- by New Deal democrat
On January 27, Shelby M. Cullom, a Republican from Illinois, spoke with reference to the proposed Fifteenth Amendment:
The rebellion destroyed the [rebel] State governments .... This condition of things in the rebel States created the necessity for the work of reconstruction. This work did not consist alone of getting the States back into the enjoyment of representation in Congress; .... Reconstruction [also] consisted in ... ‘the establishment of civil governments which should be republican in form, and a guarantee of protection to all of the people.’
.... The country began to feel not only that the rebellious States needed reconstruction, but that the whole country needed it; that justice demanded that constitutions should be amended, that laws should be enacted securing to all the people in the land an equality of civil rights.... After the civil rights bill came the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution .....
But, Mr. Speaker, it did not answer as a basis of reconstruction. ... a portion of the amendment should never have been adopted if, as alleged by some, it recognizes the right of each State to abridge or deny to any portion of its people without cause the exercise of the elective franchise. A State has the right to disenfranchise its felons, but it has no right to disenfranchise its citizens on account of race, color, or previous condition of slavery.
The [fourteenth] amendment was the best that could be done, but I would be much better satisfied with it if it could be clearer on that point. To-day, sir, we are at work to patch up the work that we failed at that time to do correctly, as we should.
...[I]n the work of reconstruction, and in our efforts to establish the government upon just principles, a constitutional amendment regulating the question of suffrage throughout the land should be passed and sent to the States for their consideration without delay.
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Source: Congressional Globe, 40th Congress, 3rd Session, pp. 650-53
This speech was a full-throated response to speeches like those of Rep. Eldridge reported earlier, and another by Rep. Michael G. Kerr, Democrat from Indiana, which was similar to Eldridge‘s and followed that of Cullom.
Note, however, that an open-ended “right to vote” is not being defended here. By this time only “equality” of the right to vote based on race was being proposed.
