The words of James G. Blaine on the issues of the day

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THE PUBLIC CAEEER OF JAMES GILLESPIE BLAINE . 1

I.— NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY. ]

II. A Free Ballot, And An Honest Count

The perpetuity of our institutions rests upon the maintenance of a free ballot, an honest count, and a correct return. We denounce the fraud and violence practised by the Democracy in Southern States, by which the will of tlie voter is defeated, as dangerous to the preservation of free institutions, and Ave solemnly arraign the Democratic party as being the guilty recipient of the fruits of such fraud and violence. We extend to the Republicans of the South, regardless of their former party affiliations, our cordial sympathy, and pledge to them our most earnest efforts to promote the passage of such legislation as will secure to every citizen of M'hatever race and color the full and complete recognition, possession, and exercise of all civil and political rights.— Republican Platform, 1884.

A FAIR VOTE OF EQUAL POWER.

On the second of December, 1878, Mr. Blaine submitted the following resolutions to the Senate : —

Besolved., That the Committee on the Judiciary be instructed to inquire and report to the Senate whether at the recent elections the constitutional rights of American citizens were violated in any of the States of the Union; whether the right of suffrage of citizens of the United States, or of any class of such citizens, was denied or abridged by the action of the election officers of any State in refusing to receive their votes, in failing to count them, or in receiving and counting fraudulent ballots in pursuance of a conspiracy to make the lawful votes of such citizens of none effect ; and whether such citizens were prevented from exercising the elective franchise, or forced to use it against their wishes, by violence or threats, or hostile demonstrations of armed men or other organizations, or by any other unlawful means or practices.

Besolved., That the Committee on the Judiciary be further instructed to inquire and report w^hether it is within the competency of Congress to provide by additional legislation for the more perfect seciu-ity of the right of suffrage to citizens of the United States in all the States of the Union.

Besolved., That in prosecuting these inquiries the Judiciary Committee shall have the right to send for persons and papers.

On Wednesday, December 11, he addressed the Senate as follows : —

Mr. Pkesident : The pending resolutions were offered by me with a twofold purpose in view : —

First, to place on record in a definite and authentic form,

THE FRAUDS AND OUTRAGES BV WHICH SOME RECENT ELECTIONS WERE CARRIED

by the Democratic party in the Southern States. Second, to find if there be any methods by Avhich a repetition of these crimes against a free ballot may be prevented.

The newspaper is the channel through which the people of the United States are informed of current events, and the accounts given in the press represent the elections in some of the Southern States to have been accompanied by violence ; in not a few cases reaching the destruction of life ; to have been controlled by threats that awed and intimidated a large class of voters ; to have been manipulated by fraud of the most shameless and shameful description. Indeed, in South Carolina there seems to have been no election at all in any proper sense of the term. There was instead a series of skirmishes over the State in which the polling-places were regarded as forts to be captured by one party and held against the other, and where this could not be done with convenience, frauds in the count and tissue-ballot devices were resorted to in order to effectually destroy the voice of the majority. These in brief are the accounts given in the non-partisan press, of the disgraceful outrages that attended the recent elections, and, so far as I have seen, these statements are without serious contradiction. It is but just and fair to all parties, however, that an impartial investigation of the facts shall be made by a committee of the Senate, proceeding under the authority of law and representing the power of the nation. Hence my resolution.

But we do not need investigation to establish certain facts already of official record. We know that one hundred and six Representatives in Congress were recently chosen in the States formerly slave-holding and that the Democrats elected one hundred and one or possibly one hundred and two and the Republicans four or possibty five. We know tliat thirty-five of these Representatives were assigned to the Southern States by reason of the colored population, and that the entire political power thus founded on the numbers of the colored people

HAS BEEN SEIZED AND APPROPRIATED

to the aggrandizement of its own strength by the Democratic party of the South.

