontracted to the Florida Democratic Party had resurrected the Klan to lock the door that the Florida Legislature had closed.

Shifting political coalitions brought an anti-railroad populism that strengthened African

American disfranchisement. The poll tax and the multi-ballot-box law relied on white, Democrat

358 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 12 - 13. 359 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 11. 360 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 15. 361 Statement of Operations, Records Group 65, 15. 362 Note 198

98 officials to excuse white Democrat voters’ compliance. Gubernatorial consultations with local

Democrats over county appointments evolved into Florida Legislature’s reliance on the

Democrat Party to exclude African Americans from the only politically relevant state - wide organization. Removal of African Americans from Democrat primaries left African Americans with a small place in a Progressive Era Democratic Party that re-defined Florida’s constitutional facade. African Americans’ political silencing had rendered the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of citizenship meaningless.

99 CHAPTER 5

CONCLUSION

It is important to identify the moving force of Florida’s restrictions on African American political activity to avoid assigning a false reason that can obscure the cause and hinder efforts to correct it. The role of Florida’s counties in African Americans’ post – Emancipation disfranchisement demonstrates the falsity of the nostrum that local governments provide greater breadth for personal liberty than centralized, federal authorities provide. As Madison observed in the Federalist Papers , local governments may offer petty tyrants the isolation needed to effectuate their schemes. Local governments’ proximity to the people places them within a heartbeat of the passion that stigmatizes the “other” to preserve position, power, and prestige.

Florida’s 1865 Constitution had denied African American equality and suffrage. Compromises to assure Congress that Florida had complied with the Fourteenth Amendment never shook Florida legislators’ assumption that politics remained the province of whites. The hope that today’s compromises would blossom into a future of inclusion led African Americans to support the

1868 constitution, even though it contained structural impediments to African American political participation. In Florida, non-state actors, such as the Young Men Democratic Clubs, used violence, and county electoral officials used fraud to control electoral results. Lawmakers relied on devices such as gubernatorial appointments and apportionment to suppress African American political participation without Florida’s repeal of its adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Florida’s structural impediments to African American political participation brought no fruit of political participation. Rather, it brought a localism that saw politics as a zero – sum game.

County Democratic organizations’ role as the enforcer of suffrage restrictions began when Reconstruction governors sought their counsel over gubernatorial appointments.

100 Gubernatorial appointments avoided direct election by majority African American populations or reliance on legislators whom those populations had elected. Local election officials manipulated electoral returns to assure Democratic control, and Democratic organs such as The Weekly

Floridian melded white solidarity with a belief in African American inferiority, and threatened loss of patronage to mobilize a white electorate to maintain Democratic power in 1884’s gubernatorial election. Governor Bloxham exemplified a Democratic establishment that relied on non-state actors such as the Klan, while it condemned racially inspired violence. Florida’s 1885 constitutional convention used senatorial consent to balance local control of government and the imperative of white political control to resolve divisions among Democrats. The 1890 Florida

Legislature used the multiple-ballot-box law and the poll tax to retain the form African American suffrage and the reality of its denial. The details of the legislation, the laws’ administration,

Florida’s political and cultural history, and the legacy of slavery show how the Democratic Party county organizations’ function as a linkage between people and government accepted the prejudices and fears of its members. The Party’s acceptance of these prejudices and fears transformed the Party into a reflection of those prejudices and fears. Transformation of perspective or outlook moved the Party from the paternalistic racism of Tallahassee’s

Reconstruction Era lawmakers and towards the virulent racism that feted Governor Bloxham at a

West Florida “Clan” rally and animated Senator Call’s rant. Florida relied on a non-state actor, the Democratic Party, to shield it from the consequences of its actions that had left African

Americans with only a shadow of their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Florida’s locally organized Democratic Party debated a white only primary before the

1900 state convention adopted it. The moving force for the white primary that completed

Florida’s constitutional facade originated in the county Democratic Party organizations. Florida’s

101 1901 Legislature delegated to these organizations the responsibility to manage elections to maintain the semblance but not the reality of African American political participation. By then,

African Americans’ political marginalization had eliminated the need for Florida’s politicians to feign a need for their support. Senator Call’s senate speech evidences the common ground between the conservatives and their Democratic opponents, the suffocation of African American political participation. Senator Call also showed that African Americans’ political silencing came from a deeper and more fundamental concern than economic issues such as patronage. African

Americans incited towards political activism became an “incubus” that threatened yeomen’s families. The Florida Democratic Party had the duty to extinguish African American political activity to forestall its metastasization into an “incubus” that threatened the foundation of society, the family.

