BOOK III. GREAT SPEECHES ON GREAT ISSUES. (continued 11)

“I said nothing whatever of any obligation on the part of the President to conform his judgment to the opinions of the Senate and the House of Representatives, although the Senator argued as if I had, and persevered in so arguing after repeated correction. I said no such thing. I know and I respect the perfect independence of each department, acting within its proper sphere, of the other departments.”

A leading democrat, an eloquent man, a man who has courage and frankness and many good qualities, has boasted publicly that the democracy are in power for the first time in eighteen years, and they do not intend to stop until they have wiped out every vestige of every war measure. Well, “forewarned is forearmed,” and you begin appropriately on a measure that has the signature of Abraham Lincoln. I think the picture is a striking one when you hear these words from a man who was then in arms against the Government of the United States, doing his best to destroy it, exerting every power given him in a bloody and terrible rebellion against the authority of the United States and when Abraham Lincoln was marching at the same time to his martyrdom in its defense! Strange times have fallen upon us that those of us who had the great honor to be associated in higher or lower degree with Mr. Lincoln in the administration of the Government should live to hear men in public life and on the floors of Congress, fresh from the battle-fields of the rebellion, threatening the people of the United States that the democratic party, in power for the first time in eighteen years, proposes not to stay its hand until every vestige of the war measures has been wiped out! the late vice-president of the confederacy boasted—perhaps I had better say stated—that for sixty out of the seventy-two years preceding the outbreak of the rebellion, from the foundation of the Government, the South, though in a minority, had by combining with what he termed the anti-centralists in the North ruled the country; and in 1866 the same gentleman indicated in a speech, I think before the Legislature of Georgia, that by a return to Congress the South might repeat the experiment with the same successful result. I read that speech at the time; but I little thought I should live to see so near a fulfillment of its prediction. I see here to-day two great measures emanating, as I have said, not from a committee of either House, but from a democratic caucus in which the South has an overwhelming majority, two-thirds in the House, and out of forty-two Senators on the other side of this Chamber professing the democratic faith thirty are from the South—twenty-three, a positive and pronounced majority, having themselves been participants in the war against the Union either in military or civil station. So that as a matter of fact, plainly deducible from counting your fingers, the legislation of this country to-day, shaped and fashioned in a democratic caucus where the confederates of the South hold the majority, is the realization of Mr. Stephens’ prophecy. And very appropriately the House under that control and the Senate under that control, embodying thus the entire legislative powers of the Government, deriving its political strength from the South, elected from the South, say to the President of the United States, 3176at the head of the Executive Department of the Government, elected as he was from the North—elected by the whole people, but elected as a Northern man; elected on Republican principles, elected in opposition to the party that controls both branches of Congress to-day—they naturally say, “You shall not exercise your constitutional power to veto a bill.”

Some gentleman may rise and say, “Do you call it revolution to put an amendment on an appropriation bill?” Of course not. There have been a great many amendments put on appropriation bills, some mischievous and some harmless; but I call it the audacity of revolution for any Senator or Representative, or any caucus of Senators or Representatives, to get together and say, “We will have this legislation or we will stop the great departments of the Government.” That is revolutionary. I do not think it will amount to revolution; my opinion is it will not. I think that is a revolution that will not go around; I think that is a revolution which will not revolve; I think that is a revolution whose wheel will not turn; but it is a revolution if persisted in, and if not persisted in, it must be backed out from with ignominy. The democratic party in Congress have put themselves exactly in this position to-day, that if they go forward in the announced programme, they march to revolution. I think they will, in the end, go back in an ignominious retreat. That is my judgment.

The extent to which they control the legislation of the country is worth pointing out. In round numbers, the Southern people are about one-third of the population of the Union. I am not permitted to speak of the organization of the House of Representatives, but I can refer to that of the last House. In the last House of Representatives, of the forty-two standing committees the South had twenty-five. I am not blaming the honorable Speaker for it. He was hedged in by partisan forces, and could not avoid it. In this very Senate, out of thirty-four standing committees the South has twenty-two. I am not calling these things up just now in reproach; I am only showing what an admirable prophet the late vice-president of the Southern Confederacy was, and how entirely true all his words have been, and how he has lived to see them realized.

I do not profess to know, Mr. President, least of all Senators on this floor, certainly as little as any Senator on this floor, do I profess to know, what the President of the United States will do when these bills are presented to him, as I suppose in due course of time they will be. I certainly should never speak a solitary word of disrespect of the gentleman holding that exalted position, and I hope I should not speak a word unbefitting the dignity of the office of a Senator of the United States. But as there has been speculation here and there on both sides as to what he would do, it seems to me that the dead heroes of the Union would rise from their graves if he should consent to be intimidated and outraged in his proper constitutional powers by threats like these.

All the war measures of Abraham Lincoln are to be wiped out, say leading democrats! The Bourbons of France busied themselves, I believe, after the restoration, in removing every trace of Napoleon’s power and grandeur, even chiseling the “N” from public monuments raised to perpetuate his glory; but the dead man’s hand from Saint Helena reached out and destroyed them in their pride and in their folly. And I tell the Senators on the other side of this Chamber,—I tell the democratic party North and South—South in the lead and North following,—that, the slow, unmoving finger of scorn, from the tomb of the martyred President on the prairies of Illinois, will wither and destroy them. Though dead he speaketh. [Great applause in the galleries.]

The presiding officer, (Mr. Anthony in the chair.) The Sergeant-at-Arms will preserve order in the galleries and arrest persons manifesting approbation or disapprobation.

Mr. Blaine. When you present these bills with these threats to the living President, who bore the commission of Abraham Lincoln and served with honor in the Army of the Union, which Lincoln restored and preserved, I can think only of one appropriate response from his lips or his pen. He should say to you with all the scorn befitting his station:

Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing?

Speech of Roscoe Conkling.

On the Extra Session of 1879. What it Teaches and what it Means. In the Senate of the United States, April 24, 1879.

The Senate having under consideration the bill (H. R. No. 1) making appropriations for the support of the Army for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1880, and for other purposes—

Mr. Conkling said:

Mr. President: During the last fiscal year the amount of national taxes paid into the Treasury was $234,831,461.77. Of this sum one hundred and thirty million and a fraction was collected under tariff laws as duties on imported merchandise, and one hundred and four million and a fraction as tax on American productions. Of this total of $235,000,000 in round numbers, twenty-seven States which adhered to the Union during the recent war paid $221,204,268.88. The residue came from eleven 3177States. I will read their names: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. These eleven States paid $13,627,192.89. Of this sum more than six million and a half came from the tobacco of Virginia. Deducting the amount of the tobacco tax in Virginia, the eleven States enumerated paid $7,125,462.60 of the revenues and supplies of the Republic.

Mr. Hill, of Georgia. Will the Senator from New York allow me to ask him a question?

Mr. Conkling. If the Senator thinks that two of us are needed to make a statement of figures I will.

Mr. Hill, of Georgia. Two no doubt can make it better.

The Presiding Officer. Does the Senator from New York yield to the Senator from Georgia?

Mr. Conkling. After the expressed opinion of the Senator from Georgia that the statement needs his aid, I cannot decline.

Mr. Hill, of Georgia. I will not interrupt the Senator if it is disagreeable to him, I assure him. I ask if in the computation he has made of the amount paid he does not ascribe to the States that adhered to the Union, to use his language, all——

Mr. Conkling. Having heard the Senator so far, I must ask him to desist.

The Presiding Officer. The Senator from New York declines to yield further.

Mr. Conkling. I have stated certain figures as they appear in the published official accounts: the Senator seems about to challenge the process or system by which the accounts are made up. I cannot give way for this, and must beg him to allow me to proceed with observations which I fear to prolong lest they become too wearisome to the Senate.

The laws exacting these few millions from eleven States, and these hundreds of millions from twenty-seven States, originated, as the Constitution requires all bills for raising revenue to originate, in the House of Representatives. They are not recent laws. They have been approved and affirmed by succeeding Congresses. The last House of Representatives and its predecessor approved them, and both these Houses were ruled by a democratic Speaker, by democratic committees, and by a democratic majority. Both Senate and House are democratic now, and we hear of no purpose to repeal or suspend existing revenue laws. They are to remain in full force. They will continue to operate and to take tribute of the people. If the sum they exact this year and next year, shall be less than last year, it will be only or chiefly because recent legislation favoring southern and tobacco-growing regions has dismissed twelve or fourteen million of annual tax on tobacco.