The issue thus raised before the country, Mr. President, is not one of mere sentiment for the rights of the negro — though far distant be the day when the rights of any American citizen, however black or however poor, shall form the mere dust of the balance in any controversy; nor still further is the issue as now presented only a question of the

A Free Ballot^ and an Honest Comit. 55

equality of tlie black voter of the South with the white voter of the South ; the issue, Mr. President, has taken a far wider range, one of portentous magnitude ; and that is,

WHETHER THE WHITE VOTER OF THE NORTH SHALL BE EQUAL TO THE WHITE VOTER OF THE SOUTH

in shaping the policy and fixing the destiny of this country ; or whether, to put it still more baldly, the white man who fought in the ranks of the Union army shall have as weighty and influential a vote in the government of the Republic as the wdiite man who fought in the ranks of the rebel army. The one fought to uphold, the other to destroy, the Union of the States, and to-day he who fought to destroy is a far more important factor in the government of the nation than he who fought to uphold it. Let me illustrate my meaning by comparing groups of States of the same representative strength North and South. Take the States of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They send seventeen Representatives to Congress. Their aggregate population is composed of ten hundred and thirty-five tliousand whites and twelve hundred and twenty-four tliousand colored ; the colored behig nearly two hundred thousand in excess of the whites. Of the seventeen Representatives, then, it is evident that nine were apportioned to these States by reason of their colored population, and only eight by reason of their white population; and yet in the choice of the entire seventeen Representatives the colored voters had no more voice or power than their remote kindred on the shores of Senegambia or on the Gold Coast. The ten liundred and thirty-five thousand white people had the sole and absolute choice of the entire seventeen Representatives. In contrast, take two States in the North, Iowa, and Wisconsin, with seventeen Representatives. They have a white population of two million two hundred and forty-seven thousand — considerably more than double the entire population of the three Southern States I have named. In Iowa and Wisconsin, therefore, it takes one hundred and thirty-two thousand white population to send a Representative to Congress, but in South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana, every sixty thousand white people send a Representative. In other words,

SIXTY THOUSAND PEOPLE IN THOSE SOUTHERN STATES

have precisely the same political power in the government of the country that one hundred and thirty-two thousand white people have in Iowa and Wisconsin.

Take another group of seventeen Representatives from the South and from the North. Georgia and Alabama have a white population of eleven hundred and fifty-eight thousand and a colored population of ten hundred and twenty thousand. They send seventeen Representatives to Congress, of whom nine Avere apportioned on account of the white population ■ and eight on account of the colored population. But the colored voters are not able to choose a single Representative, the white Democrats choosing the whole seventeen. The four Northern States, Michigan, Minnesota, Nebraska, and California, have seventeen Representatives, based on a white population of two and a quarter millions, or almost double the white population of Georgia and Alabama, so that in these relative groups of States we find the white man South exercises by his vote

DOUBLE THE POLITICAL POWER OF THE WHITE MAN NORTH.

Let us carry the comparison to a more comprehensive generalization. The eleven States that formed the confederate government had by the last census a population of nine and a half millions, of which in round numbers. five and a half millions were white and four millions colored. On this aggregate population seventy-three Representatives in Congress were appointed to those States — forty-two or three of whom were by reason of the white population, and thirty or thirty-one l^y reason of the colored population. At the recent election the white Democracy at the South seized seventy of the seventy-three districts, and thus secured a Democratic majority in the next House of Representatives. Tlius it appears that throughout the States that formed the late confederate government sixty-five thousand whites — the very people that rebelled against the Union — are enabled to elect a Representative in Congress, while in the loyal States it requires one hundred and thirty-two thousand of the white people that fought for the Union to elect a Representative. In levying every tax, therefore, in making every appropriation of money, in fixing every line of public policy, in decreeing what shall be the fate and fortune of the Republic, the

CONFEDERATE SOLDIER SOUTH

is enabled to cast a vote tliat is twice as powerful and twice as influential as the vote of the Union soldier North.

58 Wo7'ds of James Cr. Blame.

But the white men of the South did not acquire and do not hold this superior power of reason by hiw or justice, but in disregard and defiance of both. The fourteenth amendment to the Constitution was expected to be and was designed to be a preventive and corrective of all such possible abuses. The reading of the clause applicable to the case is instructive and suggestive. Hear it : —

" Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, Representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion, or. other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State."

The patent, undeniable intent of this provision was that if any class of voters were denied or in any way abridged in their right of suffrage, then the class so denied or abridged should not be counted in the basis of representation ; or, in other words, that

NO STATE OR STATES SHOULD GAIN

a large increase of representation in Congress by reason of counting any class of population not permitted to take part in electing such Representatives. But the construction given to this provision is, that before any forfeiture of representation can be enforced the denial or abridgment of suffrage must be the result of a law specifically enacted by the State. Under this construction every negro voter may have his suffrage absolutely denied or fatally abridged by the violence, actual or threatened, of irresponsible mobs, or by frauds and deceptions of State officers from the governor down to the last election clerk, and then, unless some State law can be shown that authorizes the denial or abridgment, the State escapes all penalty or peril of reduced representation. This construction may be upheld by the courts, ruling on the letter of the law, "which killeth," but tlie spirit of justice cries aloud against tlie evasive and atrocious conclusion that deals out oppression to the innocent and shields the guilty from the legitimate consequences of wilful transgression.

