Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

CHAPTER XVI.

While the result of the Presidential election of 1868 was, upon the record of the electoral votes, an overwhelming victory for the Republican party and its illustrious candidate, certain facts tended to qualify the sense of gratulation and triumph on the part of those who give serious study to the progress and results of partisan contests. It was the first Presidential election since the close of the war, and the candidates represented in sharp and definite outline the antagonistic views which had prevailed among Northern men during the period of the struggle. General Grant was the embodiment of the war feeling, and presented in his own person the spirit of the contest for the Union and the evidence of its triumph. The Democratic candidate, if not open to the charge of personal disloyalty, had done much as Governor of New York to embarrass the National Administration in the conduct of the war, and would perhaps have done more but for the singular tact and address with which Mr. Lincoln had prevented an open quarrel or even a serious conflict of authority. Mr. Seymour was indeed unpleasantly associated in the public mind with the riot which had been organized in the city of New York against the enforcement of the draft. He had been a great favorite of the Peace party, and at the most critical point in the civil struggle he had presided over a National convention which demanded that the war should cease.

Under these circumstances it was not altogether re-assuring to the ardent loyalists of the country, that the city of New York, whose prosperity depended in so great a degree upon the preservation of the Union, should now give Mr. Seymour a majority of more than sixty thousand over General Grant, and that the Empire State, which would cease to be Imperial if the Union ceased to exist, should in a popular contest defeat General Grant by fully ten thousand votes. New Jersey made an equally discouraging record by giving Mr. Seymour a majority of three thousand. The Pacific coast, whose progress and prosperity depended so largely upon the maintenance of the Union, presented an astonishing result,—California giving General Grant a majority of only 514, while Oregon utterly repudiated the great leader and gave her electoral vote for Mr. Seymour. Indiana, in the test vote of the October election for governor, was carried for the Republicans by only 961; Ohio gave a smaller majority in the hour of National victory than she had given during any year of the civil struggle, while Pennsylvania at the same election gave the party but ten thousand majority. In the city and county of Philadelphia the Democrats actually had a majority of nearly two hundred votes. The Republican majorities in these three States were considerably increased in the November election by the natural falling off of the Democratic vote, but the critical and decisive battle had been fought in each State in October. It was a very startling fact that if Mr. Seymour had received the electoral vote of the solid South (which afterwards came to be regarded either as the rightful inheritance or the fraudulent prerogative of the Democratic part), he would, in connection with the vote he received in the North, have had a majority over General Grant in the Electoral College. Considering the time of the election, considering the record and the achievements of the rival candidates, the Presidential election of 1868 must be regarded as the most remarkable and the most unaccountable in our political annals.

The result was not comforting to the thoughtful men who interpreted its true significance and comprehended the possibilities to which it pointed. Of the reconstructed States (eight in number) General Grant received the electoral votes of six,—North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida. A full vote was secured in each, and the lawfulness and fairness of the result under the system of Reconstruction were not questioned. The vote of Georgia was disputed on account of some alleged irregularity in her compliance with the Acts of Reconstruction, and the suspicion that the Presidential election was not fairly conducted. But in Louisiana there was no moral doubt that violence and disorder had done their evil work. The result in that State was declared to be in favor of Mr. Seymour. The subject was brought before Congress, and the counting of the votes of these States was challenged; but as the alleged irregularity in Georgia and the alleged fraud in Louisiana had not been legally investigated, Congress (Republican at that time by a large majority in both branches) declined to exclude them from the electoral count.

There was great dissatisfaction on the part of a considerable number of Republicans in Congress with the determination to admit the vote of Louisiana without some qualifying record or explanation. In the House General Schenck offered a resolution, declaring that "the vote of the State was counted because no proof was formally submitted to sustain the objections thereto." General Shanks of Indiana offered a much more decisive resolution, declaring that "in the opinion of the House the acceptance of the electoral vote of Louisiana will encourage the criminal practice of enforcing elections in the States lately in rebellion, and involves the murder of thousands of loyal people." The rule of the House required unanimous consent to admit these resolutions, and they were strenuously objected to by Fernando Wood, Charles A. Eldridge, and other leading Democrats of the House.

