Addresses: by John A. Martin. Delivered in Kansas.

by John Alexander Martin

This is the record, briefly told, of the Democratic party during the civil war, when the fate of the Republic, and of human liberty the world over, were trembling in the balance. I am a Republican, as I have said, because of these facts. And while I honor the Democrat who, severing all party ties, cast his lot with the Union during the war, I shall never forgive, and never cease to execrate, the man who, during that dark period, was, in his sympathies and his actions, that meanest of all created beings, a “Copperhead.”

A generation has grown up since the close of the Rebellion, and there are those in this audience, I have no doubt, who do not understand the full meaning of this detested name. For their instruction, I want to add a few words concerning it. The underlying cause of the civil war was the affirmation of the right of secession. The Southern idea—and it was one that had been taught for generations—was that the States were sovereign; that a citizen’s first allegiance was due to his State; that the Union was a mere compact of agreeing States, from which any one or more had a right to withdraw whenever longer association was not desirable to it or them. The Northern idea was that the Union of the States constituted a Nation; that the Republic could not be broken up by one or more of the States; that a citizen’s first allegiance was due to the Nation; and that the interests of all the States were so indissolubly associated that the Republic had a sovereign right to protect them against attack by one or more of the States.

Educated for generations to believe in the right of secession, it is not strange that Southern men who did not believe any real cause for a dissolution of the Union existed, went with their States when they determined to secede. Taught, from infancy, that their first allegiance was due to the State, it was not singular that they rallied to its standard when it called on them, and that, during four years of desperate war, they fought, with a courage and steadfastness that challenges the admiration of all men, for the idea, the principle, they had been educated to believe was right.

But the men of the Northern States who sympathized with the Rebellion, and did everything in their power to promote its success, had no such excuse. Their conduct cannot be palliated or defended on any possible ground. If they believed in the Northern idea, that a citizen’s allegiance was due to the Nation, it was their plain duty to support the Union cause. If they believed in the Southern idea, that a citizen’s allegiance was due to his State, it was equally their plain duty to stand by and defend their own State and the cause it maintained.

The most loyal man can, therefore, respect the motives of the men of Southern birth who followed their States. But what man, Northern or Southern, Union or Confederate, can respect the motives and actions of those malignant, crawling, venomous human reptiles known as “Copperheads”—the men of Northern birth and education who kept up a constant “fire in the rear” upon the soldiers from their own States, and whose conduct prolonged the war for years, made thousands of graves in the Southern valleys, and filled thousands of Northern homes—the homes of their neighbors and townsmen—with a grief whose shadow has never been lifted, even to this day.

I am a Republican because I am in favor of an honest ballot and a fair count. No right-thinking, rightly-educated American citizen will ever grumble at the adverse decision of an honest majority. But if our form of government is to endure, the right of every legal voter to cast one vote for which party he pleases to cast it, and to have that vote counted as it was cast, must be placed beyond doubt or dispute. For nearly ten years past, in no less than eight States of this Union, popular elections have been a cheat and a farce. The shot-gun or tissue-ballots have made the decisions recorded at the polls. In at least five States, Mississippi, Louisiana, South and North Carolina and Florida, there has not been even the pretense of a fair, free vote for ten years past. Each one of these States is Republican by as large and as reliable a majority as is Iowa, Nebraska, or Kansas. But the voice of their legal voters is systematically and regularly stifled, either by force or fraud. There is no issue in politics, no question before the American people, so momentous in the consequences of its decision as is this one of a fair, free, honest ballot-box. Because its settlement involves all other questions that the ballot-box should settle. If I am prevented from voting by terrorism; or if my vote, when cast, is not counted, or is swamped by two other ballots fraudulently put into the ballot-box, I am absolutely deprived of the highest privilege of American citizenship—the constitutional right of aiding to choose the men who make laws for my government and expend the money I pay in the form of taxes. I shall never cease voting the Republican ticket until there is a final end put to terrorism, and tissue-ballots, and false counting, in the States lately in rebellion. All other questions, in my judgment, are dwarfed in the presence of this all-embracing, all-controlling question of a free, pure ballot-box. For that is the very foundation-stone, not only of popular government, but of human rights. On its proper settlement depends the intelligent, rightful decision of all other questions, social, moral, economic, or political—more than that, the very existence of the Government itself. If elections are a cheat, the rule of the minority is substituted for that of the majority. Majorities do not cheat at the polls. Ballot-box frauds are always the work of minorities. And if they are successful and long continued, what results follow? First, and inevitably, contempt for the decision of elections; then a refusal to acquiesce in the results so obtained; then social turmoil, rebellion, and civil war.