This vast revenue is raised and to be raised for three uses. It is supplied in time of severe depression and distress, to pay debt inflicted by rebellion; to pay pensions to widows, orphans, and cripples made by rebellion; and to maintain the Government and enforce the laws preserved at inestimable cost of life and treasure.

It can be devoted to its uses in only one mode. Once in the Treasury, it must remain there useless until appropriated by act of Congress. The Constitution so ordains. To collect it, and then defeat or prevent its object or use, would be recreant and abominable oppression.

The Constitution leaves no discretion to Congress whether needful appropriations shall be made. Discretion to ascertain and determine amounts needful, is committed to Congress, but the appropriation of whatever is needful after the amount has been ascertained, is commanded positively and absolutely. When, for example, the Constitution declares that the President and the judges at stated periods shall receive compensation fixed by law, the duty to make the appropriations is plain and peremptory; to refuse to make them, is disobedience of the Constitution, and treasonable. So, when it is declared that Congress shall have power to provide money to pay debts, and for the common defense and the general welfare, the plain meaning is that Congress shall do these things, and a refusal to do them is revolutionary, and subversive of the Constitution. A refusal less flagrant would be impeachable in the case of every officer and department of the Government within the reach of impeachment. Were the President to refuse to do any act enjoined on him by the Constitution, he would be impeachable, and ought to be convicted and removed from office as a convict. Should the judges, one, or some, or all of them, refuse to perform any duty which the Constitution commits to the judicial branch, the refusal would be plainly impeachable.

Congress is not amenable to impeachment. Congressional majorities are triable at the bar of public opinion, and in no other human forum. Could Congress be dissolved instantly here as in England, could Senators and Representatives be driven instantly from their seats by popular disapproval, were they amenable presently somewhere, there would be more of bravery, if not less of guilt, in a disregard of sworn obligation. Legislators are bound chiefly by their honor and their oaths; and the very impunity and exemption they enjoy exalts and measures their obligations, and the crime and odium of violating them. Because of the fixed tenure by 3178which the members of each House hold their places and their trusts, irreparable harm may come of their acts any omissions, before they can be visited with even political defeat, and before the wrong they do can be undone. A congressional majority is absolutely safe during its term, and those who suffered such impunity to exist in the frame of our Government, must have relied on the enormity and turpitude of the act to deter the representatives of the people and the representatives of States from betraying a trust so exalted and so sacred as their offices imply.

Mr. President, it does not escape my attention, as it must occur to those around me, that in ordinary times obvious aphorisms, I might say truisms like these would be needless, if not out of place in the Senate. They are pertinent now because of an occasion without example in American history. I know of no similar instance in British history. Could one be found, it would only mark the difference between an hereditary monarchy without a written constitution, and a free republic with a written charter plainly defining from the beginning the powers, the rights, and the duties of every department of the Government. The nearest approaches in English experience to the transactions which now menace this country, only gild with broad light the wisdom of those who established a system to exempt America forever from the struggles between kingcraft and liberty, between aristocratic pretensions and human rights, which in succeeding centuries had checkered and begrimed the annals of Great Britain. It was not to transplant, but to leave behind and shut out the usurpations and prerogatives of kings, nobles, and gentry, and the rude and violent resorts which, with varying and only partial success, had been matched against them, that wise and far-seeing men of many nationalities came to these shores and founded “a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Such boisterous conflicts as the Old World had witnessed between subjects and rulers—between privilege and right, were the warnings which our fathers heeded, the dangers which they shunned, the evils which they averted, the disasters which they made impossible so long as their posterity should cherish their inheritance.

Until now no madness of party, no audacity or desperation of sinister, sectional, or partisan design, has ever ventured on such an attempt as has recently come to pass in the two Houses of Congress. The proceeding I mean to characterize, if misunderstood anywhere, is misunderstood here. One listening to addresses delivered to the Senate during this debate, as it is called, must think that the majority is arraigned, certainly that the majority wishes to seem and is determined to seem arraigned, merely for insisting that provisions appropriating money to keep the Government alive, and provisions not in themselves improper relating to other matters, may be united in the same bill. With somewhat of monotonous and ostentatious iteration we have been asked whether incorporating general legislation in appropriation bills is revolution, or revolutionary? No one in my hearing has ever so contended.

Each House is empowered by the Constitution to make rules governing the modes of its own procedure. The rules permitting, I know of nothing except convenience, common sense, and the danger of log-rolling combinations, which forbids putting all the appropriations into one bill, and in the same bill, all the revenue laws, a provision admitting a State into the Union, another paying a pension to a widow, another changing the name of a steamboat. The votes and the executive approval which would make one of these provisions a law, would make them all a law. The proceeding would be outlandish, but it would not violate the Constitution.

A Senator might vote against such a huddle of incongruities, although separately he would approve each one of them. If, however, they passed both Houses in a bunch, and the Executive found no objection to any feature of the bill on its merits, and the only criticism should be that it would have been better legislative practice to divide it into separate enactments, it is not easy to see on what ground a veto could stand.

The assault which has been made on the executive branch of the Government and on the Constitution itself, would not be less flagrant if separate bills had been resorted to as the weapons of attack. Suppose in a separate bill, the majority had, in advance of the appropriations, repealed the national-bank act and the resumption act, and had declared that unless the Executive surrendered his convictions and yielded up his approval of the repealing act, no appropriations should be made; would the separation of the bills have palliated or condoned the revolutionary purpose? In the absence of an avowal that appropriations were to be finally withheld, or that appropriations were to be made to hinge upon the approval or veto of something else, a resort to separate bills might have cloaked and secreted for a time the real meaning of the transaction. In that respect it would have been wise and artful to resort to separate bills on this occasion; and I speak, I think, in the hearing of at least one democratic Senator who did not overlook in advance the suggestion now made. But when it was declared, or intended, 3179that unless another species of legislation is agreed to, the money of the people, paid for that purpose, shall not be used to maintain their Government and to enforce the laws—when it is designed that the Government shall be thrown into confusion and shall stop unless private charity or public succor comes to its relief, the threat is revolutionary, and its execution is treasonable.

In the case before us, the design to make appropriations hinge and depend upon the destruction of certain laws is plain on the face of the bills before us,—the bill now pending, and another one on our tables. The same design was plain on the face of the bills sent us at the last session. The very fact that the sections uncovering the ballot-box to violence and fraud, are not, and never have been separately presented, but are thrust into appropriation bills, discloses and proves a belief, if not a knowledge, that in a separate bill the Executive would not approve them. Moreover both Houses have rung with the assertion that the Executive would not approve in a separate measure the overthrow of existing safeguards of the ballot-box, and that should he refuse to give his approval to appropriations and an overthrow of those safeguards linked together, no appropriations should be made.

The plot and the purpose then, is by duress to compel the Executive to give up his convictions, his duty, and his oath, as the price to be paid a political party for allowing the Government to live! Whether the bills be united or divided, is mere method and form. The substance in either form is the same, and the plot if persisted in will bury its aiders and abettors in opprobrium, and will leave a buoy on the sea of time warning political mariners to keep aloof from a treacherous channel in which a political party foundered and went down.

The size of the Army and its pay, have both been exactly fixed by law—by law enacted by a democratic House, and approved by a second democratic House. It has been decided and voted that the coast defenses and the Indian and frontier service, require a certain number of soldiers; and the appropriations needed for provision and pay have been ascertained to a farthing. Nothing remains to be done, but to give formal sanction and warrant for the use of the money from time to time. This was all true at the last session. But a democratic House, or more justly speaking the democratic majority in the House refused to give its sanction, refused to allow the people’s money, to reach the use for which the people paid it, unless certain long-standing laws were repealed. When the Senate voted against the repeal, we were bluntly told that unless that vote was reversed, unless the Senate and the Executive would accept the bills, repealing clauses and all, the session should die, no appropriations should be made, and the wheels of the Government should stop. The threat was executed; the session did die, and every branch of the Government was left without the power to execute its duties after the 30th of next June.

We were further told that when the extra session, thus to be brought about, should convene, the democrats would rule both Houses, that the majority would again insist on its terms, and that then unless the Executive submitted to become an accomplice in the design to fling down the barriers that block the way to the ballot-box against fraud and force, appropriations would again be refused, and again the session should die leaving the Government paralyzed. The extra session has convened; the democrats have indeed the power in both Houses, and thus far the war and the caucus have come up to the manifesto. So far the exploit has been easy. The time of trial is to come; the issue has been made, and of its ignominious failure, there can be no doubt if the Executive shall plant itself on constitutional right and duty, and stand firm. The actors in this scheme have managed themselves and their party into a predicament, and unless the President lets them out they will and they must back out. [Laughter, and manifestations of applause in the galleries.]

