Slavery and four years of war

by Joseph Warren Keifer

Senators Edmunds, Conkling, Blaine, Chandler of Michigan, and other Republicans, and Thurman, Voorhees, Beck, Morgan, Lamar, and other Democrats participated in the debates. In the House Mr. Garfield, Mr. Frye, Mr. Reed, and other Republicans, and Mr. Cox, Mr. Tucker, Mr. Carlisle, and other Democrats took a more or less prominent part in the discussion. I spoke against the repeal of the election laws on April 25, 1879, and against the prohibition of the use of troops at the polls to keep the peace on election days, on June 11, 1879. The necessity for the pay of members for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1880, had the effect, finally, after many vetoes of the President, to cause the Democratic members to recede, for a time, from the false position taken. The whole question was, however, renewed in the first regular session of the same Congress. Precisely similar riders to appropriation bills and new bills relating to the use of troops at the polls, to repeal laws authorizing the appointment of supervisors and special deputy marshals for elections, and to make it a crime for an officer of the army to aid in keeping the peace at the polls on election days were brought forward and their enactment into laws demanded. I spoke on the 8th and on the 10th of April, 1880, against inhibiting the use of the army at the polls and restricting the President's power to keep the peace at elections when riots and disorder prevailed, and on March 18th, and again on the 11th of June, 1880, in opposition to a bill intended to repeal existing laws relating to the use of deputy marshals at elections. In these debates I sought to make clear the power of the government to protect the voter in Federal elections; to demonstrate the necessity for doing so; to show that it was as important to have peace on election day at the polls as on the other days of the year and at other places; that it was not intended, and had never been the purpose, to use troops or supervisors or deputy marshals to prevent a voter from voting for officers of his choice, but only to secure him in that right; and that the right to a peaceful election had always been sacredly maintained, and for this purpose the army had been used in England and in all countries where free elections had been held. I maintained that the citizen was as much entitled to be protected in his right peacefully and freely to exercise the elective franchise, as to be protected in any other right, and that it was as much the duty and as clearly within the power of the Federal Government to use, when necessary, the army as a police force on an election day as to use it on other days of the year to suppress riots and breaches of the peace; and I further insisted that it was the duty of the United States to protect its citizens at home as well as abroad in all their constitutional rights.(12) I also showed that the coercive policy of forcing legislation under threats of destroying the government was not only indefensible, treasonable, and unpatriotic, but wholly new. The precedents alleged to be found in the history of the British Parliament were shown not to exist in fact; that the farthest the English Parliament had ever gone was to refuse subsidies to the Crown, the princes, or to maintain royalty, or to vote supplies to carry on a foreign war not approved by the House of Commons; that in no case had the life of the nation been threatened as the penalty for the Crown's not approving laws passed by the House of Commons, and that the English statutes provided for preserving peace and order by the army, especially at elections.

In some cases during this memorable contest in the Forty-sixth Congress I took issue in the House with the majority of my party colleagues when they, through timidity, or for other causes, yielded their opposition to proposed legislation touching the use of the army and special deputy marshals and supervisors of elections to secure peaceable and fair elections. In one notable instance (June 11, 1879), Mr. Garfield of Ohio, Mr. Hale of Maine, and the other Republican members of the appropriation committee so far surrendered their previously expressed views as to concur in the adoption of a section in the army appropriation bill which prohibited any of the money appropriated by it from being "paid for the subsistence, equipment, transportation, or compensation of any portion of the army of the United States to be used as a police force to keep the peace at any election held within any State."

The application of the previous question cut off general debate, and I was only able to get five minutes to state my objections to the proposed measure.

Though the section was plainly intended to deprive the President of his constitutional power as Commander-in-Chief of the army, eleven Republicans only of the House joined me in voting against it. The Republican Senators, however, generally opposed the section when the bill reached the Senate. Later in the same Congress the Republicans of the House unitedly supported the position taken by me. This and other like incidents led, however, to a charge being made later by some weak, jealous, and vain Republicans that I was not friendly to Mr. Garfield as a leader and not always loyal to my party.

In the last army appropriation bill of the same Congress, after full discussion, a similar provision was omitted, and no such limitation on the use of the army has since been or is ever again likely to be attempted to be enacted into law.

The political heresies of the Forty-fifth and Forty-sixth Congresses have apparently passed away, and a more patriotic sentiment generally exists in all parties, and, fortunately, the necessity for troops, supervisors of elections, and special deputy marshals at the polls no longer exists in so marked a degree.

I spoke, December 7, 1880, and again, February 9, 1881, at length, against the adoption of a joint rule of Congress relating to counting the electoral vote, which rule, among other things, undertook to give Congress the right to settle questions that might arise on objection of a member as to the vote of the electors of a State. I maintained that, under the Constitution, Congress neither in joint session nor in separate sessions had the right to decide that the vote of a State should or should not be counted, or that there was any power anywhere to reject the vote of any State after it had been cast and properly certified and returned; that the two Houses only met, as provided in the Constitution, to witness the purely ministerial work of the Vice-President in opening and counting the electoral vote as returned to him. I cited the precedents from the beginning of the government under the Constitution in support of my position, excepting only the dangerous one of 1877, growing out of the Electoral Commission.

I spoke on many other important subjects, especially on the true rule of apportionment of representation in the House; on election cases, and parliamentary questions. I was not always in harmony with my party leaders. I denied the policy of surrendering principle in any case, even though apparent harmony was, for the time being, attainable thereby.

At the November election of 1880, James A. Garfield was elected President, and the Republicans had a bare majority in the House at the opening of the Forty-seventh Congress over the Democrats and Greenbackers, but not a majority over all. There were three Mahone re-Adjusters elected from Virginia. I formed no purpose to become a candidate for Speaker of the House, until the close of the Forty- sixth, and then only on the solicitation of leading members of that Congress who had been elected to the next one.

Shortly after Mr. Garfield was inaugurated President of the United States, a violent controversy arose over appointments to important offices in New York, which led to the resignation of Senators Conkling and Platt. This was followed by President Garfield being shot (July 2, 1881) by a crazy crank (Guiteau) who, in some way, conceived that he, through the controversy, was deprived of an office. In company with General Sherman I saw and had an interview with Mr. Garfield in his room at the White House the afternoon of the day he was shot. His appearance then was that of a man fatally wounded. He lingered eighty days, dying September 19, 1881. (He is buried at Cleveland, Ohio.) Garfield was a man of great intellect, and attracted people to him by his generous nature. I have spoken of him in an oration delivered, May 12, 1887, at the unveiling of a statue of him at the foot of Capitol Hill, Washington, D. C., erected by the Society of the Army of the Cumberland.(13)