The colored citizen is thus most unhappily situated; his right of suffrage is but a hollow mockery ; it holds to his ear the word of promise, but breaks it always to his hope, and he ends only in being made the unwilling instrument of increasing the political strength of that party from which he received ever-tightening fetters when he was a slave and contemptuous refusal of civil rights since he was made free. He resembles, indeed, those unhappy captives in the East, who, deprived of their birthright, are compelled to yield their strength to the upbuilding of the monarch from w^hose tyrannies they have most to fear, and to fight against the power from which alone deliverance might be expected. The franchise intended for the

SHIELD AND DEFENCE OF THE NEGRO

has been turned against him and against his friends and has vastly increased the power of those from whom he has nothing to hope and everything to dread.

The political power thus appropriated by Southern Democrats by reason of the negro population amounts to thirty-five Representatives in Congress. It is massed almost solidly and offsets the great State of New York ; or Pennsylvania and New Jersey together ; or the whole of New England ; or Ohio and Indiana united ; or the combined strength of Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas, California, Nevada, Nebraska, Colorado, and Oregon. The seizure of this power is wanton usurpation ; it is flagrant outrage ; it is violent perversion of the whole theory of republican government. It insures solely to the present advantage and yet, I believe, to the permanent dishonor of the Democratic party. It is by reason of this trampling down of human rights, this ruthless seizure of unlawful power that the Democratic party holds the popular branch of Congress to-day and will in less than ninety days have control of this body also, thus grasping the entire legislative department of the government through the unlawful capture of the Southern States. If the prescribed vote of the South were cast as its lawful owners desire, the Democratic party could not gain power. Nay, if it were not counted on the other side against the instincts and the interests, against the principles and the prejudices, of its lawful owners. Democratic success would be hopeless. It is not enough, then, for modern Democratic tactics that the negro vote shall be silenced ; the demand goes farther and insists

A Free Ballot^ and an Honest CounK 61

tliat it shall be counted on their side, that all the Representatives in Congress and all the Presidential electors apportioned by reason of the negro vote, shall be so cast and so governed as to insure Democratic success — regardless of justice, in defiance of law.

AND THIS INJUSTICE IS WHOLLY UNPROVOKED.

I doubt if it be in the power of the most searching investigation to show that in any Southern State during the period of Republican control any legal voter was ever debarred from the freest exercise of his suffrage. Even the revenges which would have leaped into life with many who despise the negro were buried out of sight with a magnanimity which the "superior race" fail to follow and seem reluctant to recognize. I know it is said in retort of such charges against the Southern elections as I am now reviewing that unfairness of equal gravity prevails in Northern elections. I hear it in many quarters and read it in the papers that in the late exciting election in Massachusetts intimidation and bulldozing, if not so rough and rancorous as in the South, were yet as wide-spread and effective.

I have read, and yet I refuse to believe, that the distinguished gentleman who made an energetic but unsuccessful canvass for the governorship of that State, has indorsed and approved these charges, and I have accordingly made my resolution broad enouo^h to include their thoroup'h investisration. I am not demanding fair elections in the South without demanding fair elections in the North also. But venturing to speak for the New England States, of whose laws and customs I know something, I dare assert that in the late election in Massachusetts, or any of her neighboring Commonwealths, it will be impossible to find even one case where a voter was driven from the polls, where a voter did not have the fullest, fairest, freest ojD^^ortunity to cast the ballot of his choice and have it honestly and faithfully counted in the returns. Suffrage on this continent w^as first made universal in New England, and in the administration of their affairs her people have found no other appeal necessary than that which is addressed to their honesty of conviction and to their intelligent self-interest. If there be anytliing different to disclose I pray you show it to us that we may amend our ways.

