Southern state constitutions of the 1870s are far more complex in their origins and contents than C. Vann Woodward credits them with being in his Origins of the New South 1877-1913. Woodward argues that the eight southern state constitutions written in the 1870's were only one of many products of the short-term political experience of reaction against Reconstruction. Moreover, Woodward claims these eight documents were essentially uniform in placing excessive controls on government. When the contents of all eleven southern state constitutions extant in 1879 are analyzed in terms of their restrictiveness, however, they appear diverse rather than homogeneous. Only five of these documents had the extreme restraints on government described by Woodward. Furthermore, even those southern states that did adopt restrictive constitutions in the 1870s, or at least the three states (Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas) examined in this study, created those documents for reasons that differed considerably from those cited by Woodward. Instead of being primarily the product of the short-term and regional phenomenon of reaction against Reconstruction restrictive southern state constitutions of the 1870s were part of a nationwide and long-term change in American state constitutions. This shift in state constitution-making started in the North with the Illinois Constitution of l870 and the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1873 and spread across the country.
The desire for a restrictive constitution evidenced by Alabama, Louisiana, and Texas in the 1870s was influenced by reaction against Reconstruction only to a limited degree. Reconstruction helped spark the initial interest in writing a new constitution after Democrats regained power, but it played only a limited role in shaping expectations about what type of constitution should be written. In postulating that reaction against Reconstruction shaped southern constitution-making in the 1870s, Woodward argues that the Democratic party in the South manipulated the genuine hostility felt by most whites against Republican rule. The Democratic leadership did this, Woodward further maintains, in order to keep their party artificially united despite "issues of economics and self-interest" which otherwise might have divided the dominant party. Whatever was the case for politics in general, the politics of state constitution-making was substantially different from that described by Woodward. . . . (Author's abstract exceeds stipulated maximum length. Discontinued here with permission of author.) UMI
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:RICE/oai:scholarship.rice.edu:1911/19046 |
| Date | January 1983 |
| Creators | MAUER, JOHN WALKER |
| Source Sets | Rice University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis, Text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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