(June 24, 1868)
In the summer of 1868, white Southerners hotly debated the pros and cons of ratifying their revised state constitutions and the Fourteenth Amendment. That year, Carey Wentworth Styles (1825–1897), a native South Carolinian and later a Georgia state senator, assumed editorship of the Atlanta Constitution. He vehemently opposed Georgia rejoining the Union if readmission required that whites accept blacks as equal members in the brotherhood of man. The vast majority of whites of his day shared Styles’s stereotypical view of people of color. Despite Styles’s racist rhetoric, Georgians ratified the constitution and the amendment, and Congress readmitted their state to the Union in July 1868, only to return it to military rule in December 1869 for violating the Fourteenth Amendment.
The advocates of negro suffrage do not base his claim on any natural or acquired right. In a state of nature he is without law or government. As a slave, he has taken no step in civilization. We do not trace to him any of the achievements in the art, science and literature, which mark the progressive developments of mankind. The ancient Egyptian and the modern Congo negro were as widely different as any two species of our race. In this country, unlike the Indian, the negro had no normal right. His slavery was the penance of sin or the cupidity of African slave-dealers. He had no natural right to the soil, he has acquired none. . . . He was ignorant by his own incapacity. Today, as then, he is unfit to rule the State. In contact with the white man he has advanced some—the nearer the approach the higher the development. The Democratic party is opposed to giving him this prerogative. It does not believe him capable of wielding it for the good of the country. It regards him as inferior by nature to the white race—as even below the Indian, and with less claim than the latter to the franchise right. Should he in time prove his capacity for self-government, the Democratic party will concede it to him. The Democratic party accepts the negro as “a man”—not as “a brother.” The latter it will never concede. It is his friend. It will protect him in every civil right. It is unwilling, however, to make him Congressman, Governor, and Judge. It will not consent to degrade its own race by elevating an inferior above it. It is unwilling that the foreigner, when he emigrates to this country, shall go through years of privilege before he shall vote, when the negro, but recently from the barbarism of Africa, shall exercise that right without restraint. . . .
We are willing to treat the negro as “a man;” to encourage him in his industrial pursuits and in the elevation of his moral and mental being, but not to accept him as a “brother.” As such we have no affinity for him. He is farther from our ideas of brotherhood than the Indian or the Chinaman. . . . We simply claim that the Caucasian race has ever stood and will continue to stand in the foreground on the drama of the world. . . .