The biracial Virginia Convention of 1867-1868 wrote a remarkably democratic
constitution that granted the vote to African American men
but disfranchised and barred from public office all unrepentant supporters
of the Confederacy. The disfranchisement was so controversial that the
ratification referendum scheduled for 1868 was postponed for more than a
year. During the winter of 1868-1869, a committee of leaders of the
Conservative Party met in Washington with Republican congressional leaders
and President-Elect Grant. They worked out a compromise that allowed the
referendum to take place in July 1869. At that time, voters would have the
opportunity to accept or reject the two provisions that disfranchised
former Confederates and barred them from public office. On 6 July 1869,
voters rejected the clauses that limited the political rights of most of
the state’s former Confederates. They defeated Article III Section 1 Clause
4 that disfranchised former office holders 124,360 to 84,410 and the
paragraph in Article III Section 7 that barred them from office 124,715 to
83,458. Eligible voters ratified the new constitution by an overwhelming
vote of 210,585 to 9,136.

At the time of the ratification referendum, voters elected statewide
officials and members of the General Assembly, who in October 1869 ratified
the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which Congress required before it
would seat the state's senators and representatives in Congress. President
Grant signed the law that readmitted Virginia's members of  Congress in
January 1870, which had the effect of terminating military oversight of the
state government. No doubt, at least some white Virginians favorably viewed
Grant's willingness to allow the separate votes at the time of the
ratification of the constitution and his signature on the law that in
effect terminated that phase of Reconstruction in Virginia.

Richard Lowe's *Republicans and Reconstruction in Virginia, 1865-70* (1991)
has a pretty good account.

Brent Tarter
[log in to unmask]


On Thu, Apr 29, 2021 at 12:07 PM Meyers, Terry L <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>         I can’t seem to find a scholarly (or otherwise) account of how the
> 1870 Virginia Constitution was received by Virginia voters.
>
>         I ask because in an 1872 letter in the NYT, Benjamin Ewell,
> president of W&M, explains his support for Grant in the presidential
> elections of 1868 and 1872; during the course of that, he remarks that
>
> without his [Grant’s] aid the people would not have been allowed to vote
> separately on the offensive and rejected articles of the present
> Constitution.  The whole would have been adopted, and, as a necessary
> consequence , the State wold today be no better off than the worst governed
> Southern State.
>
>         What I’m most interested in here is an account of the “offensive
> and rejected articles of the present Constitution”; what were they?
>
>         Thanks for any and all help.
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Terry L.. Meyers, Chancellor Professor of English, Emeritus, The College
> of William and Mary, in Virginia, Williamsburg  23187
> ————————————————————————————————————————————————————
>
>
>  Have we got a college?  Have we got a football team?....Well, we can't
> afford both.   Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.
>  --Groucho Marx, in "Horse Feathers."
>
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