Virginia State Bar Association * 1900

A sovereign convention will before another year has passed be convened to frame a new Constitution for the government of Virginia. Its assemblage will be an event fraught with consequences of as grave import as any that has occurred since the settlement of Jamestown...

The Reconstruction Acts and the Fifteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution forced upon the people of the late slave States universal negro manhood suffrage. This was done while the passions engendered by the bloody war of arms and the bitter war of words which led up to that great struggle were still burning fiercely in the hearts of those who then dominated the legislation of the country. It was opposed by some of the ablest leaders in the councils of the victorious government of the Union, but their wise counsels were not heeded; and the policy of "reconstruction and destruction," upon arbitrary lines of radical innovation and revolution, was forced upon a helpless and almost defenseless people. Under these circumstances -- indeed, under any conceivable circumstances, the vesting of the millions of negroes of the South, just emerging from slave, without education, without experience or training in or preparation for the duties of citizenship, without fitness or capacity for self-government, still less for the government of the white people of these States, was an atrocious blunder and a moral crime. It was the degradation of American citizenship...

One race or the other will be dominant and absolutely dominant. The experience of the world and a priori reasoning alike teach us that this condition can be escaped only in one or the other of two processes -- either by the gradual decay of the inferior race and its ultimate extermination, or by the absorption of one race by the other by amalgamation, with its hybrid resultant. Which of these alternatives would the false friends of the Afro-Americans invite us to accept? Which cup do they tender to our lips? In just subordination to the stronger and higher race, the inferior may live and grow and prosper...

What I am convinced to be the truth is that the negro population of these Southern States is not, as a race and as a class, competent either for self-government or for the government in part of their white fellow-citizens... The only practical way in which relief can come is by some amendment of the State Constitution which, without violating the Fourteenth or Fifteenth amendments to the Federal Constitution, will reform suffrage and eliminate the votes of the great mass of the ignorant and vicious negro population.

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