I am a Republican because I am opposed to the domination of the “solid South.” For fifty years the Southern States dominated this country. They were feebler in numbers, in wealth, in enterprise, in commerce, in all the elements that make a nation strong and great, than were the Northern States. Yet until the outbreak of the war, they governed the country absolutely. They made a frantic appeal to arms when their domination was at last challenged, and were crushed by arms. They have for the past eight years been kept “solid” by the most atrocious crimes that ever disgraced a civilized nation—by terrorism, by the Ku-Klux Klans, by midnight murder, by tissue ballots, by wholesale cheating and false counting. A South made “solid” by such methods is a standing menace to free government, and should be confronted by a North made “solid” by love of justice, peace, fair play, and a free and unintimidated ballot. The Republican party should remain in power until a Republican is as safe and as free in Mississippi as a Democrat is in Kansas; until every citizen, white or black, can cast his vote without fear, and have it honestly counted; and until the South consents to accept the idea of political toleration, and gives up the idea that it can ever again be the master of this Government.

I am a Republican because the Republican party is not ashamed of its past. No Republican is afraid or ashamed to have his children read the history of the past quarter of a century. The Democratic party, when anything is said of its past history, pleads for the mercy of oblivion and forgetfulness. If the false disciple was to come back to earth, he would probably say: “What, are you fellows still harping about those thirty pieces of silver?” In very much the same mournful, injured tone, the Democrats say to the Republicans: “What, are you still flaunting the bloody shirt?” The faithful Republican has a right to be proud of his party’s history. It has never abandoned a position it has once taken, and it has never taken a position not in harmony with the greatest good of the greatest number. No Republican ever tore down his country’s flag, and spat upon it. No Republican ever called the soldiers of the Union “Lincoln hirelings” and “lop-eared Dutch.” No Republican ever mounted guard around the prison hell at Andersonville. No Republican ever rejoiced when the armies of the Union suffered a defeat, or grieved when the hosts of the Rebellion were driven from fields of battle. No Republican was ever a member of those traitorous, sneaking, cowardly Copperhead organizations, the “Knights of the Golden Circle” and the “Sons of Liberty.” No Republican belonged to Quantrill’s brutal gang of ruffians and assassins, who burned defenseless Lawrence, and murdered her unarmed citizens. No Republican ever rode at night with the bloody Ku-Klux. No Republican ever took part in such brutal massacres as those at Hamburg and New Orleans. No Republican ever attempted to win a National election by forging a letter, or blackguarding a good wife and mother, or defacing the tombstone of a little child. No Republican ever voted to disfranchise the soldiers of the Union while they were absent fighting the battles of the country. No Republican ever called Abraham Lincoln a “baboon and an ape,” or denounced Ulysses S. Grant as a “drunken tanner” and a “brutal butcher,” or was caught, at midnight, scrawling “329” on his neighbor’s doorstep. There is a splendid anthem which, during the war, was sung in every camp, and to whose majestic music a million soldiers marched—the Song of Old John Brown. There is another, no less thrilling in its glorious chorus, which warms and stirs the hearts of patriotic Americans whenever they hear its splendid music—the song which tells the story of the great March to the Sea. No Democratic Convention ever sang, no Democratic Convention can sing or dares to sing, either of these songs.

Twenty-one years ago this fall a regiment of Kansas soldiers was engaged, for two days, in a desperate conflict with the armed hosts of treason, in the tangled underbrush at Chicamagua. Two years before, they had marched away from the State, proud, happy, hopeful, each with the glad picture of a country saved imprinted upon his heart and lighting up the future of his imagination. Life was as dear and love as sweet to those Kansas boys as to any of you assembled here to-day. But when the sun went down on the second day of that fierce battle, over sixty per cent. of those Kansas boys—sixty out of every hundred—were lying, dead or wounded, on the blood-stained field. They had been, for more than two years, my comrades, my friends, my “boys,” and I loved them, one and all. Not a shot fired at them, not a bullet that laid one of them low, was fired by a Republican.

These are things which, for one, I never intend to forget. I don’t want to forget them. I take pride, as a Republican, in remembering that no Republican has to apologize for any such wrongs, or crimes, or outrages as these.