The Times – Union article, “The Republican Color Line” grounds political citizenship in social citizenship. African Americans’ pursuit of political citizenship in a society that deemed them fundamentally unequal demonstrated the absurdity of the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of African American citizenship. It is the irony that devolution of power to the county

Democratic organizations situated power and politics so closely to the people that the forms of power and politics, government, absorbed the prejudices and fears of those closest to it, the people of the counties. As Madison foresaw, the proximity of the people to the levers of government had left those leavers exposed to the prejudices and fears that Senator Call espoused on the senate floor. Democrat control and election laws had marginalized African Americans politically. The push for the African American political extinction came from a refusal to accept a fundamental tenant of the Fourteenth Amendment: African Americans were citizens. Denial of

102 African American political citizenship in a society that considered them fundamentally unequal had rendered the Fourteenth Amendment a logical absurdity.

The papers of Governor Napoleon Bonaparte Broward provide insight into the “incubus” that metastasized into the whites – only primary. Undated, unsigned correspondence from

Governor Broward’s papers placed African Americans outside the pale of a progressive, developing Florida, where “the mode of earning a living in the country has materially changed.” 363 This correspondence illustrates that the racism of Reconstruction Florida had not changed with the Progressive Era. Rather, progressivism had removed the paternalism that had masked the racism of Democrats, such as Governor Bloxham. In a new world freed from agricultural dependence, “The white people have no time to make excuses for the shortcomings of the negro [sic], and the negro has less inclination to work for one and be directed by xxx [type over] one he considers exacting.” This unknown author of the Progressive Era reprised Senator

Call’s allusion to justifiable homicide: “The tension between the races will become so great that outbreaks will become frequent and harmful”; “There can be but one result, the destruction of the negro and the degrading of the white man.” A new African American “incubus” not only threatened patronage, position, place, and racial purity, it now threatened Florida’s economic progress. Such a world had no place for political equality. The kernel of racial inequality had grown from its own logic. That which is inferior and threatening must be contained through gubernatorial appointments and legislative apportionment. Politics is power, and power’s ability to affect society requires the political removal of threats to society. Since the Constitution guaranteed African American suffrage, protection of society required defining the political as the

363 Napoleon Bonaparte Broward Papers , 2003 Addition, MS 9, Box 11, 38/F/5, Speeches & Writings: Race Relations, George A. Smathers Libraries, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida 103 social. The inexorable logic of inequality had progressed to demand African Americans’ removal social and political life.

From the perspective of voting laws from Reconstruction, through Redemption, the

Gilded Age, and the Progressive Era Florida’s image of “fun in the sun” hides the reality of the role of Florida’s Democratic Party county organization in African Americans disfranchisement.

Florida’s passage of the poll tax in 1889 followed Georgia to set a precedent for Mississippi and other states in 1890. 364 That Price and Carlton ranked Florida in the third tier of Southern states with South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana in the first group suggests that Florida’s constitutional facade surpassed its narrow goal of maintaining congressional representation.

Florida’s constitutional facade concealed a political system designed to avoid African American political participation.