In the Senate Mr. Morton of Indiana submitted a resolution, declaring that "while there is reason to believe from common report and information that the late Presidential election in Louisiana was carried by force and fraud, still there being no legal evidence before the Senate on that subject the electoral vote of Louisiana ought to be counted." No debate being allowed under the rule regulating the proceedings of the Senate in regard to the count of the electoral vote, the resolution was defeated. It received however the support of twenty-four Republican senators, some of them among the most prominent members of the body. Mr. Sumner, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Conkling, Mr. Cameron, Mr. Morton, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Morrill of Vermont were among those who thought some record should be made of the Senate's knowledge of the frauds in Louisiana, even if they were unable on strictly legal grounds to reject her electoral vote. Other Republican senators evidently thought, as they were unable legally to reject the vote, it was not wise to make any record on the question.

Subsequent investigation abundantly established the fact (of which at the time Congress did not possess legal knowledge) that the State of Louisiana had been carried for Mr. Seymour by shameless fraud, by cruel intimidation, by shocking violence. As incidental and unmistakable proof of fraud, it was afterwards shown from the records that in the spring election of 1868, in the parish of Orleans 29,910 votes had been cast, and that the Republicans had a majority of 13,973; whereas in the ensuing autumn, at the Presidential election, the returns for the same parish gave General Grant but 1,178 votes, while Mr. Seymour was declared to have received 24,668. In the parish of Caddo, where in the spring election the Republicans had shown a decided majority, General Grant received but one vote. In the parish of Saint Landry, where the Republicans had prevailed in the spring election by a majority of 678, not a single vote was counted for General Grant, the returns giving to Mr. Seymour the entire registered vote—4,787. In other parishes the results, if less aggravated and less startling, were of like character, and the State, which the Republicans had carried, at an entirely peaceful election in the spring, by a majority of more than 12,000, was now declared to have given Mr. Seymour a majority of 47,000.

There was no pretense that there had been a revolution of public opinion in the State to justify these returns. It was not indeed denied that General Grant was personally far stronger before the people of Louisiana than any Republican candidate at previous State or Parish elections. The change was simply the result of fraud, and the fraud was based on violence. Various investigations ordered by Congress establish this view. "From these investigations," as was stated in a subsequent report, "it appears that over two thousand persons were killed, wounded, and otherwise injured in that State within a few weeks of the Presidential election of 1868; that half the State was overrun by violence, midnight raids, secret murders, and open riots, which kept the people in constant terror, until the Republicans surrendered all claims, and then the election was carried by the Democracy."

The same report states that in the parish of Orleans "riots prevailed for weeks, filling New Orleans with scenes of blood, and Ku-Klux notices were scattered throughout the city warning the colored men not to vote." In the parish of Caddo, where as already stated only one vote was counted for General Grant, "there occurred one of the bloodiest riots on record, in which the Ku-Klux killed and wounded over two hundred Republicans, hunting and chasing them for two days and nights through fields and swamps. Thirteen captives were taken from the jail and shot, and a pile of twenty-five dead bodies were found buried in the woods." These atrocious crimes immediately preceded the election, and "having thus conquered the Republicans and killed and driven off their white leaders, the masses of the negroes were captured by the Ku-Klux, marked with badges of red flannel, enrolled in clubs, led to the polls and compelled to vote the Democratic ticket, after which they were given certificates of that fact."

One of the most alarming features connected with this series of outrages was the promptness with which Louisiana resorted to violence after her re-admission to the right of representation in Congress. Her senators and representatives had taken their seats in their respective Houses only the preceding summer, and her right to participate in the Presidential election was established at the same time. Within less than five months after her formal reconstruction, outrages which would be exceptional in the governments of Algiers or Egypt were committed in utter defiance of law, and without any attempt at punishment by the authorities of the State. Not to punish was in effect to approve.

As a mere question of figures, it is impossible that Mr. Seymour could have received the 80,225 votes with which he was credited. Indeed, his alleged majority of 47,000 over General Grant was greater than the total vote which the Democratic party could honestly cast in Louisiana. In the Presidential election of 1860, when circumstances tended to call every Democrat in the South to the polls, the united vote of Breckinridge and Douglas in Louisiana was but 30,306, while the total vote, including that given for John Bell, was but 50,510. In 1867 the entire registered white vote of Louisiana was but 45,199. The white voting population of the State, therefore, was certainly no larger in 1868 than in 1860—if as large. It was not denied that since the close of the war a considerable number of white men had joined the Republican party; white it was not even claimed that a single negro voted the Democratic ticket in 1868, except as he was led to the polls under the cover of Ku-Klux weapons, terrorized by the violence of that association of lawless men.

