Pine to Potomac

by E. K. Cressey

When the bill was before the senate to pension the soldiers of the Mexican war, Mr. Hoar offered a resolution by way of amendment: “Provided, further, that no pension shall ever be paid under this act to Jefferson Davis, the late president of the so-called Confederacy.” Twenty-two were found to vote against it. The discussion grew now almost intolerable. Nearly every rebel sympathizer from the South spoke against it; among them were Garland, Bailey, Maxey, Thurman, Gordon, Lamar, Morgan, Coke. Strong hearts were stirred against their utterances, and strong words uttered for the Union cause.

“There is no parallel to the magnanimity of our government,” said Mr. Blaine, in reply to Lamar’s charge of intolerance. “Not one single execution, not one single confiscation; at the outside only fourteen thousand out of millions put under disfranchisement, and all of them released, and all of them invited to come to the common board, fraternally and patriotically, with the rest of us, and share a common destiny for weal or for woe in the future. I tell the honorable gentleman it does not become him, or any Southern man, to speak of intolerance on the part of the national government; rather, if he speak of it at all, he should allude to its magnanimity and its grandeur.”

The great boldness with which Mr. Blaine stood up against the usurpations of the solid South is a lasting honor to him. He desired to place on record, in a definite and authentic form, the frauds and outrages by which some recent elections were carried by the Democratic party in the Southern states, and to find if there be any method to prevent a repetition of those crimes against a free ballot. One hundred and six representatives had been elected recently in the South, and only four or five of them Republicans, and thirty-five of the whole number had been assigned to the South, he said, “by reason of the colored people.” In South Carolina, he speaks of “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, so that there was no election in any proper sense.” The information came from a non-partisan press, and without contradiction so far as he had seen.

This was his resolution in the senate:—

“Resolved, 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 non 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.

“Resolved, That the committee on the judiciary be further instructed to inquire and report whether it is within the competency of congress to provide by additional legislation for the more perfect security of the right of suffrage to citizens of the United States in all the states of the Union.

“Resolved, That in prosecuting these inquiries the judiciary committee shall have the right to send for persons and papers.”

The negro had become practically disfranchised; the true end of the war in his rightful liberty as a freeman, in the full sense of the term, was concerned; and the acts of government in making him a citizen, and his representation in congress according to the new allotment of thirty-five representatives for the colored population;—all these ends had been subverted, these rights abrogated, and the constitution, in its most sacred and dearly-bought amendments, violently ignored, and men were there with perjury on their lips and treason in their hearts, who had countenanced and upheld all of this.

“Let me illustrate,” Mr. Blaine says, “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 thousand whites and twelve hundred and twenty-four thousand colored; the colored being 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 hundred 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 white 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 white 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.”