Restoring the Union
violated the principle of equality of suffrage, making the vote of a white citizen of a slave state much more powerful than of a citizen of a free state. To retain that principle in the Constitution after the abolition of slavery would make the conditions still worse. For then representation would be based upon not merely three-fifths but the whole number of negroes in the former slave states, while the right to vote would be enjoyed by only the whites. Thus in a state in which half the population was black, each white voter would have two or three times the voting power of one in a state where there were few or no blacks. To cite precise figures: In a northern state there would be one Representative to every 127,000 voters, while in a southern state there would be one Representative to every 45,000 voters. The southern Members of Congress would thus represent not only the white men who actually voted for them but also a larger number of negroes who were not permitted to vote.
This was obviously unfair. It gave the southern states an undue advantage over the northern. Accordingly it was provided in the fourteenth amendment that if in any state the right of suffrage was denied to male adults for any cause save crime, the number of Representatives apportioned to that state should be correspondingly reduced. That meant that representation would be based not upon gross population but upon the voting population. It did not interfere with the right of a state to make its own suffrage laws and to exclude citizens from the exercise of that right, but it served notice that for such exclusion a state would have to pay a penalty in reduced Congressional representation. It made straight for what afterward became
59
