In the summer of 1865, the Civil War had formally come to an end, but the political battles of Reconstruction had only just begun.

In Pennsylvania’s anthracite coal fields, the soldiers had mostly returned home by Fourth of July holiday. Yet, the political fights at the heart of the conflict that Schuylkill County’s heroes in blue won on the battlefield had transitioned to screeds on the pages of newspapers, political speeches, and legislative fights over equality for Black Americans, four million of whom had been freed by the 13th Amendment that had passed through Congress successively and awaited 3/4 of state legislatures to ratify.

Schuylkill County’s US representative, Myer Strouse, opposed the 13th Amendment and voted against the amendment. It passed anyway.

With the end of slavery in the United States all but confirmed, the political battle transitioned to the fight over the right to vote for Black men.

Following the July 4th holiday, Pottsville’s Miners’ Journal newspaper, a vehemently pro-Union, pro-emancipation newspaper in Schuylkill County, published an anonymous letter from a resident of Ashland in support of the Black suffrage.

The letter-writer’s main thesis is that Black men, 180,000+ of whom served in the US armed forces in the Civil War, earned their citizenship on the battlefield through their courage and shed blood. They also highlight who lined up on the other side in the fight over Black citizenship – former Confederate leaders and anti-war Northern politicians. The writer puts a spotlight on their racial prejudice, but also reveals a fair-share of their own white supremacy.

In all, this letter (annotated with links where relevant) is a fascinating primary source from Pennsylvania’s anthracite region at a crucial moment in American history.

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The Claims of the Negro.

Ashland, Schuylkill County, Pa.

The all absorbing question of the day is negro suffrage and negro equality. Now, let us reason together and not be swayed from doing an afflicted and greatly wronged race the justice which their gallantry upon the bloody battlefields of freedom so loudly call.

Let us not give way to passion or unjust prejudices, but award to them in the cool judgment of our rational minds the rights that God has awarded man – FREEDOM and LIBERTY. Yes, let them move in the bright sunlight of liberty. They have proved themselves worthy of the boon they ask.

Their dead from the graves who died freemen in defense of their country’s honor, join in the demand for right and justice from the hands of their more intelligent and magnanimous countrymen.

And why, I ask, should they not have it? It is evident they are not hogs, sheep, or goats; but human beings made after our own image, possessed of the same organs, and experience has proved they are as susceptible of improvement as ourselves. We have used them as a protection, and as defenders of our noble country’s dearest and best rights. They have stood as a wall lined with bristling bayonets, between traitors and the honor of a country which has heretofore denied them as freemen and withheld from them the right of suffrage, which many would not willingly give to men who have trampled beneath their feet the stars and stripes, the emblem of our liberty.

Yes, the men who have been in the ranks of our country’s enemies; the men who have stood side by side with Vallandigham and his party is embarrassing our Government in the prosecution of the war, and the restoration of the union of States, are loudest of all in their protestations against the negroes being invested with the rights of freemen, which their loyalty to their country has purchased.

I would say if the right of suffrage is to be withheld from any body of men, let it be withheld from (not Copperheads, that is too mild a term,) northern rebels, who for four years have not given the brave defenders of our country one word of encouragement; men who have flocked together, forming a strong, powerful, mighty, and traitorous organization, having for their object the embarrassment of the Administration, unlawful resistance to the draft, and the raising of a counter-rebellion in the North to cooperate with their brethren, the rebels in arms.

These are the men who shriek the deathly howl of indignation at the idea of giving to the negro the right of suffrage. They are the men who do not wish to encourage loyalty, and who after four years of hard and laborious service in cooperation with armed rebels for the destruction of our country, now seek to RULE, to GOVERN the temple of liberty, which they were unable to destroy.

I say, again, they are the men who should be denied the right of suffrage. Men who have no love for the country of their birth, and would destroy their own house, are dangerous inmates, and if allowed to inhabit it they should be deprived of all power of doing evil. The cry of equality by Southern lords and Northern rebels is inconsistent and ridiculous in the extreme, for they reduced to worse than bondage, and beneath the rank of their own slaves, the poor whites of the South.

To the cry of equality I will answer, take as an illustration the nature of our free institutions, which admit of the lowest and most humble ascending to the highest positions in the gift of the people. It is the mind that makes the man of fame, and he would be no less famous if he was a shade lighter or two shades darker. There are many members of the white race who are not strictly speaking, white. Many are as dark as some of the lighter shades of the negro race. I have yet to discover the different shades of complexion in the white race have formed a basis for different grades in society.

I am at a loss to know how a complexion one shade whiter than its fellow-citizens does create a rank in society public and private, one grade higher than that held by his less fortunate countrymen.

We must, then, if from no other cause than necessity, acknowledge that if one shade in complexion of the human race forms no basis for different grades in society, neither will six shades form a basis for formation of different grades in society. Facts are stubborn things. They are mighty and must prevail.

The MIND, not COLOR, makes the man, and many who would, under influence of their strong prejudice against a weak and heretofore oppressed race, place upon them the heel of oppression, there to remain for all future time to come, these sticklers on equality would feel greatly humiliated to be overmatched in ability, intellect, and intelligence, by one several shades darker than themselves in color (Frederick Douglass for instance).

The force of circumstances has set millions of bondmen free, and the American people will vote it universal and unreserved liberty. Prejudice must give way to reason. Blood is the price of liberty, and they have purchased it in defense of their country’s honor. Yet I do not acknowledge that the right of suffrage places the negro upon an equality with the white man.

There are grades in society which no legislation, no right of suffrage can obliterate. It is not established and maintained by different shades of complexion, but by the ascendency of one mind above another. So in future ages, when they of the black flesh become more enlightened and prosperous, they will figure in the arts and sciences, and take their positions in public, irrespective of color. Time works great changes, and the day is not far distant when a public lecture will be valued or appreciated none the less on account of the complexion of the speaker from which it emanates.

I am aware the Southern lords and Northern rebels have a brotherly affection for the down-trodden race, and that their great desire to take them once again under their wings for their own good in order to husband up the earnings of their slaves as heretofore, and again throw into an impoverished state the poor white man of the South.

And here I will say that, in my opinion, the day that gave liberty to the blacks of the South also set at liberty as many poor whites of the South, who thought not slaves by law, were by the circumstances connected with slave labor, more slaves to the aristocratic slaveholders of the South than the blacks.

Nor was their social, moral, or intellectual condition any better than that of the blacks. Nor are they at this day any more capable of exercising intelligently, the right of suffrage, than the negro.

So I say, let the qualifications that will entitle a negro to a vote be made by Congress, and I would advise them not to make the mark too high, for fear the negro-equality-howling Democracy will not be able to touch it with a ten foot pole.

FORSOOTH

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The political battles over Black suffrage continued until the ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870 during the administration of President Ulysses Grant. However, by the mid-1870s, Black rights were already on the retreat as Reconstruction policies began to be abandoned by white Northerners.

By the 1880s, segregation and Jim Crow began to emerge in the South – policies that would lock in inequality across vast swaths of the United States until the mid-20th century and the emergence of a Civil Rights Movement.

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