Explanations for Florida’s constitutional facade have included economic domination of an African American laboring class to insure a favorable atmosphere for capital. While economic domination of the laboring classes occurred throughout the Gilded Age and businesses’ need for inexpensive labor is a cost question common to all economic and social systems, African

Americans received singular attention through suffrage restrictions artfully designed to avoid patent violations of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. The heritage of slavery and stigma of asserted racial inferiority distinguished the disfranchised African Americans in Florida from similarly economically situated people. Correspondence from Governor Broward’s papers suggests a broader racially charged theme than the aspirations of local thugs, the “boisterous” element. African Americans’ political extinction developed within a culture of white supremacy that taints efforts to weigh the elements of the inextricably linked strands that wove an intricate

364 Kousser, Suffrage Restriction , 40. 104 constitutional facade. This thesis has focused on the ways that local organizations and state government cynically drafted and enforced legislation to sustain a pretense. A social-legal framework that puts laws in their social and cultural context to assist in detecting cynical manipulations of the law offers the best hope for preventing their recurrence. The massacre at

Ocoee demonstrated that discriminatorily enforced, cynically drafted laws lose moral authority, and without moral authority, the law depends only on force.

105 REFERENCES Primary

Published

Government Documents

Cases

Bisbee v. Board of County Canvassers of Alachua County, 17 Fla. 9 (1876). Smith v. Allwright, 321 U.S. 649 (1944).

Statutes and Constitutions

Federal: U.S. Constitution. U. S. Statutes and Acts.

State: Florida Constitutions 1865, 1868, 1885. Florida Statutes and Acts.

Legislative Hearings and Constitutional Conventions

Federal: Congressional Record 1890, 1894 House of Representatives Reports 1877. Joint Select Committee to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States: Miscellaneous and Florida , 42nd Congress. 1872.

State: Assembly Journal of the Florida House of Representatives 1866, 1868, 1881, 1887, 1889, 1891. House Journal of the Florida House of Representatives , 1887, 1889, 1891. Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida 1865. Journal of the Proceeding of the Constitutional Convention of the State of Florida 1885. Journal of the Florida Senate 1866, 1868, 1901.

Unpublished

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106 Federal Bureau of Investigation. “The Disfranchisement of Colored People in the South”. Microfilm Publication M1085. National Archives at College Park, College Park, MD.

State

Broward, Napoleon Bonaparte Papers, George A. Smathers Libraries, Gainesville: University of Florida State Archives of Florida election and voting records 1868, 1880, 1884; Governor’s Letter Books; Florida Legislative Investigation Commission records.

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Florida Times-Union and Citizen. New York Globe. New York Tim es. Weekly Floridian

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Currie, David P. “The Reconstruction Congress” 75 U. Chi. Law Rev. 393 (2008).

Farris, Charles D. “The Re-Enfranchisement of Negroes in Florida.” The Journal of Negro History , 39, no.4 (Oct. 1954).

Klarman, Michael J. “The White Primary Rulings: A Case Study in the Consequences of Supreme Court Decisionmaking” 29 Fla. St. U. L. Rev . (2014).

Klingman, Peter D. “Inside the Ring: Bisbee – Lee Correspondence, February – April 1880.” The Florida Historical Quarterly , 57, no. 2 (Oct. 1978).

Knauss, James Owen. “The Growth of Florida’s Elections Laws.” The Florida Historical Society Quarterly . 5, no. 1 (July, 1926).

Knight, Henry. “Southward Expansion” The Myth of the West in the Promotion of Florida, 1876 – 1900.” European Journal of American Culture , 29, no. 2 (July 2010): 111 – 28.

Marvin, William. “The Autobiography of William Marvin.” Edited by Kevin E. Kearney.

107 The Florida Historical Quarterly , 36, no. 3 (Jan. 1958).

Shofner, Jerrell H. “The Constitution of 1868.” The Florida Historical Quarterly , 41, no. 4 (Apr. 1963).

Weeks, Douglas O. “The White Primary.” 8 Miss. L. J. 135 (1935).

Weitz, Seth. “Defending the Old South: The Myth of the Lost Cause and Political Immorality in Florida, 1865 – 1968.” The Historian , 71, no. 1 (2009)

Books

Brown, Canter, Jr. “Prelude to the Poll Tax: African American Republicans and the Knights of Labor in 1880s Florida” In Florida’s Heritage of Diversity: Essays in Honor of Samuel Proctor . Edited by Mark I. Greenberg, William Warren Rogers, and Cantor Brown, Jr. Tallahassee: Sentry Press, 1997.

