Memoirs of General William T. Sherman, Vol II,Pg 373
I had a long and frank conversation, during which he [Chief Justice Chase] explained to me the confusion caused in Washington by the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, the sudden accession to power of Mr. Johnson, who was then supposed to be bitter and vindictive in his feelings toward the South, and the wild pressure of every class of politicians to enforce on the new President their pet schemes. He showed me a letter of his own, which was in print, dated Baltimore, April 11th, and another of April 12th, addressed to the President, urging him to recognize the freedmen as equal in all respects to the whites. He was the first man, of any authority or station, who ever informed me that the Government of the United States would insist on extending to the former slaves of the South the elective franchise, and he gave as a reason the fact that the slaves, grateful for their freedom, for which they were indebted to the armies and Government of the North, would, by their votes, offset the disaffected and rebel element of the white population of the South.
I had began to suspect that votes to keep them in power was the *ONLY* reason why the liberals wanted to give freed slaves the right to vote. This is a piece of evidence that confirms my suspicion.
The Liberals were doing then what they are doing now with illegals. They are trying to cut out the real constituency and replace it with people who will vote to keep them in power.
Johnson was a long time Democrat who turned out to be a lot softer on the South than most Republicans were. His idea may have been that freed slaves would vote with poorer whites to offset the power of the planter elite. In any case, we did eventually extend the suffrage to people of different races. Was that something we shouldn’t have done?
Controlling who gets to vote is what some politicians have been doing for a long time. Think of the Federalists and their Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 that extended the time of residency required for citizenship from 5 years to 14 years. The majority of immigrants at that time favored and voted for the Democratic-Republicans, not the Federalists.
Then there was the election of 1860, where some northern states let non-citizen immigrants vote if they promised to seek citizenship in the future.
The Southern Democrats of my youth stopped blacks from voting by requiring then to read and explain part of the US Constitution to the satisfaction of the registrar. I boned up on the Constitution before I registered to vote, but they didn’t ask me anything about the Constitution. I was white.
The current border policy has effectively let millions of aliens into the country. In addition, in the middle of the night some of the aliens were flown to various other states. Sounds to me like a way to affect the outcome of future elections.
Always their plan
Exploit blacks kept in the south to vote GOP which lol frankly was not a hard sell
Like the Dems do now
Parties have switched
Although it’s not that simplistic the radical republicans in many ways are aped by todays progressives
Though given most were white I doubt lefties today would claim them
Hell they even eschew poor Abe God love him
( yes I know abe was not an RR)