All things considered, it seems probable that, if the South had been permitted to have its way in 1865, the harshness of Negro slavery would have been mitigated so as to make slave trading difficult, and so as to make it possible for a Negro to hold property and appear in some cases in court; but that in most other respects the blacks would have remained in slavery.

What could prevent this?  A Freedmen’s Bureau established for ten, twenty, or forty years, with a careful distribution of land and capital and a system of education for the children, might have prevented such an extension of slavery.  But the country would not listen to such a comprehensive plan.  A restricted grant of the suffrage voluntarily made by the states would have been a reassuring proof of a desire to treat the freedmen fairly and would have balanced in part, at least, the increased political power of the South.  There was no such disposition evident.

In Louisiana, for instance, under the proposed reconstruction “not one Negro was allowed to vote, though at that very time the wealthy intelligent free colored people of the state paid taxes on property assessed at fifteen million dollars and many of them were well known for their patriotic zeal and love for the Union."[101]

Thus the arguments for universal Negro suffrage from the start were strong and are still strong, and no one would question their strength were it not for the assumption that the experiment failed.  Frederick Douglass said to President Johnson, “Your noble and humane predecessor placed in our hands the sword to assist in saving the nation, and we do hope that you, his able successor, will favorably regard the placing in our hands the ballot with which to save ourselves."[102]

Carl Schurz wrote, “It is idle to say that it will be time to speak of Negro suffrage when the whole colored race will be educated, for the ballot may be necessary to him to secure his education."[103]

The granting of full Negro suffrage meant one of two alternatives to the South:  (1) The uplift of the Negro for sheer self-preservation.  This is what Schurz and the saner North expected.  As one Southern school superintendent said, “The elevation of this class is a matter of prime importance, since a ballot in the hands of a black citizen is quite as potent as in the hands of a white one.”  Or (2) Negro suffrage meant a determined concentration of Southern effort by actual force to deprive the Negro of the ballot or nullify its use.  This last is what really happened.  But even in this case, so much energy was taken in keeping the Negro from voting that the plan for keeping him in virtual slavery and denying him education partially failed.  It took ten years to nullify Negro suffrage in part and twenty years to escape the fear of federal intervention.  In these twenty years a vast number of Negroes had arisen so far as to escape slavery forever.  Debt peonage could be fastened on part of the rural South and was; but even here the new Negro landholder appeared.  Thus despite everything the Fifteenth Amendment, and that alone, struck the death knell of slavery.