It amounts therefore to a mathematical demonstration, that nearly one-half of Mr. Seymour's vote was fraudulent; and of that fact concealment is no longer attempted from any respectable source. It has been matter of surprise to the cotemporaries of Mr. Seymour, that sensitive as he has shown himself on many occasions in regard to the record of his political life, he would consent, after investigation and exposure of the atrocities had been made, to remain in history without protest as the beneficiary of a vote that was demonstrably fraudulent in its character,—a vote that was tainted with crime and stained with the blood of innocent men. It is assuredly not to be presumed that violent acts and murderous deeds are less repulsive to Mr. Seymour than to any other refined Christian gentleman. But his silence in respect to the wicked transactions of his supporters in Louisiana, when he was a candidate for the Presidency, has persuaded many honest-minded Democrats that the whole narrative of crime was a slander, concocted in the interest of the Republican party. It has served also a far more deplorable purpose, for it has in large measure aided in screening from public reprobation, and possibly from exemplary punishment, the guilty principals and the scarcely less guilty accomplices in the maiming and murder of American citizens, who were only seeking to exercise their Constitutional right of suffrage.

The Republican victory of 1866 led to the incorporation of impartial suffrage in the Reconstruction laws. The Republican victory of 1868, it was now resolved in the councils of the party, should lead to the incorporation of impartial suffrage in the Constitution of the United States. The evasive and discreditable position in regard to suffrage, taken by the National Republican Convention that nominated General Grant in 1868, was keenly felt and appreciated by the members of the party when subjected to popular discussion. There was something so obviously unfair and unmanly in the proposition to impose negro suffrage on the Southern States by National power, and at the same time to leave the Northern States free to decide the question for themselves, that the Republicans became heartily ashamed of it long before the political canvass had closed. When Congress assembled, immediately after the election of General Grant, there was found to be a common desire and a common purpose among Republicans to correct the unfortunate position in which the party had been placed by the National Convention; and to that end it was resolved that suffrage, as between the races, should by organic law be made impartial in all the States of the Union—North as well as South.

Various propositions were at once offered, both in the Senate and House, to amend the Constitution of the United States in order to attain impartial suffrage. It was both significant and appropriate that the draught proposed by Mr. Henderson of Missouri was taken as the basis of the Amendment first reported to the Senate. In the preceding Congress, when the Fourteenth Amendment was under consideration (in the spring of 1866), Mr. Henderson had proposed substantially the same provision, and had solemnly warned his Republican associates that though they might reject it then, it would be demanded of them in less than five years. This declaration was all the more suggestive and creditable, coming from a senator who represented a former slave-holding State. And it was not forgotten that Mr. Henderson had with equal zeal and equal foresight been among the earliest to propose the Thirteenth Amendment. Mr. Henderson's proposition, now submitted and referred to the Judiciary Committee, was in these words: "No State shall deny or abridge the right of its citizens to vote or hold office, on account of race, color, or previous condition." It was reported from the Judiciary Committee by Mr. Stewart of Nevada, with an amendment proposing another form of statement; namely, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote and hold office shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."

During the debate on the question Mr. Hendricks of Indiana reproached the Republican party for forcing this question now upon Congress, when in the platform of principles upon which they appealed for popular support they had distinctly waived it, and when the Legislatures to which it must go for ratification had been elected without the slightest reference to it in the popular mind. In order to prevent what might seem to be an unfair submission of the Amendment, Mr. Dixon of Connecticut proposed that it should be referred to conventions in the respective States instead of to the Legislatures, and thus give the people, in the election of members of the conventions, a full opportunity to pass upon the merits of the question. It was contended on the other hand by Republican senators, that no subject had been more fully matured in the popular mind than this had been by the discussion which had taken place since the beginning, and especially since the close, of the war. But this was not a candid or truthful statement of the case, as had been abundantly shown by the action of the National Republican Convention. Only a few of the leaders of the party had openly announced themselves in favor of negro suffrage in the Nation; a few were openly hostile, while the great majority of the prominent members feared it and refrained from open expression in regard to it. The mass of the party, as is usual on questions of this character, had made their own conclusions, and their earnestness of convictions finally forced, if it did not persuade, the reluctant chiefs to adopt it. When they at last came to it, there was a natural disposition to represent it as one of the cardinal principles of the party. The Democratic criticisms, as to the time and method of presenting the Amendment, were well aimed and practically remained unanswered for the simple reason that no adequate or logical response could be made to them.

