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Attention! Voters! Don’t Be Deceived. Every vote for the Republican Ticket is a vote in favor of Negro Suffrage!

[New Jersey, ca. 1867]. Broadside, 12” x 18.75”. Early pencil inscription at lower left: “Nov 5, 1867.” CONDITION: Good, recently backed with Japanese tissue, small losses to margins and bits of lettering expertly reinstated, lost “d” at the end of the word “polled” (the final word of the text) reinstated.

An apparently unrecorded Reconstruction-era campaign broadside urging New Jersey voters to cast their ballots against African American suffrage.

Warning that “Every vote for the Republican Ticket is a vote in favor of Negro Suffrage,” that is, “of Congress compelling us to let the Negro Vote,” this broadside announces that “Every Vote for Charles T. Molony is a vote AGAINST Negro SUFFRAGE.” It ends with the call: “Let every Democratic Vote be polle[d].”

Molony’s message was evidently well received because he went on to represent Gloucester County as a New Jersey State Assemblyman in 1868. A November 1867 announcement in the Monmouth Democrat informs readers that, following the election, “the position of parties has been reversed, the Democrats having secured control of both Houses.” The next April, Molony was among the majority of “yea” votes in a resolution against equal suffrage proposed by the Democrats to counter a Republican resolution in favor of “the eradication of the word ‘WHITE’ from the Constitution of New Jersey” and the establishment of “a just and uniform rule of suffrage.” In their counter-resolution, the Democrats stated “That we are unalterably opposed to the establishment of negro suffrage in New Jersey by Congressional legislation, because we hold that each State has the exclusive right to regulate the qualifications of its own voters.” They underscored that “we are opposed to ‘striking out’ the word ‘WHITE’ from the Constitution of New Jersey by an amendment thereto” (West-Jersey Pioneer). Only seven assemblymen opposed a forty-five-man majority against equal suffrage. Following his term in office, Molony worked for the IRS.

Although most Northerners opposed slavery—and its expansion into the West—they also did not want free African Americans to settle in their communities, and to prevent this passed “black laws” denying Black residents “citizenship, suffrage, and property rights” (Wilson, pp. 17–18). During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, northern states like Massachusetts, Indiana, Ohio, and even Wisconsin effectively prevented African Americans from entering or settling their territories, accessing their legal systems, serving in their militias, and, of course, voting. Among the staunchest opponents to African American enfranchisement was New Jersey, which in 1830—when slavery had been effectively abolished in most Northern states—was still home to more than two-thirds of the entire slave population of the North, and in 1865 was one of just three Northern states that refused to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. Black male suffrage “remained a lightning rod in Northern political campaigns” (“The Genius of Freedom”) and New Jersey was among the last states to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment, on February 15th, 1871—a year after it had been ratified by Congress.

No holdings recorded in OCLC.

A rare and striking artifact of entrenched Northern opposition to the Black vote in the aftermath of the Civil War.

REFERENCES: Manual of the Legislature of New Jersey…1905 (Trenton, 1904), p. 209; “The Legislature,” Monmouth Democrat (Freehold, New Jersey), November 14, 1867; West-Jersey Pioneer, July 3, 1868, p. 2; Moore, Shirley Ann Wilson. Sweet Freedom’s Plains: African Americans on the Overland Trails 1841–1869 (2012) at the National Park Service online; Martin, Julia. “Slavery’s legacy is written all over North Jersey, if you know where to look” (2023), at northjersey online; “The Genius of Freedom : Northern Black Activism and Uplift after the Civil War” at the Library Company of Philadelphia online.

Item #8951

Price: $12,500.00

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