But whenever

A FEEBLE PROTEST IS MADE

against such injustice as I have described in the South the response Ave get comes to us in the form of a taunt, " What are you going to do about it ? " and " How do you propose to help yourselves? " This is the stereotyped answer of defiance which intrenched wrong always gives to inquiring justice ; and those who imagine it to be conclusive do not know the temper of the American people. For let me assure you that against the complicated outrage upon the right of representation lately triumphant in the South there will be arrayed many phases of public opinion in the North not often hitherto in harmony. Men who have cared little, and affected to care less, for the rights or the wrongs of the negro suddenly find that vast monetary and commercial interests, great questions of revenue, adjustments of tariff, vast investments in manufactures, in railways, and in mines, are under the control of a Democratic Congress whose majority was obtained by depriving the negro of his rights under a common constitution and common laws. Men who have been offended with talk about negro equality are beginning to perceive that the pending question of to-day relates more pressingly to the equality of white men under this government, and that however careless they may be about the rights or the wrongs of the negro they are very jealous and tenacious about the rights of their own race and the dignity of their own firesides and their own kindred.

I know something of public opinion in the North. I know a great deal about the views, wishes, and purposes of the Republican party of the nation. Within that entire great organization there is not one man, whose opinion is entitled to be quoted, that does not desire peace and harmony and friendship and a patriotic and fraternal union between the North, and the South. This wish is spontaneous, instinctive, universal throughout the Northern States ; and yet, among men of character and sense, there is surely no ■ need of attempting to deceive ourselves as to the precise truth. First pure, then peaceable. Gush will not remove a grievance,

AND NO DISGUISE OF STATE RIGHTS

will close the eyes of our people to the necessity of correcting a great national wrong.

Nor should the South make the fatal mistake of concluding that injustice to the negro is not also injustice to

64 Words of James G-. Blame,

the white man ; nor should it ever be forgotten that for the wrongs of both a remedy will assuredly be found. The war, with all its costly sacrifices, was fought in vain unless equal riohts for all classes be established in all the States of the Union ; and now, in words which are those of friendship, however differently they ma}^ be accepted, I tell tlie men of the South here on this floor and beyond this chamber, that even if they could strip the negro of his constitutional rights they can never permanently maintain the inequality of white men in this nation ; they can never make a white man's vote in the South double as powerful in the administration of the government as a white man's vote in the North.

In a memorable debate in the House of Commons, Mr. Macaulay reminded Daniel O'Connell, when he was moving for repeal, that the English Whigs had endured calumny, abuse, popular fury, loss of position, exclusion from Parliament, rather than the great agitator himself should be less than a British subject ; and Mr. Macaulay warned liim that they would never suffer him to be more. Let me now remind you that the government nnder whose protecting Hag we sit to-day sacrificed myriads of lives and expended thousands of millions of treasure that our countrymen of the South should remain citizens of the United States, having equal personal rights and equal political privileges with all other citizens. And I venture, now and here, to warn the men of the South, in the exact, words of Macaulay, that we will never suffer them to be more !

A Free Ballot^ and an Honest Count, Q^

MILITARY INTERFERENCE AT THE ELECTIONS IN THE

SOUTH.

[Speech in the Senate, Monday, April 14, 1879.]

Mr. President: The existing section of the Revised Statutes numbered 2002 reads thus : —

" No military or naval officer, or other person engaged in the civil, military, or naval service of the United States, shall order, bring, keep, or have under his authority or control, any troops or armed men at the place where any general or special election is held in any State, unless it be necessary to repel the armed enemies of the United States, or to Jceep the peace at the polish

The object of the proposed section, which has just been read at the clerk's desk, is to get rid of the eight closing words, namely, " or

TO KEEP THE PEACE AT THE POLLS,"

and therefore the mode of legislation proposed in the army bill now before the Senate is an unusual mode ; it is an extraordinary mode. If you want to take off a single sentence at the end of a section in the Revised Statutes the ordinary way is to strike off' tliose words, but the mode chosen in this bill is to repeal and re-enact the whole section leaving those few words out. While I do not wish to be needlessly suspicious on a small point, I am quite persuaded that this did not happen by accident but that it came by design. If I may so speak it came of cunning, the intent being to create the impression that whereas the Republicans in the administration of the general government had been using troops right and left, hither and thither, in every direction, as soon as the Democrats got power they enacted this section. I can imagine Democratic candidates for Congress all over the country reading this section to gaping and listening audiences as one of the first offsprings of Democratic reform, whereas every word of it, every syllable of it, from its first to its last, is the enactment of a Republican Congress.

I repeat that this unusual form

PRESENTS A DISHONEST ISSUE,

whether so intended or not. It presents the issue that as soon as the Democrats got possession of the Federal government they proceeded to enact the clause which is thus expressed. The law was passed by a Republican Congress in 1865. There were forty-six Senators sitting in this chamber at the time, of whom only ten or at most eleven were Democrats. Tlie House of Representatives was over- Avhelmingiy Republican. We were in the midst of a war. The Republican administration had a million or possibly twelve hundred thousand bayonets at its command. Thus circumstanced and thus surrounded, with the amplest possible poAver to interfere with elections had they so designed, with soldiers in every hamlet and county of the United States, the Republican party themselves placed that provision on the statute-book, and Abraham Lincoln, their President, signed it.

