The "Fightin' Granddaddy" Clause, Voting, and Military Service as a Proxy for Race in the Disfranchisement Era

Military service, as it relates to citizenship throughout U.S. History, has typically resulted in a positive grant of citizenship rights.  The subject has been studied most frequently as it relates to the African American experience.  Scholars have amply documented the role that black military service played in decisions to extend full citizenship protections to the freedmen during and following the U.S. Civil War, and the effect of military service upon the civil rights movements of the twentieth has been similarly well-examined.  What is less well-recognized is that at the turn of the last century, military service was employed as a proxy for race by several southern states, most notably Virginia and Alabama.  In both states, disfranchisers sought to use past military service, whether by an individual or his ancestors, as a way to allow poor and illiterate white men onto the voting rolls.  They did this primarily to mollify white opponents of disfranchisement but also because they feared that any loophole that obviously turned on race–such as the infamous Grandfather Clause in the 1898 Louisiana Constitution–invited federal interference and so they turned to past military service.  Blacks, however few their numbers may have been, had served in every military conflict that the United States entered into, but southern disfranchisers rarely if ever allowed black men to avail themselves of the loophole.  Indeed, this paper will discuss the ample evidence which survives of the many and varied ways in which they dismissed black men’s evidence of service.  This paper will also examine the southern disfranchisers’ own internal arguments about these “Fighting Grandfather Clauses,” revealing a range of conflicting opinions about whether service alone qualified a man for citizenship.