Should the Executive interpose the constitutional shield against the political enormities of the proposed bills, and then should the majority carry out the threat to desert their posts by adjournment without making the needed appropriations, I hope and trust they will be called back instantly and called back as often as need be until they relinquish a monstrous pretension and abandon a treasonable position.

The Army bill now pending, is not, in its political features, the bill tendered us at the last session a few days ago; it is not the same bill then insisted on as the ultimatum of the majority. The bill as it comes to us now, condemns its predecessor as crude and objectionable. It was found to need alteration. It did need alteration badly, and those who lately insisted on it as it was, insist on it now as it then was not. A grave proviso has been added to save the right of the President to aid a State gasping in the throes of rebellion or invasion and calling for help. As the provision stood when thrust upon us first and last at the recent session, it would have punished as a felon the President of the United States, the General of the Army, and others, for attempting to obey the Constitution of the United States and two ancient 3180acts of Congress, one of them signed by George Washington. Shorn of this absurdity, the bill as it now stands, should it become a law, will be the first enactment of its kind that ever found its way into the statutes of the United States. A century, with all its activities and party strifes, with all its passionate discords, with all its expedients for party advantage, with all its wisdom and its folly, with all its patriotism and its treason, has never till now produced a congressional majority which deemed such a statute fit to be enacted.

Let me state the meaning of the amendments proposed under guise of enlarging liberty on election day—that day of days when order, peace, and security for all, as well as liberty, should reign. The amendments declare in plain legal effect that, no matter what the exigency may be, no matter what violence or carnage may run riot and trample down right and life, no matter what mob brutality may become master, if the day be election day, any officer or person, civil, military, or naval, from the President down, who attempts to interfere, to prevent or quell violence by the aid of national soldiers, or armed men not soldiers, shall be punished, and may be fined $5,000 and imprisoned for five years. This is the law we are required to set up. Yes, not only to leave murderous ruffianism untouched, but to invite it into action by assurances of safety in advance.

In the city of New York, all the thugs and shoulder-hitters and repeaters, all the carriers of slung-shot, dirks, and bludgeons, all the fraternity of the bucketshops, the rat-pits, the hells and the slums, all the graduates of the nurseries of modern so-called democracy, [laughter;] all those who employ and incite them, from King’s Bridge to the Battery, are to be told in advance that on the day when the million people around them choose their members of the National Legislature, no matter what God-daring or man-hurting enormities they may commit, no matter what they do, nothing that they can do will meet with the slightest resistance from any national soldier or armed man clothed with national authority.

Another bill, already on our tables, strikes down even police officers armed, or unarmed, of the United States.

In South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and in the other States where the colored citizens are counted to swell the representation in Congress, and then robbed of their ballots and dismissed from the political sun—in all such States, every rifle club, and white league, and murderous band, and every tissue ballot-box stuffer, night-rider, and law-breaker, is to be told that they may turn national elections into a bloody farce, that they may choke the whole proceeding with force and fraud, and blood, and that the nation shall not confront them with one armed man. State troops, whether under the name of rifle clubs or white leagues, or any other, armed with the muskets of the United States, may constitute the mob, may incite the mob, but the national arm is to be tied and palsied.

I repeat such an act of Congress has never yet existed. If there ever was a time when such an act could safely and fitly stand upon the statute book, that time is not now, and is not likely to arrive in the near future. Until rebellion raised its iron hand, all parties and all sections had been content to leave where the Constitution left it the power and duty of the President to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

The Constitution has in this regard three plain commands:

The President “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Again, “The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States.”

“The actual service of the United States” some man may say means war merely, service in time of war. Let me read again, “Congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the militia.” For what? First of all, “to execute the laws of the Union.”

Yes, Congress shall have power “to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union.” Speaking to lawyers, I venture to emphasize the word “execute.” It is a term of art; it has a long-defined meaning. The act of 1795, re-enacted since, emphasized these constitutional provisions.

The election law came in to correct abuses which reached their climax in 1868 in the city of New York. In that year in the State of New York the republican candidate for governor was elected; the democratic candidate was counted in. Members of the Legislature were fraudulently seated. The election was a barbarous burlesque. Many thousand forged naturalization papers were issued; some of them were white and some were coffee-colored. The same witnesses purported to attest hundreds and thousands of naturalization affidavits, and the stupendous fraud of the whole thing was and is an open secret. Some of these naturalization papers were sent to other States. So plenty were they, that some of them were sent to Germany, and Germans who had never left their country claimed exemption from the German draft for soldiers in the Franco-Prussian war, because they were naturalized American citizens! [Laughter.]

3181Repeating, ballot-box stuffing, ruffianism, and false counting decided everything. Tweed made the election officers, and the election officers were corrupt. In 1868, thirty thousand votes were falsely added to the democratic majority in the cities of New York and Brooklyn alone. Taxes and elections were the mere spoil and booty of a corrupt junta in Tammany Hall. Assessments, exactions, and exemptions were made the bribes and the penalties of political submission. Usurpation and fraud inaugurated a carnival of corrupt disorder; and obscene birds without number swooped down to the harvest and gorged themselves on every side in plunder and spoliation. Wrongs and usurpations springing from the pollution and desecration of the ballot-box stalked high-headed in the public way. The courts and the machinery of justice were impotent in the presence of culprits too great to be punished.

The act of 1870 came in to throttle such abuses. It was not born without throes and pangs. It passed the Senate after a day and a night which rang with democratic maledictions and foul aspersions.

In the autumn of that year an election was held for the choice of Representatives in Congress. I see more than one friend near me who for himself and for others has reason even unto this day to remember that election and the apprehension which preceded it. It was the first time the law of 1870 had been put in force. Resistance was openly counseled. Democratic newspapers in New York advised that the officers of the law be pitched into the river. Disorder was afoot. Men, not wanting in bravery, and not republicans, dreaded the day. Bloodshed, arson, riot were feared. Ghastly spectacles were still fresh in memory. The draft riots had spread terror which had never died, and strong men shuddered when they remembered the bloody assizes of the democratic party. They had seen men and women, blind with party hate, dizzy and drunk with party madness, stab and burn and revel in murder and in mutilating the dead. They had seen an asylum for colored orphans made a funeral pile, and its smoke sent up from their Christian and imperial city to tell in heaven of the inhuman bigotry, the horrible barbarity of man. Remembering such sickening scenes, and dreading their repetition, they asked the President to protect them—to protect them with the beak and claw of national power. Instantly the unkenneled packs of party barked in vengeful chorus. Imprecations, maledictions, and threats were hurled at Grant; but with that splendid courage which never blanched in battle, which never quaked before clamor—with that matchless self-poise which did not desert him even when a continent beyond the sea rose and uncovered before him, [applause in the galleries,] he responded in the orders which it has pleased the honorable Senator from Delaware to read. The election thus protected was the fairest, the freest, the most secure, a generation has seen. When, two years afterward, New York came to crown Grant with her vote, his action in protecting her chief city on the Ides of November, 1870, was not forgotten. When next New York has occasion to record her judgment of the services of Grant, his action in 1870 touching peace in the city of New York will not be hidden away by those who espouse him wisely. [Applause in the galleries.]

Now, the election law is to be emasculated; no national soldier must confront rioters or mobs; no armed man by national authority, though not a soldier, must stay the tide of brutality or force; no deputy marshal must be within call; no supervisor must have power to arrest any man who in his sight commits the most flagrant breach of the peace. But the democrats tell us “we have not abolished the supervisors; we have left them.” Yes, the legislative bill leaves the supervisors, two stool-pigeons with their wings clipped, [laughter,] two licensed witnesses to stand about idle, and look—yes, “a cat may look at a king”—but they must not touch bullies or lawbreakers, not if they do murders right before their eyes.

If a civil officer should, under the pending amendment, attempt to quell a riot by calling on the bystanders, if they have arms, he is punishable for that. If a marshal, the marshal of the district in which the election occurs, the marshal nominated to the Senate and confirmed by the Senate—I do not mean a deputy marshal—should see an affray or a riot at the polls on election day and call upon the bystanders to quell it, if this bill becomes a law, and one of those bystanders has a revolver in his pocket, or another one takes a stick or a cudgel in his hand, the marshal may be fined $5,000 and punished by five years’ imprisonment.

Such are the devices to belittle national authority and national law, to turn the idea of the sovereignty of the nation into a laughing-stock and a by-word.

