In the autumn of that year an election was held for the choice of Representatives in Congress. I see more than one friend near me who for himself and for others has reason even unto this day to remember that election and the apprehension which preceded it. It was the first time the law of 1870 had been put in force. Resistance was openly counseled. Democratic newspapers in New York advised that the officers of the law be pitched into the river. Disorder was afoot. Men, not wanting in bravery, and not republicans, dreaded the day. Bloodshed, arson, riot were feared. Ghastly spectacles were still fresh in memory. The draft riots had spread terror which had never died, and strong men shuddered when they remembered the bloody assizes of the democratic party. They had seen men and women, blind with party hate, dizzy and drunk with party madness, stab and burn and revel in murder and in mutilating the dead. They had seen an asylum for colored orphans made a funeral pile, and its smoke sent up from their Christian and imperial city to tell in heaven of the inhuman bigotry, the horrible barbarity of man. Remembering such sickening scenes, and dreading their repetition, they asked the President to protect them—to protect them with the beak and claw of national power. Instantly the unkenneled packs of party barked in vengeful chorus. Imprecations, maledictions, and threats were hurled at Grant; but with that splendid courage which never blanched in battle, which never quaked before clamor—with that matchless self-poise which did not desert him even when a continent beyond the sea rose and uncovered before him, [applause in the galleries,] he responded in the orders which it has pleased the honorable Senator from Delaware to read. The election thus protected was the fairest, the freest, the most secure, a generation has seen. When, two years afterward, New York came to crown Grant with her vote, his action in protecting her chief city on the Ides of November, 1870, was not forgotten. When next New York has occasion to record her judgment of the services of Grant, his action in 1870 touching peace in the city of New York will not be hidden away by those who espouse him wisely. [Applause in the galleries.]
Now, the election law is to be emasculated; no national soldier must confront rioters or mobs; no armed man by national authority, though not a soldier, must stay the tide of brutality or force; no deputy marshal must be within call; no supervisor must have power to arrest any man who in his sight commits the most flagrant breach of the peace. But the democrats tell us “we have not abolished the supervisors; we have left them.” Yes, the legislative bill leaves the supervisors, two stool-pigeons with their wings clipped, [laughter,] two licensed witnesses to stand about idle, and look—yes, “a cat may look at a king”—but they must not touch bullies or lawbreakers, not if they do murders right before their eyes.
If a civil officer should, under the pending amendment, attempt to quell a riot by calling on the bystanders, if they have arms, he is punishable for that. If a marshal, the marshal of the district in which the election occurs, the marshal nominated to the Senate and confirmed by the Senate—I do not mean a deputy marshal—should see an affray or a riot at the polls on election day and call upon the bystanders to quell it, if this bill becomes a law, and one of those bystanders has a revolver in his pocket, or another one takes a stick or a cudgel in his hand, the marshal may be fined $5,000 and punished by five years’ imprisonment.
Such are the devices to belittle national authority and national law, to turn the idea of the sovereignty of the nation into a laughing-stock and a by-word.
Under what pretexts is this uprooting and overturning to be? Any officer who transgresses the law, be he civil or military, may be punished in the courts of the State or in the courts of the nation under existing law. Is the election act unconstitutional? The courts for ten years have been open to that question. The law has been pounded with all the hammers of the lawyers, but it has stood the test; no court has pronounced it unconstitutional, although many men have been prosecuted and convicted under it. Judge Woodruff and Judge Blatchford have vindicated its constitutionality. But, as I said before, the constitutional argument has been abandoned. The supreme political court, practically now above Congresses or even constitutions, the democratic caucus, has decided that the law is constitutional. The record of the judgment is in the legislative bill.
We are told it costs money to enforce the law. Yes, it costs money to enforce all laws; it costs money to prosecute smugglers, counterfeiters, murderers, mail robbers and others. We have been informed that it has cost $200,000 to execute the election act. It cost more than $5,000,000,000 in money alone, to preserve our institutions and our laws, in one war, and the nation which bled and the nation which paid is not likely to give up its institutions and the birthright of its citizens for $200,000. [Applause in the galleries.]
The presiding officer, (Mr. Cockrell, in the chair.) The Senator will suspend a moment. The chair will announce to the galleries that there shall be no more applause; if so, the galleries will be cleared immediately.
Mr. Conkling. Mr. President, that interruption reminds me, the present occupant of the chair having been deeply interested in the bill, that the appropriations made and squandered for local and unlawful improvements in the last river and harbor bill alone, would pay for executing the election law as long as grass grows or water runs. The interest on the money wrongfully squandered in that one bill, would execute it twice over perpetually. The cost of this needless extra session, brought about as a partisan contrivance, would execute the election law for a great while. A better way to save the cost, than to repeal the law, is to obey it. Let White Leagues and rifle clubs disband; let your night-riders dismount; let your tissue ballot-box stuffers desist; let repeaters, false-counters, and ruffians no longer be employed to carry elections, and then the cost of executing the law will disappear from the public ledger.
Again we are told that forty-five million people are in danger from an army nominally of twenty-five thousand men scattered over a continent, most of them beyond the frontiers of civilized abode. Military power has become an affrighting specter. Soldiers at the polls are displeasing to a political party. What party? That party whose Administration ordered soldiers, who obeyed, to shoot down and kill unoffending citizens here in the streets of Washington on election day; that party which has arrested and dispersed Legislatures at the point of the bayonet; that party which has employed troops to carry elections to decide that a State should be slave and should not be free; that party which has corraled courts of justice with national bayonets, and hunted panting fugitive slaves, in peaceful communities, with artillery and dragoons; that party which would have to-day no majority in either House of Congress except for elections dominated and decided by violence and fraud; that party under whose sway, in several States, not only the right to vote, but the right to be, is now trampled under foot.
Such is the source of an insulting summons to the Executive to become particeps criminis in prostrating wholesome laws, and this is the condition on which the money of the people, paid by the people, shall be permitted to be used for the purposes for which the people paid it.