FREEDMEN'S CHARTER, THE, the statute of 1858 declaring the freedmen of the Commonwealth's dominions, and their descendants, to possess full civil standing: the franchise on the same terms as any other subject of the Commonwealth, the right to hold and convey property, to sue and be sued, to sit on juries, and to hold any office the Frame does not expressly reserve. It was passed twenty-two years after the Act of General Emancipation (q.v.) had ended chattel labour and two years before the Freedmen's College of New Carthage opened its doors, and it was received, at the time, as the completion of a promise the Commonwealth had made to itself in 1836 and had been slow to finish paying.
It has not been kept. From the eighteen-seventies the provincial circuits of Carolina and the Indies began adopting what their own statute books call revisions: property qualifications set just above what a freedman farming rented ground could ordinarily meet; registration terms timed to fall outside the planting season, when a labouring man cannot easily leave his crop to travel to a courthouse; residency tests written to exclude the very migrants the plantation economy itself had displaced. None of these provisions names its object. All of them were adopted, province by province, over the thirty years following the Reconstitution, and their combined effect by 1911 is that a freedman in the Carolina lowcountry votes, in practice, considerably less often than his father did the year the Charter was signed. This is not a matter of local report or partisan complaint; it is a matter of the circuit rolls themselves, which any clerk of the courts will produce on request and which this contributor has, in several instances, examined.
The Charter's language has not been repealed. No court has held the revisions to contravene it, on the settled ground that a property or residency qualification, stated in general terms, discriminates against no one by name. The Commonwealth's franchise is accordingly, in the letter of its own law, universal for men since the Third Frame, and in the practice of a considerable part of its southern dominions, it is not. Both of those sentences are true, and an encyclopaedia that printed only the first would not be honest. The present writer has set down here what the circuit rolls actually show, and leaves the apportionment of blame to better-placed hands, having found that his own plain statement of the fact has generally sufficed. (J. E. C.)