Under what pretexts is this uprooting and overturning to be? Any officer who transgresses the law, be he civil or military, may be punished in the courts of the State or in the courts of the nation under existing law. Is the election act unconstitutional? The courts for ten years have been open to that question. The law has been pounded with all the hammers of the lawyers, but it has stood the test; no court has pronounced it unconstitutional, although many men have been prosecuted 3182and convicted under it. Judge Woodruff and Judge Blatchford have vindicated its constitutionality. But, as I said before, the constitutional argument has been abandoned. The supreme political court, practically now above Congresses or even constitutions, the democratic caucus, has decided that the law is constitutional. The record of the judgment is in the legislative bill.

We are told it costs money to enforce the law. Yes, it costs money to enforce all laws; it costs money to prosecute smugglers, counterfeiters, murderers, mail robbers and others. We have been informed that it has cost $200,000 to execute the election act. It cost more than $5,000,000,000 in money alone, to preserve our institutions and our laws, in one war, and the nation which bled and the nation which paid is not likely to give up its institutions and the birthright of its citizens for $200,000. [Applause in the galleries.]

The presiding officer, (Mr. Cockrell, in the chair.) The Senator will suspend a moment. The chair will announce to the galleries that there shall be no more applause; if so, the galleries will be cleared immediately.

Mr. Conkling. Mr. President, that interruption reminds me, the present occupant of the chair having been deeply interested in the bill, that the appropriations made and squandered for local and unlawful improvements in the last river and harbor bill alone, would pay for executing the election law as long as grass grows or water runs. The interest on the money wrongfully squandered in that one bill, would execute it twice over perpetually. The cost of this needless extra session, brought about as a partisan contrivance, would execute the election law for a great while. A better way to save the cost, than to repeal the law, is to obey it. Let White Leagues and rifle clubs disband; let your night-riders dismount; let your tissue ballot-box stuffers desist; let repeaters, false-counters, and ruffians no longer be employed to carry elections, and then the cost of executing the law will disappear from the public ledger.

Again we are told that forty-five million people are in danger from an army nominally of twenty-five thousand men scattered over a continent, most of them beyond the frontiers of civilized abode. Military power has become an affrighting specter. Soldiers at the polls are displeasing to a political party. What party? That party whose Administration ordered soldiers, who obeyed, to shoot down and kill unoffending citizens here in the streets of Washington on election day; that party which has arrested and dispersed Legislatures at the point of the bayonet; that party which has employed troops to carry elections to decide that a State should be slave and should not be free; that party which has corraled courts of justice with national bayonets, and hunted panting fugitive slaves, in peaceful communities, with artillery and dragoons; that party which would have to-day no majority in either House of Congress except for elections dominated and decided by violence and fraud; that party under whose sway, in several States, not only the right to vote, but the right to be, is now trampled under foot.

Such is the source of an insulting summons to the Executive to become particeps criminis in prostrating wholesome laws, and this is the condition on which the money of the people, paid by the people, shall be permitted to be used for the purposes for which the people paid it.

Has the present national Administration been officiously robust in checking the encroachments and turbulence of democrats, either by the use of troops or otherwise? I ask this question because the next election is to occur during the term of the present Administration.

What is the need of revolutionary measures now? What is all this uproar and commotion, this daring venture of partisan experiment, for? Why not make your issue against these laws, and carry your issue to the people? If you can elect a President and a Congress of your thinking, you will have it all your own way.

Why now should there be an attempt to block the wheels of government on the eve of an election at which this whole question is triable before the principals and masters of us all? The answer is inevitable. But one truthful explanation can be made of this daring enterprise. It is a political, a partisan manœuvre. It is a strike for party advantage. With a fair election and an honest count, the democratic party cannot carry the country. These laws, if executed, insure some approach to a fair election. Therefore they stand in the way, and therefore they are to be broken down.

I reflect upon no man’s motives, but I believe that the sentiment which finds expression in the transaction now proceeding in the two houses of Congress, has its origin in the idea I have stated. I believe that the managers and charioteers of the democratic party think that with a fair election and a fair count they cannot carry the State of New York. They know that with free course, such as existed in 1868, to the ballot-box and count, no matter what majority may be given in that State where the green grass grows, the great cities will overbalance and swamp it. They know that with the ability to give eighty, ninety, one hundred thousand majority in the county of New York and the county of 3183Kings, half of it fraudulently added, it is idle for the three million people living above the Highlands of the Hudson to vote.

This is a struggle for power. It is a fight for empire. It is a contrivance to clutch the National Government. That we believe; that I believe.

The nation has tasted, and drunk to the dregs, the sway of the democratic party, organized and dominated by the same influences which dominate it again and still. You want to restore that dominion. We mean to resist you at every step and by every lawful means that opportunity places in our hands. We believe that it is good for the country, good for every man North and South who loves the country now, that the Government should remain in the hands of those who were never against it. We believe that it is not wise or safe to give over our nationality to the dominion of the forces which formerly and now again rule the democratic party. We do not mean to connive at further conquests, and we tell you that if you gain further political power, you must gain it by fair means, and not by foul. We believe that these laws are wholesome. We believe that they are necessary barriers against wrongs, necessary defenses for rights; and so believing, we will keep and defend them even to the uttermost of lawful honest effort.

The other day, it was Tuesday I think, it pleased the honorable Senator from Illinois [Mr. Davis] to deliver to the Senate an address, I had rather said an opinion, able and carefully prepared. That honorable Senator knows well the regard not only, but the sincere respect in which I hold him, and he will not misunderstand the freedom with which I shall refer to some of his utterances.

Whatever else his sayings fail to prove, they did I think, prove their author, after Mrs. Winslow, the most copious and inexhaustible fountain of soothing syrup. The honorable Senator seemed like one slumbering in a storm and dreaming of a calm. He said there was no uproar anywhere—one would infer you could hear a pin drop—from centre to circumference. Rights, he said, are secure. I have his language here. If I do not seem to give the substance aright I will stop and read it. Rights secure North and South; peace and tranquillity everywhere. The law obeyed and no need of special provisions or anxiety. It was in this strain that the Senator discoursed.

Are rights secure, when fresh-done barbarities show that local government in one portion of our land is no better than despotism tempered by assassination? Rights secure, when such things can be, as stand proved and recorded by committees of the Senate! Rights secure, when the old and the young fly in terror from their homes, and from the graves of their murdered dead! Rights secure, when thousands brave cold, hunger, death, seeking among strangers in a far country a humanity which will remember that—

“Before man made them citizens,

Great nature made them men!”

Read the memorial signed by Judge Dillon, by the democratic mayor of Saint Louis, by Mr. Henderson, once a member of the Senate, and by other men known to the nation, detailing what has been done in recent weeks on the Southern Mississippi. Read the affidavits accompanying this memorial. Has any one a copy of the memorial here? I have seen the memorial. I have seen the signatures. I hope the honorable Senator from Illinois will read it, and read the affidavits which accompany it. When he does, he will read one of the most sickening recitals of modern times. He will look upon one of the bloodiest and blackest pictures in the book of recent years. Yet the Senator says, all is quiet. “There is not such faith, no not in Israel.” Verily “order reigns in Warsaw.”

Solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant.

Mr. President, the republican party every where wants peace and prosperity—peace and prosperity in the South, as much and as sincerely as elsewhere. Disguising the truth, will not bring peace and prosperity. Soft phrases will not bring peace. “Fair words butter no parsnips.” We hear a great deal of loose, flabby talk about “fanning dying embers,” “rekindling smoldering fires,” and so on. Whenever the plain truth is spoken, these unctious monitions, with a Peter Parley benevolence, fall copiously upon us. This lullaby and hush has been in my belief a mistake from the beginning. It has misled the South and misled the North. In Andrew Johnson’s time a convention was worked up at Philadelphia, and men were brought from the North and South, for ecstasy and gush. A man from Massachusetts and a man from South Carolina locked arms and walked into the convention arm in arm, and sensation and credulity palpitated, and clapped their hands, and thought an universal solvent had been found. Serenades were held at which “Dixie” was played. Later on, anniversaries of battles fought in the war of Independence, were made occasions by men from the North and men from the South for emotional, dramatic, hugging ceremonies. General Sherman, I remember, attended one of them, and I remember also, that with the bluntness of a soldier, and the wisdom and hard sense of a statesman, he plainly cautioned all concerned not to be carried away, and not to be fooled. 3184But many have been fooled, and being fooled, have helped to swell the democratic majorities which now display themselves before the public eye.

Of all such effusive demonstrations I have this to say: honest, serious convictions are not ecstatic or emotional. Grave affairs and lasting purposes do not express or vent themselves in honeyed phrase or sickly sentimentality, rhapsody, or profuse professions.

