LAUSR

How did fiction respond to the expansions of democracy during the Reconstruction period? This article provides a survey of Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction novels that include scenes of Black electoral participation. Such scenes of voting are also scenes of violence, either threatened or realized, and represent a range of political views. The article explores how novels use such scenes to advocate radical protections of Black voting rights, white supremacist restrictions on Black suffrage, and liberal policies of nonintervention in elections. A set of post-Reconstruction writers asserted a position as expressly moderate between the latter two: that Black political participation must be regulated. These novels pair the threat of Black voting with the civic emergencies of floods and other natural disasters in order to make the regulation of voting rights as necessary for survival as the management of a rising river. This view, positioned as a compromise between the rights provided by the Fifteenth Amendment and the fears of white reactionaries, was shared, alongside similar water metaphors, in the consequential decisions on voting rights by the period’s Supreme Court. This article shows the range of novelistic responses in the wake of the Fifteenth Amendment and the shaping of a self-consciously moderate stance that ultimately supported the national policy of Black disenfranchisement.Liberals [could] square voting regulations with their belief in laissez-faire government . . . by treating electoral reform like the management of natural phenomena, a science of managing threats as in the linked rising tides of river and Black politics in [the period’s novels].