“Sir, I have heard a great deal about this pretended election in Louisiana that did not come from Major-General Banks, and I pronounce the proceeding a mockery. It is not pretended that there could be drummed up from the riffraff of New Orleans and sent into the vicinity under the mandate of a Major-General more than about six thousand votes, where over fifty thousand were formerly polled.
“Talk not to me of your ten per cent. principle. A more absurd, monarchical, and anti-American principle was never announced on God’s earth——“[[421]]
At this point Senator Sherman, of Ohio, interposed to obtain consideration for a revenue measure which he had in charge, whereupon his colleague changed somewhat the declamation against the resolution to a denunciation of its advocates, especially Trumbull, upon whom he retorted the charge of retarding legitimate business. Howard resented the charge of radical factiousness and denounced Trumbull with considerable warmth. Sherman suggested that enough had been said on both sides, and in the lighter skirmishing of the breathing-spell which followed, Mr. Sprague, of Rhode Island, hitherto a silent spectator of these exciting scenes, declared that he held in his possession a paper indicating the names of the members of the Louisiana Legislature, and it showed that twenty-five, or twenty-seven or thirty of those gentlemen who constituted that assembly were officeholders of the Federal Government, or the government of the State, which, he said, was the same thing.[[422]]
While Sherman’s measure and Trumbull’s resolution were competing for priority of consideration Sumner remarked that during the preceding summer, 1864, he had met a distinguished gentleman just returned from Louisiana; he had been present at some of the sittings of the convention, having been in New Orleans in discharge of important public duties. This gentleman, added Sumner, said compendiously that the convention was “nothing but a stupendous hoax.”
When Reverdy Johnson inquired the name of Sumner’s informant, Senator Grimes replied that he could furnish a large number of names of persons present in New Orleans when the convention was held, and added: “If the Senate will give a committee I will undertake to prove and I will prove that the voters whose votes were polled in the outlying parishes at Thibodeaux and Placquemines, and other places, were carried in army transports to those places where they polled the votes, being discharged soldiers and persons belonging in New Orleans, and were brought back to New Orleans, and were not residents of the places where they purported to vote.”[[423]]
Sumner, immediately after the uncontroverted statement of Mr. Grimes, added, with more energy than elegance: “The pretended State government in Louisiana is utterly indefensible whether you look at its origin or its character. To describe it, I must use plain language. It is a mere seven-months’ abortion, begotten by the bayonet in criminal conjunction with the spirit of caste, and born before its time, rickety, unformed, unfinished—whose continued existence will be a burden, a reproach, and a wrong. That is the whole case; and yet the Senator from Illinois now presses it upon the Senate at this moment to the exclusion of the important public business of the country.”[[424]]
The urgency of the army and navy appropriation bills prevented for the time further consideration of the Louisiana question. The subject, however, was again brought before the Senate on March 2, 1865, by Mr. Doolittle, who had received and had been requested to file with the secretary of the Senate a certificate, under seal of the State of Louisiana, of the election of Michael Hahn as a Senator of the United States from the State of Louisiana for six years from March 4, 1865. Mr. Davis, of Kentucky, opposed its reception. Doolittle’s motion to have it laid on the table and filed was, however, agreed to.
Only two days of the session remained; in the temper of the Senate it was impossible that the resolution could pass at that time, and the House had not yet taken it up for discussion. In these circumstances the measure was abandoned, though very reluctantly, by its champions.