Rainy Day History: How the South Emerged from the Civil War with More Political Power Than Ever

The red states, mostly in the South, have created much political angst as they impose ever tighter voting conditions in an attempt to limit the number of voters.  It is well understood why they wish to do this.  What is perhaps less clear is how important control of access to polling booths within the electoral system has been throughout the history of the southern states.

When our nation was formed, representation in the House of Congress would be proportional to the population of each state.  The southern states’ populations were composed largely of slaves who were not considered citizens eligible to vote, yet these states needed the total population count in order to have the political influence they thought they deserved.  A compromise was reached in which it was allowed for each slave to be considered three-fifths of a person in allocating representatives.  As a result of the Civil War and the constitutional amendments enacted, the former slaves had to be treated as full citizens and provided the right to vote.  In effect, the freeing of the slaves would change the three-fifths rule to the five-fifths rule.  In terms of representation, the southern states would receive extra house members—to the losers went the spoils.

This situation would be optimized, in the southerners’ view, if the former slaves were not allowed to vote, providing more seats, yet with total control over who manned those seats.  It took a few years and a friendly Supreme Court, but soon southern blacks were nearly totally disenfranchised, and the south would comfortably remain a one-party region.

States with a dominant party gain nothing from encouraging voter turnout as long as the players in the scheme show up to vote.  The differences between numbers of voters and representation in congress of the voters became startlingly large.  Alexander Keyssar recently wrote a book titled Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?  He points out that for all our history the method of electing a president was universally viewed as defective and dangerous.  However, there were always enough states or a political party that had an advantage from the electoral system and refused to give up that short-term gain for long-term stability.  Ultimately, the most popular proposed amendment was to replace the Electoral College with direct election of the president by a nationwide vote, something the southern states would never allow.

Keyssar provides some data on the imbalance caused by the electoral system.

“In 1904, for example, Delaware had cast roughly the same number of votes for Congress as Georgia had. But Georgia had eleven representatives while Delaware had only one.  Ohio that same year cast as many votes for president as nine southern states together, but those nine states possessed ninety-nine electoral votes in comparison to Ohio’s twenty-three.  (The 1904 election was no anomaly: in every presidential contest from the 1890s into the 1960s, there were many fewer ballots cast per electoral vote in the South than elsewhere.)”

“…the Electoral College reinforced white supremacy in the South and gave southern Democrats unmerited strength in national elections.”

The South would use this unmerited strength to forbid any attempt to make lynching a crime, eliminate most of the black population from the Social Security System, and ensure that the postwar G.I. Bill would effectively become affirmative action for whites.  The southern Democrats would eventually become mainstream Republicans and continue pursuing minority party rule and white dominance.  The culture persists; the methods are little changed.

You can learn a little about a lot of things or you can learn a lot about a very few things. Guess which is the most fun.