This is as true of political as of religious duties. The Divine Master tells us, “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven.”

Facts are stubborn things, but the better way to deal with them is to look them squarely in the face.

The republican party and the Northern people preach no crusade against the South. I will say nothing of the past beyond a single fact. When the war was over, no man who fought against his flag was punished even by imprisonment. No estate was confiscated. Every man was left free to enjoy life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. After the Southern States were restored to their relations in the Union, no man was ever disfranchised by national authority—not one. If this statement is denied, I invite any Senator to correct me. I repeat it. After the Southern State governments were rebuilded, and the States were restored to their relations in the Union, by national authority, not one man for one moment was ever denied the right to vote, or hindered in the right. From the time that Mississippi was restored, there never has been an hour when Jefferson Davis might not vote as freely as the honorable Senator in his State of Illinois. The North, burdened with taxes, draped in mourning, dotted over with new-made graves tenanted by her bravest and her best, sought to inflict no penalty upon those who had stricken her with the greatest, and, as she believed, the guiltiest rebellion that ever crimsoned the annals of the human race.

As an example of generosity and magnanimity, the conduct of the nation in victory was the grandest the world has ever seen. The same spirit prevails now. Yet our ears are larumed with the charge that the republicans of the North seek to revive and intensify the wounds and pangs and passions of the war, and that the southern democrats seek to bury them in oblivion of kind forgetfulness.

We can test the truth of these assertions right before our eyes. Let us test them. Twenty-seven States adhered to the Union in the dark hour. Those States send to Congress two hundred and sixty-nine Senators and Representatives. Of these two hundred and sixty-nine Senators and Representatives, fifty-four, and only fifty-four, were soldiers in the armies of the Union. The eleven States which were disloyal send ninety-three Senators and Representatives to Congress. Of these, eighty-five were soldiers in the armies of the rebellion, and at least three more held high civil station in the rebellion, making in all eighty-eight out of ninety-three.

Let me state the same fact, dividing the Houses. There are but four Senators here who fought in the Union Army. They all sit here now; and there are but four. Twenty Senators sit here who fought in the army of the rebellion, and three more Senators sit here who held high civil command in the confederacy.

In the House, there are fifty Union soldiers from twenty-seven States, and sixty-five confederate soldiers from eleven States.

Who, I ask you, Senators, tried by this record, is keeping up party divisions on the issues and hatreds of the war?

The South is solid. Throughout all its borders it has no seat here save two in which a republican sits. The Senator from Mississippi [Mr. Bruce] and the Senator from Louisiana [Mr. Kellogg] are still spared; and whisper says that an enterprise is afoot to deprive one of these Senators of his seat. The South is emphatically solid. Can you wonder that the North soon becomes solid too? Do you not see that the doings witnessed now in Congress fill the North with alarm, and distrust of the patriotism and good faith of men from the South? Forty-two democrats have seats on this floor; forty-three if you add the honorable Senator from Illinois, [Mr. Davis.] He does not belong to the democratic party, although I must say, after reading his speech the other day, that a democrat who asks anything more of him is an insatiate monster. [Laughter.] If we count the Senator from Illinois, there are forty-three democrats in this Chamber. Twenty-three is a clear majority of all, and twenty-three happens to be exactly the number of Senators from the South who were leaders in the late rebellion.

Do you anticipate my object in stating these numbers? For fear you do not, let me explain. Forty-two Senators rule the Senate; twenty-three Senators rule the caucus. A majority rules the Senate; a caucus rules the majority; and the twenty-three southern Senators rule the caucus. The same thing, in the same way, governed by the same elements, is true in the House.

This present assault upon the purity and fairness of elections, upon the Constitution, upon the executive department, and upon the rights of the people; not the 3185rights of a king, not on such rights as we heard the distinguished presiding officer, who I am glad now to discover in his seat, dilate upon of a morning some weeks ago; not the divine right of kings, but the inborn rights of the people—the present assault upon them, could never have been inaugurated without the action of the twenty-three southern Senators here, and the southern Representatives there, [pointing to the House.]

The people of the North know this and see it. They see the lead and control of the democratic party again where it was before the war, in the hands of the South. “By their fruits ye shall know them.” The honorable Senator from Alabama [Mr. Morgan], educated no doubt by experience in political appearances, and spectacular effects, said the other day that he preferred the democrats from the North should go first in this debate. I admired his sagacity. It was the skill of an experienced tactician to deploy the northern levies as the sappers and miners; it was very becoming certainly. It was not from cruelty, or to make them food for powder, that he set them in the forefront of the battle; he thought it would appear better for the northern auxiliaries to go first and tunnel the citadel. Good, excellent, as far as it went; but it did not go very far in misleading anybody; putting the tail foremost and the head in the sand, only displayed the species and habits of the bird. [Laughter.]

We heard the other day that “the logic of events” had filled the southern seats here with men banded together by a common history and a common purpose. The Senator who made that sage observation perhaps builded better than he knew. The same logic of events, let me tell democratic Senators, and the communities behind them, is destined to bring from the North more united delegations.

I read in a newspaper that it was proposed the other day in another place, to restore to the Army of the United States men who, educated at the nation’s cost and presented with the nation’s sword, drew the sword against the nation’s life. In the pending bill is a provision for the retirement of officers now in the Army, with advanced rank and exaggerated pay. This may be harmless, it may be kind. One swallow proves not spring, but along with other things, suspicion will see in it an attempt to coax officers now in the Army to dismount, to empty their saddles, in order that others may get on.

So hue and cry is raised because courts, on motion, for cause shown in open court, have a right to purge juries in certain cases. No man in all the South, under thirty-five years of age, can be affected by this provision, because every such man was too young when the armies of the rebellion were recruited to be subject to the provision complained of. As to the rest, the discretion is a wholesome one. But, even if it were not, let me say in all kindness to southern Senators, it was not wise to make it a part of this proceeding, and raise this uproar in regard to it.

Even the purpose, in part already executed, to remove the old and faithful officers of the Senate, even Union soldiers, that their places may be snatched by others—to overturn an order of the Senate which has existed for a quarter of a century, in order to grasp all the petty places here, seems to me unwise. It is not wise, if you want to disarm suspicion that you mean aggrandizing, gormandizing, unreasonable things.

Viewing all these doings in the light of party advantage—advantage to the party to which I belong, I could not deplore them; far from it; but wishing the repose of the country, and the real, lasting, ultimate welfare of the South, and wishing it from the bottom of my heart, I believe they are flagrantly unwise, hurtfully injudicious.

What the South needs is to heal, build, mend, plant, sow. In short, to go to work. Invite labor; cherish it; do not drive it out. Quit proscription, both for opinion’s sake, and for color’s sake. Reform it altogether. I know there are difficulties in the way. I know there is natural repugnance in the way; but drop passion, drop sentiment which signifies naught, and let the material prosperity and civilization of your land advance. Do not give so much energy, so much restless, sleepless activity, to an attempt so soon to get possession once more, and dominate and rule the country. There is room enough at the national board, and it is not needed, it is not decorous, plainly speaking, that the South should be the MacGregor at the table, and that the head of the table should be wherever he sits. For a good many reasons, it is not worth while to insist upon it.

Mr. President, one of Rome’s famous legends stands in these words: “Let what each man thinks of the Republic be written on his brow.” I have spoken in the spirit of this injunction. Meaning offence to no man, and holding ill-will to no man, because he comes from the South, or because he differs with me in political opinion, I have spoken frankly, but with malice toward none.

This session, and the bill pending, are acts in a partisan and political enterprise. This debate, begun after a caucus had defined and clenched the position of every man in the majority, has not been waged to convince anybody here. It has resounded to fire the democratic heart, to 3186sound a blast to the cohorts of party, to beat the long-roll, and set the squadrons in the field. That is its object, as plainly to be seen as the ultimate object of the attempted overthrow of laws.

Political speeches having been thus ordained, I have discussed political themes, and with ill-will to no portion of the country but good will toward every portion of it, I have with candor spoken somewhat of my thoughts of the duties and dangers of the hour. [Applause on the floor and in the galleries.]

Lincoln’s Speech at Gettysburg.

“Four-score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new Nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now, we are engaged in a great civil war testing whether that Nation, or any Nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting-place for those, who here gave their lives that that Nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a large sense, we cannot dedicate—we cannot consecrate—we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we SAY here, but it can never forget what they DID here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead, we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion, that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this Nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that Government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from this earth.”

Speech of Hon. John M. Broomall, of Pennsylvania,

On the Civil Rights Bill. House of Representatives, March 8, 1866.

