It is barely possible that a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law specially enacted to fit his case.
Blaine critiques the discriminatory application of vagrancy laws against African Americans in the post-Civil War era.
Share
More from James Blaine
Their convention did more to popularize the Fourteenth Amendment as a political issue than any other instrumentality of the year.
The two schools in short marked the dividing line between the radical and the conservative.
In Congressional districts where the colored race constituted one-half of the total population (and in many instances the proportion was even larger), the vote of one white man offset the vote of two in a Northern district where suffrage…
Emboldened by the support of the National Administration, the Southern leaders believed that they could carry their designs through, and, instead of being restrained by the protest or the advice of Republicans, they chose with apparent…
Other voices in this conversation
