By Susan Grigsby
Sunday Nov 16, 2014 · 5:45 PM EST
It all started with a Constitution that allowed slavery to continue unmolested in the Southern states, only limiting the importation of additional slaves after 1808. In addition to requiring the return of escaped slaves to the slave labor camps, it required them to be included in the census as three-fifths of a free person for taxation and representation.
Because seats in the House of Representatives are based on population, not on the number of registered voters or even on the number people eligible to vote, but of total population—including people held in slavery, even if each was only considered three-fifths of a man—the South received more that their fair share. And it was not just extra House seats that their slave population provided, but also additional muscle in the Electoral College that selects the president. According to Edward E. Baptist in The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism:
One result was the South’s dominance of the presidency over the next seventy years. Four of the first five presidents would be Virginia slaveholders. Eight of the first dozen owned people.
Oh, but you say, we fought a Civil War and ended all of that nonsense when we freed the slaves. Slavery ended 150 years ago, it is time to move on. To get past it. Get over it.
I wish that we could, but if you follow me below the fold I will trace for you the reasons it never ended and continues today.
Reconstruction 1865-1877
After the end of the Civil War, U.S. Army troops were sent into the rebellious states to ensure the civil rights of the newly freed people. This period only lasted for a dozen years, but during that time, African Americans were granted suffrage. The rebels of the Southern states, who never truly surrendered, joined together under the banner of the terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan, to intimidate black and white voters who attempted to participate in civic life and supported Reconstruction. This resulted in federal intervention under the Enforcement Acts of 1870 and 1871.
Compromise of 1877
By 1877, through means of voter suppression, intimidation, and fraud, the Democrats had managed to achieve a majority in the House of Representatives. In 1877, the Southern racists, nominally Democrats, agreed to stop the Senate filibuster and support Republican presidential candidate Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of U.S. Army troops from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, and a return to self-rule for the states.
The South vowed to protect the rights of African Americans.
This is a simplified, bare-bones version of a quite complicated negotiation, but the nuance it deserves would require an entire volume on the Compromise of 1877. Fortunately, C. Vann Woodward has already written one. From his work, Reunion and Reaction: The Compromise of 1877 and the End of Reconstruction, comes this example of Southern legislative tactics that should sound familiar to those who follow current events:
At a Democratic caucus on February 19,1877, a majority of the members voted for a resolution to write into the army appropriations bill, then still pending, a clause forbidding the use of troops to support the claims of any state government in the South until it should be recognized by Congress. A bill containing such a clause was passed by the House and a penalty of hard labor and imprisonment provided for anyone found guilty of violating the act. When the Republican Senate refused to accept the clause the House stood its ground and adjourned without making any appropriations for the army whatever.
Read much more of the history of this travesty...
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2014/11/16/1344692/-How-the-racists-of-the-South-have-ruled-this-nation-from-the-very-beginning
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