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If blacks could be trusted with the musket, they could be trusted with the ballot, and the nation owed at least as much to those who had helped to defend it as to those who had tried to destroy it. Their claims to the suffrage, blacks maintained, had already been validated by the martyrdom of Crispus Attucks in the American Revolution, by the valor of black soldiers at the Battle of New Orleans in 1812 and most recently on the battlefields of the Civil War. This patriotic appeal was made frequently, if only because it seemed calculated to win sympathy in the North, where black leaders were now certain the final decision would be made. At the same time, blacks pressed their case on the basis of whites already permitted to vote. If men who had fought against the government could vote, why not loyal Americans who had remained steadfast in their support of the government? If “the very poorest and meanest of white men” and foreign immigrants barely acculturated to American values and principles (such as the “lowly” Irish) could be trusted to exercise the franchise, why not blacks whose roots were as deep as those of any American, including the President himself?58

By citing the admission of immigrants to political privileges, black leaders sought to make two important points. The case of the Irish suggested to them that wealth and literacy were not considered valid criteria for depriving any person of the suffrage. The fact that distinct ethnic groups like the Jews voted without restriction further suggested that political equality need not lead to social mixing, as some whites feared. “They enjoy all the privileges that any white American enjoys in this country,” a black newspaper said of the Jews, but “there is not as much social commingling between the Jew and the white American as between the white American and the black man.” In the view of the Colored American, a black newspaper in Augusta, Georgia, only three classes of the population could be properly deprived of the right to vote: foreigners, children, and women, whose “sphere is anywhere but in the arena of politics and government.”59 Although some black leaders were less dogmatic on the question of extending the vote to women, the issue was seldom raised lest it confuse and undermine the more urgent cause of black suffrage.

In petitioning the Constitutional Convention for suffrage rights, a black meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, frankly admitted the “deplorable ignorance” of the majority of their people. Nor did they expect “the ignorant” to be admitted to the exercise of privileges “which they might use to the injury of the State.” While conceding this point, however, blacks in Charleston and elsewhere insisted that ignorance was not a deficiency peculiar to Afro-Americans but characterized large numbers of whites—North and South. If “the ignorant” were to be deprived of the vote, then, consistency demanded the disfranchisement of tens of thousands of whites. If, on the other hand, ignorant whites voted without undermining American institutions, ignorant blacks could be trusted as well. Although preferring universal manhood suffrage, black leaders were willing to accept educational and property tests, but only if they were applied honestly and equally to both races.60 That would immediately enfranchise literate and propertied blacks, while encouraging others to emulate them. In the 1890s, black leaders would advance a similar proposal as a way of forestalling total disfranchisement. But whether in the 1860s or in the 1890s, black support for conditional suffrage rested on the false assumption that their white opponents objected only to ignorant and poor blacks voting and on the naïve belief that whites would disfranchise some of their own people. Actually, most black leaders knew better and suggested conditional suffrage only as a way of unveiling white hypocrisy and obtaining full suffrage. “Is a white voter required to know how to read and write?” a black newspaper asked.