Mr. Speaker, it is alleged that this species of legislation will widen the breach existing between the two sections of the country, will offend our southern brethren. Do not gentlemen know that those who are most earnestly asking this legislation are our southern brethren themselves.

They are imploring us to protect them against the conquered enemies of the country, who notwithstanding their surrender, have managed, through their skill or our weakness, to seize nearly all the conquered territory.

This is not the first instance in the world’s history in which all that had been gained by hard fighting was lost by bad diplomacy.

But they, whose feelings are entitled to so much consideration in the estimation of those who urge this argument, are not our southern brethren, but the southern brethren of our political opponents; the conquered rebels, pardoned and unpardoned; traitors priding themselves upon their treason.

These people are fastidious. The ordinary terms of the English language must be perverted to suit their tastes. Though they surrendered in open and public war, they are not to be treated as prisoners. Though beaten in the last ditch of the last fortification, they are not to be called a conquered people. The decision of the forum of their own choosing is to be explained away into meaningless formality for their benefit. Though guilty of treason, murder, arson, and all the crimes in the calendar, they are “our southern brethren.” The entire decalogue must be suspended lest it should offend these polished candidates for the contempt and execration of posterity.

Out of deference to the feelings of these sensitive gentlemen, an executive construction must be given to the word “loyalty,” so that it shall embrace men who only are not hanged because they have been pardoned, and who only did not destroy the Government because they could not. Out of deference to the feelings of these sensitive gentlemen, too, a distinguished public functionary, once the champion of the rights of man, a leader in the cause of human progress, a statesman whose keen foreknowledge could point out the “irrepressible conflict between slavery and freedom,” cannot now see that treason and loyalty are uncompromising antagonisms.

It is charged against us that the wheels of Government are stopped by our refusal to admit the representatives of these southern communities. When we complain that Europe is underselling us in our markets, and demand protection for the American laborer, we are told to “admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we complain that excessive importations are impoverishing the country, and rapidly bringing on financial ruin, we are told to “admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we complain that an inflated currency is making the rich richer, and the poor poorer, keeping the prices of even the necessaries of life beyond 3187the reach of widows and orphans who are living upon fixed incomes, the stereotyped answer comes, “Admit the southern Senators and Representatives.” When we demand a tax upon cotton to defray the enormous outlay made in dethroning that usurping “king of the world,” still the answer comes, and the executive parrots everywhere repeat it, “Admit the southern Senators and Representatives.”

The mind of the man who can see in that prescription a remedy for all political and social diseases must be curiously constituted. Would these Senators and Representatives vote a tax upon cotton? Would they protect American industry by increasing duties? Would they prevent excessive importations? To believe this requires as unquestioning a faith as to believe in the sudden conversion of whole communities from treason to loyalty.

We are blocking the wheels of Government! Why, the Government has managed to get along for four years, not only without the aid of the Southern Senators and Representatives, but against their efforts to destroy it; and in the mean time has crushed a rebellion that would have destroyed any other Government under heaven. Surely the nation can do without the services of these men, at least during the time required to examine their claims and to protect by appropriate legislation our Southern brethren. None but a Democrat would think of consulting the wolf about what safeguard should be thrown around the flock.

Those who advocate the admission of the Senators and Representatives from the States lately reclaimed from the rebellion, as a means of protecting the loyal men in those States and as a substitute for the system of legislation of which this bill is part, well know that the majority in both Houses of Congress ardently desire the full recognition of those States, and only ask that the rights and interests of the truly loyal men in those States shall be first satisfactorily secured.

Much useless controversy has been had about the legal status of those States. There is no difference between the two parties of the country on that point. The actual point of difference is this: the Democrats affiliate with their old political friends in the South, the late rebels, the friends and followers of Breckinridge, Lee, and Davis. The Union majority, on the other hand, naturally affiliate with the loyal men in the South, the men who have always supported the Government against Breckinridge, Lee, and Davis. Each party wants the South reconstructed in the hands of its own “southern brethren.”

In short, the northern party corresponding with the loyal men of the South ask that the legitimate results of Grant’s victory shall be carried out, while the northern party corresponding with the rebels of the South ask that things should be considered as if Lee had been the conqueror, or at least as if there had been a drawn battle, without victory on either side.

This brings the rights of those in whose behalf the opponents of the bill under consideration are acting directly in question, and in order to limit down the field of controversy as far as possible, let us inquire how far all parties agree upon the legal status of the communities lately in rebellion. Now, the meanest of all controversies is that which comes from dialectics. Where the disputants attach different meanings to the same word their time is worse than thrown away. I have always looked upon the question whether the States are in or out of the Union as only worthy of the schoolmen of the middle ages, who could write volumes upon a mere verbal quibble. The disputants would agree if they were compelled to use the word “State” in the same sense. I will endeavor to avoid this trifling.

All parties agree that at the close of the rebellion the people of North Carolina, for example, had been “deprived of all civil government.” The President, in his proclamation of May 29, 1865, tells the people of North Carolina this in so many words, and he tells the people of the other rebel States the same thing in his several proclamations to them. This includes the Conservatives and Democrats, who, however they may disagree, at last agree in this, that the President shall do their thinking.

The Republicans subscribe to this doctrine, though they differ in their modes of expressing it. Some say that those States have ceased to possess any of the rights and powers of government as States of the Union. Others say, with the late lamented President, that “those States are out of practical relations with the Government.”

Others hold that the State organizations are out of the Union. And still others that the rebels are conquered, and therefore that their organizations are at the will of the conqueror.

The President has hit upon a mode of expression which embraces concisely all these ideas. He says that the people of those States were, by the progress of the rebellion and by its termination, “deprived of all civil government.”

One step further. All parties agree that the people of these States, being thus disorganized for all State purposes, are still at the election of the government, citizens of the United States, and as such, as far as they have not been disqualified by treason, ought to be allowed to form their own State governments, subject to the requirements of the Constitution of the United States.

3188Still one step further. All parties agree that this cannot be done by mere unauthorized congregations of the people, but that the time, place and manner must be prescribed by some department of the Government, according to the argument of Mr. Webster and the spirit of the decision of the Supreme Court in Luther vs. Borden, 7 Howard, page 1.

Yet another step in the series of propositions. All parties agree that as Congress was not in session at the close of the rebellion, the President, as Commander-in-Chief, was bound to take possession of the conquered country and establish such government as was necessary.

Thus far all is harmonious; but now the divergence begins. At the commencement of the present session of Congress three-fourths of both Houses held that when the people of the States are “deprived of all civil government,” and when, therefore, it becomes necessary to prescribe the time, place, and manner in and by which they shall organize themselves again into States while the President may take temporary measures, yet only the law-making power of the Government is competent to the full accomplishment of the task. In other words, that only Congress can enable citizens of the United States to create States. I have said that at the commencement of the session three-fourths of both houses held this opinion. The proportion is smaller now, and by a judicious use of executive patronage it may become still smaller; but the truth of the proposition will not be affected if every Representative and Senator should be manipulated into denying it.

On the other hand, the remaining fourth, composed of the supple Democracy and its accessions, maintain that this State-creating power is vested in the President alone, and that he has already exercised it.

The holy horror with which our opponents affect to contemplate the doctrine of destruction of States is that much political hypocrisy. Every man who asks the recognition of the existing local governments in the South thereby commits himself to that doctrine. The only possible claim that can be set up in favor of the existing governments is based upon the theory that the old ones have been destroyed. The present organizations sprang up at the bidding of the President after the conquest among a people who, he said, had been “deprived of all civil government.”

If the President’s “experiment” had resulted in organizing the southern communities in loyal hands, the majority in Congress would have found no difficulty in indorsing it and giving it the necessary efficiency by legislative enactment.

In this case, too, the President never would have denied the power of Congress in the premises. He never would have set up the theory that the citizens of the United States, through their representatives, are not to be consulted when those who have once broken faith with them ask to have the compact renewed.

Our opponents have no love for the President. They called him a usurper and a tyrant in Tennessee. They ridiculed him as a negro “Moses.” They tried to kill him, and failing that, they accused him of being privy to the murder of his predecessor. But when his “experiment” at reconstruction was found to result in favor of their friends, the rebels, then they hung themselves about his neck like so many mill-stones, and tried to damn him to eternal infamy by indorsing his policy. Will they succeed? Will he shake them off, or go down with them?

But let us suffer these discordant elements to settle their own terms of combinations as best they may. The final result cannot be doubtful.

If ten righteous men were needed to save Sodom, even Andrew Johnson will find it impossible to save the Democratic party.

