Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[121] and substantially absorbed the other two parties. Gardner maintained his hold upon the State for three years, and in the very first year, 1855, this 18th Article was approved by the legislature, and it was ratified by the people on the 23d day of May of that year. Article 20 of the Constitution was another blow to the power of the Catholic Church and the Irishmen. It provided that “No person shall have the right to vote, or be eligible to office, who shall not be able to read the Constitution in the English language, and write his name.” This article was adopted on the recommendation of the same legislature, May 1, 1859.

This provision has been opposed by the Democratic party in the State ever since, and is one to which the writer has ever been opposed. It is not levelled against ignorance wholly, because it shuts out from voting or holding office the most learned professor of a foreign university, if it so happen that he cannot read the Constitution in the English language. But I do not hold, and never shall believe, that the matter of reading and writing should determine the capacity of a man to govern himself. Most of the barons of England could not write their names, yet they wrested from King John that palladium of the freedom of the people, Magna Charta, and established the rights of the people against royal prerogative.

An examination of the pay-rolls of that revolution which established the liberty of this country will show that much the larger number of the soldiers were such as could not have voted under the strict application of this rule of the Constitution of Massachusetts. While they could not write their names, they made their marks at least, upon the bodies of the Hessian soldiers of Great Britain, who were bought to maintain kingly power here. Such a provision is an invasion of liberty and the rights of men, and to-day is depriving substantially all the laboring men of the South of that true citizenship which the soldiers of Massachusetts, many of whom could not read and write, fought to give them,--namely, equality of rights that belonged to the man because he was a man.

These several “Native American” legislatures, which were very largely composed of the lower class of sectarian preachers, were found to be among the most corrupt legislatures that had ever convened in Massachusetts. They employed their time in seeing how they could, by legislation, strike down the Catholic religion and the Catholic