Autobiography of Seventy Years, Vol. 1-2

by George Frisbie Hoar

There has never since been an attempt to protect National elections by National authority. The last vestige of the National statute for securing purity of elections was repealed in President Cleveland's second Administration, under the lead of Senator Hill of New York. I have reflected very carefully as to my duty in that matter. I am clearly of the opinion that Congress has the power to regulate the matter of elections of Members of the House of Representatives and to make suitable provisions for honest elections and an honest ascertainment of the result, and that such legislation ought to be enacted and kept on the statute book and enforced. But such legislation, to be of any value whatever, must be permanent. If it only be maintained in force while one political party is in power, and repealed when its antagonist comes in, and is to be constant matter of political strife and sectional discussion, it is better, in my judgment, to abandon it than to keep up an incessant, fruitless struggle. It is like legislation to prohibit by law the selling of liquor. I believe that it would be wise to prohibit the sale of liquor, with the exceptions usually made in prohibitory laws. But if we are to have in any State, as we have had in so many States, a prohibitory law one year, another with different provisions the next, a license law the next, and the difficulty all the time in enforcing any of them, it is better to give the attempt at prohibition up and to adopt a local option, or high license, or some other policy. In other words, it is better to have the second best law kept permanently on the statute book than to have the best law there half the time.

So, after Senator Hill's repealing act got through the Senate, I announced that, so far as I was concerned, and so far as I had the right to express the opinion of Northern Republicans, I thought the attempt to secure the rights of the colored people by National legislation would be abandoned until there were a considerable change of opinion in the country, and especially in the South, and until it had ceased to be a matter of party strife. To that announcement, Senator Chandler of New Hampshire, who had been one of the most zealous advocates of the National laws, expressed his assent. That statement has been repeated once or twice on the floor of the Senate. So far as I know, no Republican has dissented from it. Certainly there has been no Bill for that purpose introduced in either House of Congress, or proposed, so far as I know, in the Republican press, or in any Republican platform since.

The question upon which the policy of all National election laws depends is, At whose will do you hold your right to be an American citizen? What power can you invoke if that right be withheld from you? If you hold the right at will of your State, then you can invoke no power but the State for its vindication. If you hold it at the will of the Nation, as expressed by the people of the whole Nation under the Constitution of the United States, then you are entitled to invoke the power of the United States for its enforcement whenever necessary. If you hold it at the will of the white Democracy of any State or neighborhood then, as unfortunately seems to be the case in a good many States, you will be permitted to exercise it only if you are a white man, and then only so long as you are a Democrat.

I have had during my whole life to deal with that most difficult of all political problems, the relation to each other, in a Republic, of men of different races. It is a question which has vexed the American people from the beginning of their history. It is, if I am not much mistaken, to vex them still more hereafter. First the Indian, then the Negro, then the Chinese, now the Filipino, disturb our peace. In the near future will come the Italian and the Pole and the great population of Asia, with whom we are soon to be brought into most intimate and close relation.

In my opinion, in all these race difficulties and troubles, the fault has been with the Anglo-Saxons. Undoubtedly the Indian has been a savage; the Negro has been a savage; the lower order of Chinamen have been gross and sometimes bestial. The inhabitants of the Philippine Islands, in their natural rights, which, as we had solemnly declared to be a self-evident truth, were theirs beyond question, have committed acts of barbarism. But in every case, these inferior and alien races, if they had been dealt with justly, in my opinion, would have been elevated by quiet, peaceful and Christian conduct on our part to a higher plane, and brought out of their barbarism. The white man has been the offender.

I have no desire to recall the story of the methods by which the political majorities, consisting in many communities largely of negroes and led by immigrants from the North, were subdued.

This is not a sectional question.

It is not a race question. The suffrage was conferred on the negro by the Southern States themselves. They can always make their own rules. If the negro be ignorant, you may define ignorance and disfranchise that. If the negro be vicious, you may define vice and disfranchise that. If the negro be poor, you may define poverty and disfranchise that. If the negro be idle, you may define idleness and disfranchise that. If the negro be lazy, you may define laziness and disfranchise that. If you will only disfranchise him for the qualities which you say unfit him to vote and not for his race or the color of his skin there is no Constitutional obstacle in your way.

So it was not wholly a race or color problem. It was largely a question of party supremacy. In three states, Alabama, South Carolina and Florida, white Democrats charged each other with stifling the voice of the majority by fraudulent election processes, and in Alabama they claimed that a majority of white men were disfranchised by a false count of negro votes in the black belt.

It was not wholly unnatural that the men who, in dealing with each other, were men of scrupulous honor and of undoubted courage should have brought themselves to do such things, or at any rate to screen and sympathize with the more hot- headed men who did them. The proof in the public records of those public crimes is abundant. With the exception of Reverdy Johnson of Maryland there is no record of a single manly remonstrance, or expression of disapproval from the lips of any prominent Southern man. But they had persuaded themselves to believe that a contest for political power with a party largely composed of negroes was a contest for their civilization itself. They thought it like a fight for life with a pack of wolves. In some parts of the South there were men as ready to murder a negro who tried to get an office as to kill a fox they found prowling about a hen roost. These brave and haughty men who had governed the country for half a century, who had held the power of the United States at bay for four years, who had never doffed their hats to any prince or noble on earth, even in whose faults or vices there was nothing mean or petty, never having been suspected of corruption, who as Macaulay said of the younger Pitt, "If in an hour of ambition they might have been tempted to ruin their country, never would have stooped to pilfer from her," could not brook the sight of a Legislature made up of ignorant negroes who had been their own slaves, and of venal carpet- baggers. They could not endure that men, some of whom had been bought and sold like chattels in the time of slavery, and others ready to sell themselves, although they were freemen, should sit to legislate for their States with their noble and brave history. I myself, although I have always maintained, and do now, the equal right of all men of whatever color or race to a share in the government of the country, felt a thrill of sadness when I saw the Legislature of Louisiana in session in the winter of 1873.