Disfranchisement Debate in the Virginia Legislature, 1902

From Report of the Proceedings and Debates of the Constitutional Convention, State of Virginia, Held in the City of Richmond, June 12, 1901 to June 26, 1902, volume 2. Richmond, Va.: The Hermitage Press, 1906. 3031-3032. Special Collections, Alderman Library, University of Virginia.

Mr. [William E.] Cameron: I wish to say that the chief inducement operating on my mind towards participation in anything relating to our suffrage system was based upon the hope that such results be obtained as would enable us to put into our election system such laws as would guarantee us against the further continuance and spread of the corrupting influences that have sprung up in our midst, as a result of having in our electorate the great body of vice and ignorance which has been represented by the negro race. Such was the keynote of the cry . . . which, spreading throughout the state, gave rise to the call of a Constitutional Convention. Anything done by us which would not lead to the purification of the ballot would be, to my mind, an abject failure. . . . I do not believe in universal suffrage. I believe that negro suffrage has been a curse, a curse to the white people and an imminent threat to the negro. I believe that the Fifteenth Amendment was the crime of this age. I believe that the greatest evil flowing from negro suffrage has been that it has polluted the sources of governmental power, that the poison began where the evil was most accentuated and has spread into every limb of our body politic until, if allowed to go on, it would have made a mass of reeking corruption of the social and political order of this State. I believe that if the work we are now engaged on will accomplish what its advocates have claimed for it, a reformation of the electorate and the leaving of a minimum of dangerous element in that electorate, it is our bounden duty as citizens and as Democrats to lay down here the foundation rules which, so far as possible, will insure in the future a removal from Virginia of the suspicion that our people are wedded to those practices which would leave a stain and bring disaster upon any people who tolerate them. . . .

If our work has been well done . . . if it does relieve us of this incubus of vice and ignorance, what earthly reason can there by why we should not throw every safeguard possible around the conduct of our elections? I say I am going to show my faith in the work of this Convention, my faith in the suffrage clause that has been recommended by these distinguished gentlemen, and my faith in their assertion that it is going to work the result it was intended to accomplish by voting to make our election process as clean as the cleanest and [as] pure as constitutional language can enforce.