Southern Strategy - 19th Century Disfranchisement and Rise of The Solid South

19th Century Disfranchisement and Rise of The Solid South

After the American Civil War, southern states gained additional seats in the House of Representatives and representation in the Electoral College because freed slaves were granted full citizenship and suffrage. Southern white resentment stemming from the Civil War and the Republican Party’s policy of Reconstruction kept most southern whites in the Democratic Party, but the Republicans could compete in the South with a coalition of freedmen, Unionists and highland whites.

Rising intimidation and violence by white paramilitary groups such as the White League and Red Shirts who supported the Democratic Party during the mid to late-1870s contributed to the turning out Republican officeholders and suppression of the black vote. After the North agreed to withdraw federal troops under the Compromise of 1877, white Democrats used a variety of tactics to reduce voting by African Americans and poor whites. In the 1880s they began to pass legislation making election processes more complicated. Although the Fourteenth Amendment reduced the Congressional representation of states that denied votes to their adult male citizens, this provision was never enforced.

From 1890 to 1908, the white Democratic legislatures in every Southern state enacted new constitutions or amendments with provisions to disenfranchise most blacks and tens of thousands of poor whites. Provisions required complicated processes for poll taxes, residency, literacy tests, and other requirements which were subjectively applied against blacks. As blacks lost their vote, the Republican Party lost its ability to effectively compete. There was a dramatic drop in voter turnout as these measures took effect, a drop in participation that continued across the South.

The South became solidly white Democratic until past the middle of the 20th century. Effectively, Southern white Democrats controlled all the votes of the expanded population by which Congressional apportionment was figured. Many of their representatives achieved powerful positions of seniority in Congress, giving them control of chairmanships of Congressional committees. Because African Americans could not be voters, they were prevented from being jurors and serving in local offices. Services and institutions for them in the segregated South were chronically underfunded.

During this period, Republicans held only a few House seats from the South. Between 1880 and 1904, Republican presidential candidates in the South received between 35 and 40 percent of that section's vote (except in 1892, when the 16 percent for the Populists knocked Republicans down to 25 percent). From 1904 to 1948, Republicans received more than 30 percent of the section's votes only in the 1920 (35.2 percent, carrying Tennessee) and 1928 elections (47.7 percent, carrying five states). The only important political role of the South in presidential elections came in the 1912 election, when it provided the delegates to select Taft over Theodore Roosevelt in that year's Republican convention.

During this period, Republicans regularly supported anti-lynching bills, which were filibustered by Southern Democrats in the Senate, and appointed a few blacks to office. In the 1928 election, the Republican candidate Herbert Hoover rode the issues of prohibition and anti-Catholicism to carry five former Confederate states, with 62 of the 126 electoral votes of the section. After his victory, Hoover attempted to build up the Republican Party of the South, transferring patronage away from blacks and toward the same kind of white Protestant businessmen who made up the core of the Northern Republican Party. With the onset of the Great Depression, which severely impacted the South, Hoover soon became extremely unpopular. The gains of the Republican Party in the South were lost. In the 1932 election, Hoover received only 18.1 percent of the Southern vote for re-election.