Voting in the Reconstruction Novel: Black Suffrage, Election-Day Violence, and the Regulation of the Vote.

This article examines how fiction during and after the Reconstruction period responded to the expansion of Black male suffrage, focusing on scenes of Black electoral participation that often involved violence and reflected diverse political perspectives. It highlights a moderate literary stance, exemplified by Jeannette Walworth’s 1886 novel *The New Man at Rossmere*, which framed Black voting as a natural threat akin to flooding that required regulation for community survival—a metaphor echoed in contemporaneous Supreme Court rulings endorsing voting restrictions. The article contrasts this moderate position with more radical novels advocating full Black enfranchisement and reactionary works promoting white supremacist disenfranchisement, as well as Black radical literature envisioning separate Black governance in response to federal failures to protect voting rights. Overall, these fictional portrayals reveal the complex cultural negotiations around Black suffrage, electoral violence, and the legal and political mechanisms that ultimately enabled widespread disenfranchisement in the post-Reconstruction South.