Post-Reconstruction Suffrage Restrictions in Tennessee: A New Look at the V.O. Key Thesis

Abstract

Most contemporary observers accorded Mississippi primacy in the enactment of legal suffrage restrictions in the South. Delegates to its nationally watched 1890 constitutional convention broached most of the important arguments and proposals for disfranchisement, drafted the first comprehensive and permanent limitations on suffrage in the late nineteenth century South, and advanced the initial rhetorical and legal defenses of franchise contraction. Six other ex-Confederate states frequently adverted to Mississippi's experience as they passed similarly sweeping revisions in their fundamental voting requirements in the dozen years after 1890. Scholars have almost universally followed the contemporary pattern by concentrating on these seven states in their analyses of I suffrage restriction. They have paid considerably less attention to the four Southern states which adopted simpler, mainly statutory limits on the electorate-Arkansas, Texas, Florida, and Tennessee. Yet the restrictive devices which Florida and Tennessee employed actually preceded the Mississippi convention, and although not as complex, were almost as effective as the Magnolia State's regulations in curtailing Negro voting. More obviously partisan and seemingly less racist in its goals than the seven more familiar movements, the drive for restriction in Tennessee was typical of the largely neglected, but extremely significant acts of legislative suffrage contraction.