Our path of duty is plain before us. Let us pass this bill and such others as may be necessary to secure protection to the loyal men of the South. If our political opponents thwart our purposes in this, let us go to the country upon that issue.

I am by no means an advocate of extensive punishment, either in the way of hanging or confiscation, though some of both might be salutary. I do not ask that full retribution be enforced against those who have so grievously sinned. I am willing to make forgiveness the rule and punishment the exception; yet I have my ultimatum. I might excuse the pardon of the traitors Lee and Davis, even after the hanging of Wirz, who but obeyed their orders, orders which he would have been shot for disobeying. I might excuse the sparing of the master after killing the dog whose bite but carried with it the venom engendered in the master’s soul. I might look calmly upon a constituency ground down by taxation, and tell the complainants that they have neither remedy nor hope of vengeance upon the authors of their wrongs. I might agree to turn unpityingly from the mother whose son fell in the Wilderness, and the widow whose husband was starved at Andersonville, and tell them that in the nature of things retributive justice is denied them, and that the murderers of their kindred may yet sit in the councils of their country; yet even I have my ultimatum. I might consent that the glorious deeds of the last five years should be blotted from the country’s history; that the trophies won on a hundred battle-fields, the sublime visible evidence of the heroic devotion of America’s citizen soldiery, should be 3189burned on the altar of reconciliation. I might consent that the cemetery at Gettysburg should be razed to the ground; that its soil should be submitted to the plow, and that the lamentation of the bereaved should give place to the lowing of cattle. But there is a point beyond which I shall neither be forced nor persuaded. I will never consent that the government shall desert its allies in the South and surrender their rights and interests to the enemy, and in this I will make no distinction of caste or color either among friends or foes.

The people of the South were not all traitors. Among them were knees that never bowed to the Baal of secession, lips that never kissed his image. Among the fastness of the mountains, in the rural districts, far from the contagion of political centres, the fires of patriotism still burned, sometimes in the higher walks of life, oftener in obscure hamlets, and still oftener under skins as black as the hearts of those who claimed to own them.

These people devoted all they had to their country. The homes of some have been confiscated, and they are now fugitives from the scenes that gladdened their childhood. Some were cast into dungeons for refusing to fire upon their country’s flag, and still others bear the marks of stripes inflicted for giving bread and water to the weary soldier of the Republic, and aiding the fugitive to escape the penalty of the disloyalty to treason. If the God of nations listened to the prayers that ascended from so many altars during those eventful years, it was to the prayers of these people.

Sir, we talked of patriotism in our happy northern homes, and claimed credit for the part we acted; but if the history of these people shall ever be written, it will make us blush that we ever professed to love our country.

The government now stands guard over the lives and fortunes of these people. They are imploring us not to yield them up without condition to those into whose hands recent events have committed the destinies of the unfortunate South. A nation which could thus withdraw its protection from such allies, at such a time, without their full and free consent, could neither hope for the approval of mankind nor the blessing of heaven.

Speech, of Hon. Charles A. Eldridge, of Wisconsin.

Against the Civil Rights Bill, in the House of Representatives, March 2, 1866.

Mr. Speaker: I thought yesterday that I would discuss this measure at some length; but I find myself this morning very unwell; and I shall therefore make only a few remarks, suggesting some objections to the bill.

I look upon the bill before us, Mr. Speaker, as one of the series of measures rising out of a feeling of distrust and hatred on the part of certain individuals, not only in this House, but throughout the country, toward these persons who formerly held slaves. I had hoped that long before this time the people of this country would have come to the conclusion that the subject of slavery and the questions connected with it had already sufficiently agitated this country. I had hoped that now, when the war is over, when peace has been restored, when in every State of the Union the institution of slavery has been freely given up, its abolition acquiesced in, and the Constitution of the United States amended in accordance with that idea, this subject would cease to haunt us as it is made to do in the various measures which are constantly being here introduced.

This bill is, it appears to me, one of the most insidious and dangerous of the various measures which have been directed against the interest of the people of this country. It is another of the measures designed to take away the essential rights of the State. I know that when I speak of States and State rights, I enter upon unpopular subjects. But, sir, whatever other gentlemen may think, I hold that the rights of the States are the rights of the Union, that the rights of the States and the liberty of the States are essential to the liberty of the individual citizen. * * *

Now, it may be said that there is no reason for this distinction; but I claim that there is. And there is no man that can look upon this crime, horrid as it is, diabolical as it is when committed by the white man, and not say that such a crime committed by a negro upon a white woman deserves, in the sense and judgment of the American people, a different punishment from that inflicted upon the white man. And yet the very purpose of this section, as I contend, is to abolish or prevent the execution of laws making a distinction in regard to the punishment.

But, further, it is said the negro race is weak and feeble; that they are mere children—“wards of the Government.” In many instances it might be just and proper to inflict a less punishment upon them for certain crimes than upon men of intelligence and education, whose motives may have been worse. It might be better for the community to control them by milder and gentler means. If the judge sitting upon the bench of the State court shall, in carrying out the law of the State, inflict a higher penalty upon the white man than that which attaches to the freedman, not that I suppose it is ever contemplated to 3190enforce that, yet it would be equally applicable, and the penalty would be incurred by the judge in the same manner precisely.

But I proceed to the section I was about to remark upon when the gentleman interrupted me. The marshals who may be employed to execute warrants and precepts under this bill, as I have already remarked, are offered a bribe for the execution of them. It creates marshals in great numbers, and authorizes commissioners to appoint almost anybody for that purpose, and it stimulates them by the offer of a reward not given in the case of the arrest of persons guilty of any other crime.

It goes further. It authorizes the President, when he is apprehensive that some crime of that sort may be committed, on mere suspicion, mere information or statement that it is likely to be committed, to take any judge from the bench or any marshal from his office to the place where the crime is apprehended, for the purpose of more efficiently and speedily carrying out the provisions of the bill.

The gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Thayer) tells us that it is very remarkable that it should be claimed that this bill is intended to create and continue a sort of military despotism over the people where this law is to be executed. It seems to me nothing is plainer. Where do we find any laws heretofore passed having no relation to the negro in which such a provision as this tenth section is to be found? Generally the marshal seeks by himself to execute this warrant, and failing, he calls out his POSSE COMITATUS. But this bill authorizes the use in the first instance of the Army and Navy by the President for the purpose of executing such writs.

The gentlemen who advocate this bill are great sticklers for equality, and insist that there shall be no distinction made on account of race or color.

Why, sir, every provision of this bill carries upon its face the distinction, and is calculated to perpetuate it forever as long as the act shall be in force. Where did this measure originate but in the recognition of the difference between races and colors? Does any one pretend that this bill is intended to protect white men—to save them from any wrongs which may be inflicted upon them by the negroes? Not at all. It is introduced and pressed in the pretended interest of the black man, and recognizes and virtually declares distinction between race and color.

I deprecate all these measures because of the implication they carry upon their face, that the people who have heretofore owned slaves intend to do them harm. I do not believe it. So far as my knowledge goes, and so far as my information extends, I believe that the people who have held the freedmen as slaves will treat them with more kindness, with more leniency, than those of the North who make such loud professions of love and affection for them, and are so anxious to pass these bills. They know their nature; they know their wants; they know their habits; they have been brought up together; none of the prejudices and unkind feelings which many in the north would have toward them.

I do not credit all these stories about the general feeling of hostility in the South toward the negro. So far as I have heard opinions expressed upon the subject, and I have conversed with many persons from that section of the country, they do not blame the negro for anything that has happened. As a general thing, he was faithful to them and their interests, until the army reached the place and took him from them. He has supported their wives and children in the absence of the husbands and fathers in the armies of the South. He has done for them what no one else could have done. They recognize his general good feeling toward them, and are inclined to reciprocate that feeling toward him.

I believe that is the general feeling of the southern people to-day. The cases of ill-treatment are exceptional cases. They are like the cases which have occurred in the northern States where the unfortunate have been thrown upon our charity.

Take, for instance, the stories of the cruel treatment of the insane in the State of Massachusetts. They may have been barbarously confined in the loathsome dens as stated in particular instances; but is that any evidence of the general ill-will of the people of the State of Massachusetts toward the insane? Is that any reason why the Federal arm should be extended to Massachusetts to control and protect the insane there?

It has also been said that certain paupers in certain States have been badly used, paupers, too, who were whites. Is that any reason why we should extend the arm of the Federal Government to those States to protect the poor who are thrown upon the charity of the people there?

