People,”[1] framed it and preceded by a broad
Declaration of Rights which did away with property qualifications and based representation directly on population instead of property. It especially took up new subjects of social legislation,
declaring navigable rivers free public highways,
instituting homestead exemptions, establishing
boards of county commissioners, providing for a
new penal code of laws, establishing universal
manhood suffrage “without distinction of race or
color,” devoting six sections to charitable and
penal institutions and six to corporations, providing separate property ftir married women, etc.
Above all, eleven sections of the Tenth Article
were devoted to the establishment of a complete
public school system.
So satisfactory was the constitution thus adopted by Negro suffrage and by a convention composed of a majority of blacks that the States lived twenty-seven years under it without essential change and when the constitution was revised in 1895, the revision was practically nothing more than an amplification of the Constitution of 1868. No essential advance step of the former document was changed except the suffrage article to disfranchise Negroes.
- ↑ Some of the Reconstruction Constitutions preceding Negro Suffrage showed tendencies toward democratization among the whites.