Mr. Garrett Davis of Kentucky charged that the Republican party, in proposing this Amendment, was simply seeking to perpetuate its power in the country; but on this point he was effectively answered by Mr. Wilson of Massachusetts. "The senator from Kentucky knows, and I know," said Mr. Wilson, "that this whole struggle to give equal rights and equal privileges to all citizens of the United States has been an unpopular one; that we have been forced to struggle against passion and prejudice engendered by generations of wrong and oppression; that we have been compelled to struggle against great interests and powerful political organizations. I say to the senator from Kentucky that the struggle of the last eight years to give freedom to four and a half millions of men who were held in slavery, to make them citizens of the United States, to clothe them with the right of suffrage, to give them the privilege of being voted for, to make them in all respects equal to the white citizens of the United States, has cost the Republican party a quarter of a million votes."

The House of Representatives had been considering the question of the suffrage amendment at equal step with the Senate. On the 11th of January Mr. Boutwell of Massachusetts, from the Committee on the Judiciary, proposed an Amendment to the Constitution in these words: "The right of any citizen of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State, by reason of the race, color, or previous condition of slavery of any citizen or class of citizens of the United States.—The Congress shall have power to enforce by proper legislation the provisions of this Article."

Mr. Boutwell made one of the strongest and most pointed arguments delivered in Congress for the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment. He showed that by the Fourteenth Amendment we had declared that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside." "There are," said he, "citizens in Kentucky and Maryland eligible to-day to the office of President or Vice-President of the United States, yet who cannot vote for representatives in Congress, or even for a State, county or town officer. What is the qualification for the office of President? He must be a native-born citizen of the United States and thirty-five years of age. Nothing more! These are the only qualifications for the office of President. By the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, we have declared that all the black men in Maryland and other States shall be citizens of the United States. Certain State governments have for the present denied those people the right to vote, and yet one of them is eligible to the Presidency of the United States and another to the Vice-Presidency. Is there such an anomaly in our Government? Are we prepared to admit its existence unless the Constitution imperatively requires it?"

The speech of Mr. Boutwell was answered by Mr. Beck of Kentucky and Mr. Eldridge of Wisconsin, their respective arguments resting mainly upon the propriety of leaving the regulation of suffrage within the power of the States, where it was originally left by the Constitution. After several ineffectual attempts to amend the Constitutional Amendment as reported from the Judiciary Committee, the House, on the 30th of January (1869), passed it by ayes 150, noes 42, not voting 31.

When the House Amendment reached the Senate it was at once taken up for consideration, and the Amendment which that body had been considering was laid aside. This was done for the purpose of expediting an agreement between the two branches. Numerous modifications and additions were then proposed, including the one originally reported by the Judiciary Committee. Every modification or substitute failed, until Senator Wilson offered the following: "No discrimination shall be made in any State among the citizens of the United States in the exercise of the elective franchise, or in the right to hold office in any State, on account of race, color, nativity, property, education, or religious creed." Mr. Trumbull declared that the adoption of this Amendment would abolish the constitutions of perhaps all, certainly of half, the States of the Union. He then pointed out that the constitution of almost every State prescribed a qualification of age for the governor of the State, and of a certain length of residence, many of them requiring a natural-born citizen; and that the effect of Mr. Wilson's Amendment would be to level all the constitutions, and radically reverse the deliberate judgment of the people of the States who had ordained them. Serious objections were also made against prohibiting an educational test, as would be the effect of Mr. Wilson's Amendment. Mr. Wilson frankly avowed his hostility to an educational test, and declared that the one existing in Massachusetts had never proved valuable in any sense. Against all objections and arguments Mr. Wilson's Amendment was adopted by the Senate.

A proposition was now introduced and supported with equal zeal by Mr. Morton of Indiana and Mr. Buckalew of Pennsylvania, proposing an amendment to the pending resolution, which should in effect be a sixteenth amendment to the Constitution. Its aim was to take from the States the power now confided in them by the Constitution, to direct the manner in which electors of President and Vice-President shall be chosen. The declared motive for the change was to prevent the possibility of the electors being chosen by the State Legislatures, as had been done in some cases, and to guarantee the certainty of a popular vote in their selection in every State of the Union. To insure this result it was proposed in the amendment that the entire power over the choice of electors should be transferred to Congress. After a brief debate the amendment was agreed to,(1) and the two proposed articles, included under one resolution, were adopted by ayes 39, noes 16, and sent to the House for concurrence.

