Non-Citizen Voting as a Reconstruction Reform

Rachel Gunter, Collin College - Plano Campus

In Minor v. Happersett (1875), the Supreme Court ruled against Virginia Minor, a suffragist who argued that the 14th Amendment made her a citizen and as such granted her the right to vote. The Court noted that in the United States, citizenship was neither a guarantee of suffrage nor a requirement of suffrage. Many citizens including women were barred from voting, while many declarant immigrants (non-citizens who had filed their intention to naturalize or “first papers”) were enfranchised. While declarant immigrant voting began in the Midwest, Republicans added the practice to the Reconstruction constitutions of seven former Confederate states after the Civil War bringing non-citizen voting to the South. In many areas, Republicans sought to enfranchise immigrant voters, who were largely against secession if not slavery itself. The hope was that these immigrant voters would counter the votes of white southern Democrats, who wanted to retain the antebellum political and power structure. My paper explores how declarant immigrant voting functioned and eventually ended in the South. Some of these southern states ended declarant immigrant voting when establishing their Jim Crow constitutions, which reversed many of the gains of Reconstruction and effectively disfranchised Black voters in the late nineteenth century. Other southern states, where political parties or factions had become reliant upon these votes, retained declarant immigrant voting in their new Jim Crow constitutions. This includes both Texas and Arkansas, the final state to eliminate declarant immigrant voting in the 1920s. In these states, noncitizen voting was hotly debated in the WWI era. Opponents argued that voting should be a right of citizens who had met their obligations to the nation, an argument ironically made by those who fought to continue disfranchising Black Americans despite their war service.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 157. Citizenship, Naturalization, and Democracy: Learning from the Late-19th and Early-20th Century United States