The primary source I will be looking at this week is the Proceedings and Debates of the of the Convention of North-Carolina Called to Amend the Constitution of the State. This document chronicles all of the debates, issues, votes, and resolutions of the North Carolina Convention of 1835, and gives the county where delegates hailed from. It is especially important because, unlike convention documents from other states, the Proceedings and Debates actually record the speeches of the delegates. Analyzing the speeches will provide me with the best way to recreate the reasons for black disfranchisement and the other issues that delegates dealt with at the convention.
Although other issues were more important to the delegates, like the reapportionment of political power to the western half of the states, I will be looking at this document because of the description of the debate that took suffrage away from African Americans. In the debate, some delegates argued that blacks were so inferior to whites that there was no way they should have the right to vote, but others thought that to take away the vote would be to limit free blacks’ ability to advance themselves (I realize this is a vague statement. I need to find out what this mean. Did it mean social or economic advancement or some other kind?). Tied up in this was the idea that blacks were not citizens, so suffrage should be out of the question for them and that disfranchisement was better for all parties since suffrage put free blacks at the mercy of white “demagogues.” Also, I hope to find manuscript collections of the key players in the debate: Daniel, Gaston, Bryan, Edwards, Macon, Branch, Meares, Wilson, Cooper, Speight, Holmes, Giles, Crudup, Guinn, and McQueen. Possibly these men provide information about their opinions of black disfranchisement in their private papers. There might also be some political/geographical correlation based on the delegates’ voting patterns. Regardless of how I approach black disfranchisement, this document will be essential to my study.
In his book Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict, Harry Watson uses the case study of Cumberland County, North Carolina, to trace the development of the second two-party system. Essentially comparing the Whigs and Democrats, Watson argues that party lines were important on a national scale, but the differences in the two parties can best be seen at the local level. He claims that the difference between the Whigs and the Democrats arose “over questions of political economy” (14). The Whigs sought to industrialize Cumberland County and firmly attach it to the market economy, while the Democrats preferred to strive for a “yeoman’s utopia (14). Also important to Watson is the stages of political development development in the two party system: first is Jackson’s disruption to the Era of Good Feelings, second is when leaders drew on existing “community values” based on “regional, ethnic, and class alignments” to create rival voting blocs. and third is when county voters accepted these constructed political identities after the election of 1836 (15). Watson contends that economic change was the primary catalyst for the development of the two-party system (15).
My takeaway from this work has to do with the political aspect of black disfranchisement. In his book, Watson references several newspaper articles and legal proceedings that mention how African Americans’ vote could be bought for barbeque and whiskey (45, 95). The sources seem to make the case that African Americans tended to vote for Whigs, rather than Democrats (191). This is important because I think one of my “daisy petals” has to be politics, and unlike some of the more traditional works on North Carolina politics, Watson stresses the need to look at political developments at the local level. I will certainly use Cumberland County as one of the local places I look to see reasons for black disfranchisement. His book also goes well with Edwards’ The People and Their Peace.