I repeat that this unusual form presents a dishonest issue, whether so intended or not. It presents the issue that as soon as the democrats got possession of the Federal Government they proceeded to enact the clause which is thus expressed. The law was passed by a republican Congress in 1865. There were forty-six Senators sitting in this Chamber at that time, of whom only ten or at most eleven were democrats. The House of Representatives was overwhelmingly republican. We were in the midst of a war. The republican administration had a million or possibly twelve hundred thousand bayonets at its command. Thus circumstanced and thus surrounded, with the amplest possible power to interfere with elections had they so designed, with soldiers in every hamlet and county of the United States, the republican party themselves placed that provision on the statute book, and Abraham Lincoln, their President, signed it.
I beg you to observe, Mr. President, that this is the first instance in the legislation of the United States in which any restrictive clause whatever was put upon the statute book in regard to the use of troops at the polls. The republican party did it with the Senate and the House in their control. Abraham Lincoln signed it when he was Commander-in-Chief of an army larger than ever Napoleon Bonaparte had at his command. So much by way of correcting an ingenious and studied attempt at misrepresentation.
The alleged object is to strike out the few words that authorize the use of troops to keep peace at the polls. This country has been alarmed, I rather think indeed amused, at the great effort made to create a widespread impression that the republican party relies for its popular strength upon the use of the bayonet. This democratic Congress has attempted to give a bad name to this country throughout the civilized world, and to give it on a false issue. They have raised an issue that has no foundation in fact—that is false in whole and detail, false in the charge, false in all the specifications. That impression sought to be created, as I say, not only throughout the North American continent but in Europe to-day, is that elections are attempted in this country to be controlled by the bayonet.
I denounce it here as a false issue. I am not at liberty to say that any gentleman making this issue knows it to be false; I hope he does not; but I am going to prove to him that it is false, and that there is not a solitary inch of solid earth on which to rest the foot of any man who makes that issue. I have in my hand an official transcript of the location and the number of all the troops of the United States east of Omaha. By “east of Omaha,” I mean all the United States east of the Mississippi river and that belt of States that border the Mississippi river on the west, including forty-one million at least out of the forty-five million of people that this country is supposed to contain to-day. In that magnificent area, I will not pretend to state its extent, but with forty-one million people, how many troops of the United States are there to-day? Would any Senator on the opposite side like to guess, or would he like to state how many men with muskets in their hands there are in the vast area I have named? There are two thousand seven hundred and ninety-seven! And not one more.
From the headwaters of the Mississippi River to the lakes, and down the great chain of lakes, and down the Saint Lawrence and down the valley of the Saint John and down the St. Croix striking the Atlantic Ocean and following it down to Key West, around the Gulf, up to the mouth of the Mississippi again, a frontier of eight thousand miles either bordering on the ocean or upon foreign territory is guarded by these troops. Within this domain forty-five fortifications are manned and eleven arsenals protected. There are sixty troops to every million of people. In the South I have the entire number in each State, and will give it.
And the entire South has eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers to intimidate, overrun, oppress and destroy the liberties of fifteen million people! In the Southern States there are twelve hundred and three counties. If you distribute the soldiers there is not quite one for each county; and when I give the counties I give them from the census of 1870. If you distribute them territorially there is one for every seven hundred square miles of territory, so that if you make a territorial distribution, I would remind the honorable Senator from Delaware, if I saw him in his seat, that the quota for his State would be three—“one ragged sergeant and two abreast,” as the old song has it. [Laughter.] That is the force ready to destroy the liberties of Delaware!
Mr. President, it was said, as the old maxim has it, that the soothsayers of Rome could not look each other in the face without smiling. There are not two democratic Senators on this floor who can go into the cloak-room and look each other in the face without smiling at this talk, or, more appropriately, I should say without blushing—the whole thing is such a prodigious and absolute farce, such a miserably manufactured false issue, such a pretense without the slightest foundation in the world, and talked about most and denounced the loudest in States that have not and have not had a single Federal soldier. In New England we have three hundred and eighty soldiers. Throughout the South it does not run quite seventy to the million people. In New England we have absolutely one hundred and twenty soldiers to the million. New England is far more overrun to-day by the Federal soldier, immensely more, than the whole South is. I never heard anybody complain about it in New England, or express any great fear of his liberties being endangered by the presence of a handful of troops.
As I have said, the tendency of this talk is to give us a bad name in Europe. Republican institutions are looked upon there with jealousy. Every misrepresentation, every slander is taken up and exaggerated and talked about to our discredit, and the democratic party of the country to-day stand indicted, and I here indict them, for public slander of their country, creating the impression in the civilized world that we are governed by a ruthless military despotism. I wonder how amazing it would be to any man in Europe, familiar as Europeans are with great armies, if he were told that over a territory larger than France and Spain and Portugal and Great Britain and Holland and Belgium and the German Empire all combined, there were but eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers! That is all this democratic howl, this mad cry, this false issue, this absurd talk is based on—the presence of eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers on eight hundred and fifty thousand square miles of territory, not double the number of the democratic police in the city of Baltimore, not a third of the police in the city of New York, not double the democratic police in the city of New Orleans. I repeat, the number indicts them; it stamps the whole cry as without any foundation; it derides the issue as a false and scandalous and partisan makeshift.
What then is the real motive underlying this movement? Senators on that side, democratic orators on the stump cannot make any sensible set of men at the crossroads believe that they are afraid of eleven hundred and fifty-five soldiers distributed one to each county in the South. The minute you state that, everybody sees the utter, palpable and laughable absurdity of it, and therefore we must go further and find a motive for all this cry. We want to find out, to use a familiar and vulgar phrase, what is “the cat under the meal.” It is not the troops. That is evident. There are more troops by fifty per cent. scattered through the Northern States east of the Mississippi to-day than through the Southern States east of the Mississippi, and yet nobody in the North speaks of it; everybody would be laughed at for speaking of it; and therefore the issue, I take no risk in stating, I make bold to declare, that this issue on the troops, being a false one, being one without foundation, conceals the true issue, which is simply to get rid of the Federal presence at Federal elections, to get rid of the civil power of the United States in the election of Representatives to the Congress of the United States. That is the whole of it; and disguise it as you may there is nothing else in it or of it.
You simply want to get rid of the supervision by the Federal Government of the election of Representatives to Congress through civil means; and therefore this bill connects itself directly with another bill, and you cannot discuss this military bill without discussing a bill which we had before us last winter, known as the legislative, executive, and judicial appropriation bill. I am quite well aware, I profess to be as well aware as any one, that it is not permissible for me to discuss a bill that is pending before the other House. I am quite well aware that propriety and parliamentary rule forbid that I should speak of what is done in the House of Representatives; but I know very well that I am not forbidden to speak of that which is not done in the House of Representatives. I am quite free to speak of the things that are not done there, and therefore I am free to declare that neither this military bill nor the legislative, executive, and judicial appropriation bill ever emanated from any committee of the House of Representatives at all; they are not the work of any committee of the House of Representatives, and, although the present House of Representatives is almost evenly balanced in party division, no solitary suggestion has been allowed to come from the minority of that House in regard to the shaping of these bills. Where do they come from? We are not left to infer; we are not even left to the Yankee privilege of guessing, because we know. The Senator from Kentucky [Mr. Beck] obligingly told us—I have his exact words here—“that the honorable Senator from Ohio [Mr. Thurman] was the chairman of a committee appointed by the democratic party to see how it was best to present all these questions before us.”