Sir, we must yield to the altered state of things in this country. We must trust the people; it is our duty to do so; we cannot do otherwise. And the sooner we place ourselves in a position where we can win the confidence of our late enemies, where our counsels will be heeded, where our advice may be regarded, the sooner will the people of the whole country be fully reconciled to each other and their changed relationship; the sooner will all the inhabitants of our country be in the possession of all the rights and immunities essential to their prosperity and happiness.

3191

Hon. A. K. McClure on What of the Republic?

Annual Address delivered before the Literary Societies of Dickinson College, June 26th, 1873.

Gentlemen of the Literary Societies:—What of the Republic? The trials and triumphs of our free institutions are hackneyed themes. They are the star attractions of every political conflict. They furnish a perpetual well-spring of every grade of rhetoric for the hustings, and partisan organs proclaim with the regularity of the seasons, the annual perils of free government.

But a different occasion, with widely different opportunities and duties, has brought us together. The dissembling of the partisan would be unwelcome, but here truth may be manfully spoken of that which so profoundly concerns us all. I am called to address young men who are to rank among the scholars, the teachers, the statesmen, the scientists of their age. They will be of the class that must furnish a large proportion of the executives, legislators, ministers, and instructors of the generation now rapidly crowding us to the long halt that soon must come. Doubtless, here and there, some who have been less favored with opportunities, will surpass them in the race for distinction; but in our free government where education is proffered to all, and the largest freedom of conviction and action invites the humblest to honorable preferment, the learned must bear a conspicuous part in directing the destiny of the nation. Every one who moulds a thought or inspires a fresh resolve even in the remotest regions of the Continent, shapes, in some measure, the sovereign power of the Republic.

The time and the occasion are alike propitious for a dispassionate review of our political system, and of the political duties which none can reject and be blameless. Second only to the claims of religion are the claims of country. Especially should the Christian, whether teacher or hearer, discharge political duties with fidelity. I do not mean that the harangue of the partisan should desecrate holy places, or that men should join in the brawls of pot-house politicians; but I do mean that a faithful discharge of our duty to free government is not only consistent with the most exemplary and religious life, but is a Christian as well as a civil obligation. The government that maintains liberty of conscience as one of its fundamental principles, and under which Christianity is recognized as the common law, has just claims upon the Christian citizen for the vigilant exercise of all political rights.

If it be true, as is so often confessed around us, that we have suffered a marked decline in political morality and in our political administration, let it not be assumed that the defect is in our system of government, or that the blame lies wholly with those who are faithless or incompetent. Here no citizen is voiceless, and none can claim exemption from just responsibility for evils in the body politic. Ours is, in fact as well as in theory, a government of the people; and its administration is neither better nor worse than the people themselves. It was devised by wise and patriotic men, who gave to it the highest measure of fidelity; and so perfectly and harmoniously is its framework fashioned, that the sovereign power can always exercise a salutary control over its own servants. An accidental mistake of popular judgment, or the perfidy of an executive, or the enactment of profligate or violent laws, are all held in such wholesome check by co-ordinate powers, as to enable the supreme authority of the nation to restrain or correct almost every conceivable evil.

Until the people as a whole are given over to debauchery the safety of our free institutions cannot be seriously endangered. True, such a result might be possible without the demoralization of a majority of the people, if good citizens surrender their rights, and their duties, and their government to those who desire to rule in profligacy and oppression.

If reputable citizens refrain from active participation in our political conflicts, they voluntarily surrender the safety of their persons and property, and the good order and well-being of society, to those who are least fitted for the exercise of authority. When such results are visible in any of the various branches of our political system, turn to the true source and place the responsibility where it justly belongs. Do not blame the thief and the adventurer, for they are but plying their vocations, and they rob public rather than private treasure, because men guard the one and do not guard the other. Good men employ every proper precaution to protect their property from the lawless. When an injury is done to them individually they are swift to invoke the avenging arm of justice. They are faithful guardians of their own homes and treasures against the untitled spoiler, while they are criminally indifferent to the public wrongs done by those who, in the enactment and execution of the laws, directly affect their happiness and prosperity. Do not answer that politics have become disreputable. Such a declaration is a confession of guilt. He who utters it becomes his own accuser. If it be true that our politics, either generally or in any particular municipality or State, have become disreputable, who must answer for it? Who have made our politics disreputable? Surely not the disreputable citizens, for they are a small minority 3192in every community and in every party. If they have obtained control of political organizations, and thereby secured their election to responsible trusts, it must have been with the active or passive approval of the good citizens who hold the actual power in their own hands. There is not a disgraceful official shaming the people of this country to-day, who does not owe his place to the silent assent or positive support of those who justly claim to be respectable citizens, and who habitually plead their own wrongs to escape plain and imperative duties. If dishonest or incompetent appointments have been made, in obedience to the demands of mere partisans, a just expression of the honest sentiments of better citizens, made with the manliness that would point to retribution for such wrongs, would promptly give us a sound practical civil service, and profligacy and dishonesty would end.

Our Presidents and Governors are not wholly or even mainly responsible for the low standard of our officials. If good men concede primary political control to those who wield it for selfish ends, by refraining from an active discharge of their political duties, and make the appointing powers dependent for both counsel and support upon the worst political elements, who is to blame when public sentiment is outraged by the selection of unworthy men to important public trusts? The fruits are but the natural, logical results of good citizens refusing to accept their political duties. There is not a blot on our body politic to-day that the better elements of the people could not remove whenever they resolved to do so,—and they will so resolve in good time, as they have always done in the past. There is not a defect or deformity in our political administration that they cannot, and will not correct, by the peaceful expression of their sober convictions, in the legitimate way pointed out by our free institutions.

You who are destined to be more or less conspicuous among the teachers of men, should study well this reserved power so immediately connected with the preservation of our government. The virtue and intelligence of the people is the sure bulwark of safety for the Republic. It has been the source of safety in all times past, in peace and in war, and it is to-day, and will ever continue to be, the omnipotent power that forbids us to doubt the complete success of free government. It may, at times, be long suffering and slow to resent wrongs which grow gradually in strength and diffuse their poison throughout the land. It may invoke just censure for its forbearance in seasons of partisan strife. It may long seem lost as a ruling element of our political system, and may appear to be faithless to its high and sacred duties. It may be unfelt in its gentler influences, which should ever be active in maintaining the purity and dignity of society and government. But if for a season the better efforts of a free people are not evident to quicken and support public virtue, it must not be assumed that the source of good influences has been destroyed, or that public virtue cannot be restored to its just supremacy. When healthful influences do not come like the dew drops which glitter in the morning as they revive the harvest of the earth, they will most surely come in their terrible majesty, as the tempest comes to purify the atmosphere about us. The miasmas which arise from material corruption, poison the air we breathe and disease all physical life within their reach. The poison of political corruption is no less subtle and destructive in its influences upon communities and nations. But when either becomes general or apparently beyond the power of ordinary means of correction, the angry sweep of the hurricane must perform the work of regeneration. In our government the mild, but effectual restraints of good men should be ceaseless in their beneficent offices, but when they fail to be felt in our public affairs, and evil control has widened and strengthened itself in departments of power, the storm and the thunderbolt have to be invoked for the public safety, and our convulsive but lawful revolutions attest the omnipotence of the reserved virtue of a faithful and intelligent people.

I am not before you to garner the scars and disjointed columns of free government. The Republic that has been reared by a century of patriotic labor and sacrifice, more than covers its wounds with the noblest achievements ever recorded in man’s struggle for the rights of man. It is not perfect in its administration or in the exercise of its vast and responsible powers; but when was it so? when shall it be so? No human work is perfect. No government in all the past has been without its misshaped ends; and few, indeed, have survived three generations without revolution. We must have been more than mortals, if our history does not present much that we would be glad to efface. We should be unlike all great peoples of the earth, if we did not mark the ebb and flow of public virtue, and the consequent struggles between the good and evil elements of a society in which freedom is at times debased to license. We have had seasons of war and of peace. We have had tidal waves of passion, with their sweeping demoralization. We have enlisted the national pride in the perilous line of conquest, and vindicated it by the beneficent fruits of our civilization. We have had the tempest of aggression, and the profound calm that 3193was the conservator of peace throughout the world. We have revolutionized the policy of the government through the bitter conflicts of opposing opinions, and it has been strengthened by its trials. We have had the fruits of national struggles transferred to the vanquished, without a shade of violence; and the extreme power of impeachment has been invoked in the midst of intensest political strife, and its judgment patriotically obeyed. We have had fraternal war with its terrible bereavements and destruction. We have completed the circle of national perils, and the virtue and intelligence of the people have ever been the safety of the Republic.