I beg you to observe, Mr. President, that this is the first

A Free Ballot^ and an Honest Coimt. 67

instance in the legislation of the United States in which any restrictive clause wliatever is put upon the statute-book in regard to the use of troops at the polls. The Republican party did it with the Senate and the House in their control. Abraham Lincoln signed it when he was commander-in-chief of aii army larger than ever Napoleon Bonaparte had at his command. So much by way of correcting an ingenious and studied attempt at misrepresentation.

The alleged object is to strike out the few words that authorize the use of troops to keep peace at the polls.

THIS COUNTRY HAS BEEN ALARMED,

I rather think indeed amused, at the great effort made to create a widespread impression that the Republican party relies for its popular strength upon the use of the bayonet. This Democratic Congress has attempted to give a bad name to this country throughout the civilized world, and to give it on a false issue. They have raised an issue that has no foundation in fact — that is false in whole and detail, false in the charge, false in all the specifications. That impression sought to be created, as I say, not only throughout the North American continent but in Europe to-day, is that elections are attempted in this country to be controlled by the bayonet.

I DENOI^NCE IT HERE AS A FALSE ISSUE.

I am not at liberty to say that any gentleman making the issue knows it to be false ; I hope he does not ; but I am going to prove to him that it is false, and that there is not a solitary inch of solid earth on which to rest the foot of any man that makes that issue. I have in my hand an official transcript of the location and the number of all the troops of the United States east of Omaha. By "east of OmaluV I mean all the United States east of the Mississippi River and the belt of States that borders the Mississippi River on the west, including forty-one millions at least out of the forty-five millions of people that this country is supposed to contain to-day. In that magnificent area, I will not pretend to state its extent, but with forty-one million people, how many troops of the United States are there to-day ? Would any Senator on the opposite side like to guess, or would he like to state, how many men with muskets in their hands there are in the vast area I have named ? There are 2,797 ! And not one more.

From the headwaters of the Mississippi River, to the lakes and down the great chain of lakes, and down the Saint Lawrence and down the valley of the Saint John and down the Saint Croix striking the Atlantic Ocean and following it down to Key West, around the Gulf up to the mouth of the IMississippi again, a frontier of eight thousand miles either bordering on the ocean or upon foreign territory is guarded by these troops. Within this domain forty-five fortifications are manned and eleven arsenals protected. There are sixty troops to every million of people. In the South I have the entire number in each State and will give it.

I believe the Senator from Delaware is alarmed, greatly alarmed, about the overriding of the popular ballot by troops of the United States ! In Delaware there is not a single armed man — not one. The United States has not even one soldier in the State.

The honorable Senator from West Virginia [Mr. Hereford] on Friday last lashed himself into a passion, or at least into a perspiration, over the wrongs of his State, trodden down by the iron heel of military despotism. There is not a solitary man of the United States army on the soil of West Virginia, and there has not been for years.

In Maryland. I do not know whether my esteemed friend from Maryland [Mr. Whyte] has been greatly alarmed or not; but at Fort McHenry, guarding the entrance to the beautiful harbor of his beautiful city, there are one hundred and ninety-two artillerymen located.

In Virginia there is a school of practice at Fortress Monroe. My honorable friend who has charge of this bill [Mr. Withers] knows very well, and if he does not I will tell him, that outside of that school of practice at Fortress Monroe, which has two hundred and eighty-two men in it, there is not a Federal soldier on the soil of Virginia — not one.

North Carolina. Are the Senators from that State alarmed at the immediate and terrible prospect of being overrun by the army of the United States ? On the whole soil of North Carolina there are but thirty soldiers guarding a fort at the mouth of Cape Fear River — just thirty.

South Carolina. I do not see a Senator on the floor from that State. There are oiie hundred and twenty artillerymen guarding the approaches to Charleston Harbor, and not another soldier on her soil.

Georgia. Does my gallant friend from Georgia [Mr. Gordon] who knows better than I the force and strength of military organization, the senior Senator and the junior also — are both or either of those Senators alarmed at the presence of twenty-nine soldiers in Georgia ? There are just twenty-nine there.