ABSTRACT
The active participation of the masses, and the extension of the right of suffrage to the very lowest and most ignorant classes have, moreover, favored the admission of so many vulgar and cant terms that in politics, above all, the line between slang and solemn speech is not always perceptible. Where appeals are made at every election to vast assemblies, not unfrequently consisting largely of so-called Mean Whites, and of Blacks but recently emancipated from slavery and all its blighting consequences, strong colors must be used to paint the adversary, and still stronger language to impress the dull minds. (M. Schele de Vere, Americanisms [1872] 249)
Two years after the Fifteenth Amendment granted the elective franchise to African American men, writer M. (Maximilian) Schele de Vere focused on the relation between “the extension of the right of suffrage to the very lowest and most ignorant classes” and the fl uctuation, even corruption, of speech, in particular the blurring of “the line between slang and solemn speech.” As the last two chapters have shown, antebellum Americans often turned to discussions of language-for example, debates about political language or vocal propriety-to manage anxieties about national citizenship, particularly concerns about whose voices could count in the body politic and whose could not. After the Civil War, too, ideas about language similarly emerged to manage concerns about citizenship in new ways, as indicated by Schele de Vere’s commentary. For, at the same time that Schele de Vere expresses linguistic concern about the destabilization of the “line between slang and solemn speech,” he places this concern within the context of a more sweeping sociopolitical concern about “the extension of the right of suffrage to the very lowest and most ignorant classes,” a right which had indeed been extended to “so-called Mean Whites” and “Blacks but recently emancipated from slavery.”