The House not being willing to accept the Senate's Amendments, refused by formal vote to concur, and asked for a conference. The Senate took the unusual step of declining a conference, promptly receded from its own Amendments, and sent to the House the original proposition of that body. The House, not to be outdone by the Senate in capricious change of opinion, now refused to agree to the form of amendment it had before adopted, and returned it to the Senate with the added requirement of nativity, property, and creed, which the Senate had originally proposed. The rule indeed seemed to be for each branch to desert its own proposition as soon as there was a prospect that the other branch would agree to it. The strange controversy was finally ended and the subject brought into intelligible shape by a conference committee, which reported the Fifteenth Amendment in the precise form in which it became incorporated in the Constitution. It received the sanction of the house by a vote far beyond the two-thirds required to adopt it, the ayes being 145, the noes 44. In the Senate the ayes were 39, the noes were 13. The action of Congress on the Amendment was completed on the 26th of February, six days before General Grant was installed in the Presidency.

The gradual progress of public opinion in the United States on questions relating to slavery and to the personal and political rights of the negro race, may be clearly traced in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.

—The Thirteenth Amendment, proposed by Congress while the war was yet flagrant, simply declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall exist within the United States or in any place subject to National jurisdiction.

—The Fourteenth Amendment advanced the negro to the status of a citizen, but did nothing affirmatively to confer the right of suffrage upon him. Negatively it aided him thereto, by laying the penalty of a decreased representation upon any State that should deny or in any way abridge his 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.

—The Fifteenth Amendment, now proposed, did not attempt to declare affirmatively that the negro should be endowed with the elective franchise, but it did what was tantamount, in forbidding to the United States or to any State the power to deny or abridge the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. States that should adopt an educational test or a property qualification might still exclude a vast majority of negroes from the polls, but they would at the same time exclude all white men who could not comply with the tests that excluded the negro. In short, suffrage by the Fifteenth Amendment was made impartial, but not necessarily universal, to male citizens above the age of twenty-one years.

The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment seriously modified the effect and potency of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Under that section a State could exclude the negro from the right of suffrage, if willing to accept the penalty of the proportional loss of representation in Congress, which the exclusion of the colored population from the basis of apportionment would entail. But the Fifteenth Amendment took away absolutely from the State the power to exclude the negro from suffrage, and therefore the second section to the Fourteenth Amendment can refer only to those other disqualifications never likely to be applied, by which a state might lessen her voting population by basing the right of suffrage on the ownership of real estate, or on the possession of a fixed income, or upon a certain degree of education, or upon nativity, or religious creed. It is still in the power of the States to apply any one of these tests or all of them, if willing to hazard the penalty prescribed in the Fourteenth Amendment. But it is not probably that any one of these tests will ever be applied. Nor were they seriously taken into consideration when the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress. Its prime object was to correct the wrongs which might be enacted in the South, and the correction proposed was direct and unmistakable; viz., that the Nation would exclude the negro from the basis of apportionment wherever the State should exclude him from the right of suffrage.

When therefore the nation by subsequent change in its Constitution declared that the State shall not exclude the negro from the right of suffrage, it neutralized and surrendered the contingent right before held, to exclude him from the basis of apportionment. Congress is thus plainly deprived by the Fifteenth Amendment of certain powers over the representation in the South, which it previously possessed under the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, if a State should exclude the negro from suffrage, the next step would be for Congress to exclude the negro from the basis of apportionment. After the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, if a State should exclude the negro from suffrage, the next step would be for the Supreme Court to declare that the act was unconstitutional, and therefore null and void. The essential and inestimable value of the Fourteenth Amendment still remains in the three other sections, and pre-eminently in the first section.

