ABSTRACT
The Northerners’ efforts to impose “negro suffrage” were generally viewed as “flagrant hypocrisy.” A Whig editorial accused several state legislators of “falsehood and duplicity” when they “excused themselves for having voted against the Franchise Law. Even editors of the African-American Loyal Georgian seemed to be willing to accept citizenship without suffrage for freedmen. The Colored Tennessean saw the “question of manhood suffrage as a simple one.” The Sentinel in Raleigh concluded that “the necessary consequence” of “negro suffrage” would be “negro equality in all respects-which, in the case of nearly all the States of the South, means negro supremacy. In advance of the same municipal election, the Charleston Mercury also urged freedmen to support the Citizens’ Ticket, but it followed a harsher line than the Courier. Constitutionally, the former slaves were citizens and voters, but the political mentality that had made possible the decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford once again had begun to prevail.