Cash, William T. History of the Democratic Party in Florida . Tallahassee: Democratic Historical Foundation, 1936.

Davis, William Watson. The Civil War and Reconstruction in Florida. Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, [1913] 1964.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution 1863 – 1877 , updated ed. New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2014.

Free, Laura E. Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War. Ithaca: Columbia University Press, 2015.

Gilmore, Elizabeth Glenda. Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896 – 1920 . Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Gould, Lewis L. “Party Conflicts: Republicans versus Democrats, 1877 – 1901” In The Gilded Age . Edited by Charles W. Calhoun. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007.

Kousser, J. Morgan. The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880 – 1910 . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.

Ortiz, Paul, Emancipation Betrayed: The Hidden Story of Black Organizing and White Violence in Florida from Reconstruction to the Bloody Election of 1920 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Price, Douglas Hugh. The Negro and Southern Politics: A Chapter of Florida History . Washington Square: New York University Press, 1957

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Shofner, Jerrell H. Nor Is It Over: Florida in the Era of Reconstruction 1863 – 1877 . Gainesville: The University of Florida Presses, 1974.

______. “Reconstruction and Renewal, 1865 – 1877” in The New History of Florida . Edited by Michael Gannon. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996.

Tebeau, Charles W. A History of Florida . Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971.

Trelease, Allen W. White Terror: The Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy and Southern Reconstruction . New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Weinfeld, Daniel R. The Jackson County War: Reconstruction and Resistance in Post-Civil War Florida . Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2012.

Williamson, Edward C. Florida Politics in the Gilded Age 1877-1893 . Gainesville: The University Presses of Florida, 1976.

Websites

Florida Memory

U.S. Census Bureau (1870), (1880)

Unpublished

Oral Histories

Collins, Leroy Interview, Tallahassee Civil Rights Oral History Collection, Special Collections, Florida State University Libraries, Tallahassee, Florida. http://purl.fcla.edu/fsu/MSS_1990-001

Theses/Dissertations

Dabbs, Lester Jr., “A Report of the Circumstances and Events of the Race Riot on November 2, 1920 in Ocoee, Florida,” Master’s thesis, Stetson University, 1969,

Richardson, Joe Martin. “The Negro in the Reconstruction of Florida.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1963.

Williamson, Edward C. “Wilkinson Call: A Pioneer in Progressive Democracy.” Master’s Thesis: University of Florida 1946.

Shofner, Jerrel H. “Florida’s Political Reconstruction and the Presidential Election of 1876.” Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 1963

109 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Thomas W. Long is a licensed, inactive attorney in North Carolina (1980) and Texas (1987).

Federal court admissions include U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas (1984),

U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas (1987), and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (2000). His post – secondary education includes a B.A. from the University of

Florida (1977), a J.D. from Wake Forest School of Law (1980), and a Masters of Arts Degree from Sul Ross State University (2013). He is currently enrolled in the Graduate School at Florida

State’s Department of History.

Publications include “The Role of Prior Fires and the Role of Chances in an Insurer’s

Defense of Fire Loss Claims, 54 Def. Counsel J. 188 (1987); “Appraisal Provisions of a Texas

Property Insurance Policy,” The Houston Lawyer , September/October at 32 (1988); “Economic

Impairment in Personal Injury Actions,” 30 S. Tex. L. Rev. 397 (1989).

Reported appellate cases include Dueitt v. Dueitt , 802 S.W.2d 859 (Tex.App. – Houston [1 st

Dist], 1991, no writ); Trussway v. Wetzel , 928 S.W.2d 174 (Tex.App.-Beaumont 1996, writ denied); Risner v. McDonald’s Corp. , 18 S.W.3d 903 (Tex.App.-Beaumont 2000, writ denied).

He served as a Captain in the United States Army Judge Advocate Generals Corps (1980 –

1983), and was a certified specialist in personal injury trial law by the Texas Board of Legal

Specialization from 1998 – 2008.

Non-Legal employment includes work as a middle school teacher and a public high school teacher in Texas. His subjects included Advanced Placement U.S. History.

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