The contentions which have arisen between political parties as to the rights of negro suffrage in the Southern States, would scarcely be cognizable judicially under either the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Both of those Amendments operate as inhibitions upon the power of the State, and do not have reference to those irregular acts of the people which find no authorization in the public statutes. The defect in both Amendments, in so far as their main object of securing rights to the colored race is involved, lies in the fact that they do not operate directly upon the people, and therefore Congress is not endowed with the pertinent and applicable power to give redress. By decisions of the Supreme Court, the Fourteenth Amendment has been deprived in part of the power which Congress no doubt intended to impart to it. Under its provisions, as construed by the Court, little, if any thing, can be done by Congress to correct the evils or avert the injurious consequences arising from such abuses of the suffrage as distinguished the vote of Louisiana in the Presidential election of 1868, and in the numerous and flagrant cases which followed that baleful precedent of unrestrained violence and unlimited wrong. Those outrages are the deeds of individual citizens or of associated masses, acting without authority of law and in defiance of law. Yet when a vitiated public opinion justifies their course, and when indictment and conviction are impossible, the injured citizen loses his rights as conclusively as if the law had denied them, and indeed far more cruelly.

Undoubtedly a large proportion of the members of Congress, while following the lead of those who constructed the Fourteenth Amendment, sincerely believed that it possessed a far greater scope than judicial inquiry and decision have left it. It is hazarding little to say that if the same political bodies which submitted the Amendment to the people could have measured both the need of its application and the insufficiency of its power, it would have been seriously changed, and would have conferred upon the National Government the unquestioned authority to protect individual citizens in the right of suffrage, so far as that suffrage is used in the choice of officers of the United States. The opportunity was neglected and may never return. It is not at all probable that any political party will succeed in time of peace, upon financial and industrial issues, in electing two-thirds of the Senate and two-thirds of the House of Representatives. No further change in the Constitution of the Republic is probable therefore, within any period whose line of thought or action may now be anticipated with reasonable certainty; and if a sudden political convulsion should possibly give two-thirds of each branch of Congress to one political party, it would be found impracticable to propose any change in the Constitution, in the direction of enlarging the scope of liberty, that would be likely to secure the support of three-fourths of the States of the Union.

The Constitutional Amendments were proposed and adopted under the belief that they would be honorably observed and enforced in all the States alike. The presumption was certainly in favor of that loyal obedience to the organic law of the Republic without which Anarchy has already begun its evil work. If however, by reason of infidelity to the Constitutional provisions in some sections, if by violence in resisting them in others, it be suggested that they should have been drawn with greater circumspection, with a broader comprehension of all the contingencies of the future, the fact yet remains that they are of priceless value to the Government and the people. They have added largely to the muniments of personal liberty; they have immeasurably increased the just power of the National Government; they have exerted a constantly growing force against the spirit that organized the Rebellion; they have strengthened the bonds of the Union against every form of danger which it has hitherto encountered.

Without the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments the Thirteenth would have proved of little value to the oppressed race which it declared to be free. In every step taken after the simple article of emancipation was decreed, the Republicans who controlled the Government met with obstacles from without and from within. There were thousands in their own ranks who did not wish the negro advanced to citizenship; there were tens of thousands who were unwilling to see him advanced to the elective franchise. But happily there were hundreds of thousands who plainly saw that without the rights of citizenship his freedom could be maintained only in name, and that without the elective franchise his citizenship would have no legitimate and (if the phrase be allowed) no automatic protection.

To the brave men who led the Republican party to its duty and its mission, who overcame the numbers of the opposition, who lifted their associates from the slough of prejudice and led them out of the darkness of tradition, let there be all honor and praise. They gave hope to the hopeless, help to the helpless, liberty to the downtrodden. They did more: they elevated the character and enlightened the conscience of the oppressing race. The struggle is not yet ended, the final battle is not yet fought; but complete victory sooner or later is assured. The three great Amendments to the Constitution were bought with a great price—even the blood of the slain—and they will assuredly, in their letter and in their spirit, be vindicated and enforced. Mr. Lincoln taught his countrymen the lesson that he who would be no slave must be content to have no slave. It is yet to be learned with equal emphasis that he who would preserve his own right to suffrage must never aid in depriving another citizen of the same great boon. In moral as in physical conflicts it may be easy to determine who strikes the first blow, but it is difficult to foresee who may strike the last.

[(1) The proposition of Messrs. Morton and Buckalew for a Sixteenth Article of Amendment was as follows:—

"The second clause, first section, second article of the Constitution of the United States shall be amended to read as follows: 'Each State shall appoint by vote of the people thereof qualified to vote for representatives in Congress, a number of electors equal to the whole number of senators and representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress; but no senator or representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector; and the Congress shall have power to prescribe the manner in which such electors shall be chosen by the people.'">[