gro hands.
To the Southerner such an idea is intolerable, and it is my confident
belief that if the State of Alabama were resettled by men from
Massachusetts, and the same problems were presented to those men, they
would be just as quick as the white Alabamans of to-day to find means to
suppress the negro vote. With all my heart I wish that such an exchange
of citizens might temporarily be effected, for when the immigrants from
Massachusetts moved back to their native New England, after an
experience of the black belt, they would take with them an
understanding of certain aspects of the negro problem which they have
never understood; an understanding which, had they possessed it sixty or
seventy years ago, might have brought about the freeing of slaves by
government purchase--a course which Lincoln advocated and which would
probably have prevented the Civil War, and thereby saved millions upon
millions of money, to say nothing of countless lives. Had they even
understood the problems of the South at the end of the Civil War, the
horrors of Reconstruction might have been avoided, and I cannot too
often reiterate that, but for Reconstruction we should not be perplexed,
to-day, by the unhappy, soggy mass of political inertia known as the
Solid South.

I asked a former State official how the negro vote had been eliminated
in Alabama. "At first," he said, "we used to kill them to keep them from
voting; when we got sick of doing that we began to steal their ballots;
and when stealing their ballots got to troubling our consciences we
decided to handle the matter legally, fixing it so they couldn't vote."

I inquired as to details. He explained.

It seems that in 1901 a constitutional convention was held, at which it
was enacted that, in order to be eligible for life to vote, citizens
must register during the next two years. There were, however, certain
qualifications prescribed for registration. A man must be of good
character, and must have fought in a war, or be the descendant of a
person who had fought. This enactment, known as the "grandfather
clause," went far toward the elimination of the negro. As an additional
safeguard, however, an educational clause was added, but the educational
requirement did not become effective at once, as that would have made
illiterate whites ineligible as voters. Not until the latter were safely
registered under the "grandfather clause," was the educational clause
applied, and as, under th