“_Resolved_, That the committee on the judiciary be instructed to
inquire and report to the senate, whether at the recent elections
the constitutional rights of American citizens were violated in
any of the states of the Union; whether the right of suffrage of
citizens of the United States, or of any class of such citizens,
was denied or abridged by the action of the election-officers of
any state in refusing to receive their votes, in failing to count
them, or in receiving and counting fraudulent ballots in pursuance
of a conspiracy to make the lawful votes of such citizens of non
effect; and whether such citizens were prevented from exercising the
elective franchise, or forced to use it against their wishes, by
violence or threats, or hostile demonstrations of armed men or other
organizations, or by any other unlawful means or practices.
“_Resolved_, That the committee on the judiciary be further
instructed to inquire and report whether it is within the competency
of congress to provide by additional legislation for the more perfect
security of the right of suffrage to citizens of the United States in
all the states of the Union.
“_Resolved_, That in prosecuting these inquiries the judiciary
committee shall have the right to send for persons and papers.”
The negro had become practically disfranchised; the true end of the war
in his rightful liberty as a freeman, in the full sense of the term,
was concerned; and the acts of government in making him a citizen,
and his representation in congress according to the new allotment of
thirty-five representatives for the colored population;--all these ends
had been subverted, these rights abrogated, and the constitution, in
its most sacred and dearly-bought amendments, violently ignored, and
men were there with perjury on their lips and treason in their hearts,
who had countenanced and upheld all of this.
“Let me illustrate,” Mr. Blaine says, “by comparing groups of states
of the same representative strength North and South. Take the states
of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana. They send seventeen
representatives to congress. Their aggregate population is composed
of ten hundred and thirty-five thousand whites and twelve hundred and
twenty-four thousand colored; the colored being nearly two hundred
thousand in excess of the whites. Of the seventeen representatives,
then, it is evident that nine were apportioned to these states by
reason of their colored population, and only eight by reason of their
white population; and yet in the choice of the entire seventeen
representatives, the colored voters had no more voice or power than
their remote kindred on the shores of Senegambia or on the Gold Coast.
The ten hundred and thirty-five thousand white people had the sole and
absolute choice of the entire seventeen representatives.
“In contrast, take two states in the North, Iowa and Wisconsin, with
seventeen representatives. They have a white population of two million
two hundred and forty-seven thousand,--considerably more than double
the entire white population of the three Southern states I have named.
In Iowa and Wisconsin, therefore, it takes one hundred and thirty-two
thousand white population to send a representative to congress, but in
South Carolina, Mississippi, and Louisiana every sixty thousand white
people send a representative. In other words, sixty thousand white
people in those Southern states have precisely the same political
power in the government of the country that one hundred and thirty-two
thousand white people have in Iowa and Wisconsin.”
And it is because this state of things continues and has threatened
every presidential election since then, that the brave deed of standing
in the presence of the perpetrators of the wrong, and unmasking its
hideous mien, is still all the more worthy of notice, and demands an
increased interest; and so we venture to give another sample of his
old Plutarch method of contrast and comparison; the last few sentences
of the speech, constituting as they did his peroration, and being so
pointed, personal, and triumphant in tone and manner, revealing the
man so clearly and forcibly, that we close our reference to the speech
with them, and giving a summary of argument and powerful, homeward
putting of truth, worthy of the honor of the great cause he pleaded,
worthy of the dignity of the high place in which he spoke, and worthy
of himself:--
“Within that entire great organization there is not one man, whose
opinion is entitled to be quoted, that does not desire peace and
harmony and friendship, and a patriotic and fraternal union, between
the North and the South. This wish is spontaneous, instinctive,
universal throughout the Northern states; and yet, among men of
character and sense, there is surely no need of attempting to deceive
ourselves as to the precise truth. First pure, then peaceable. Gush
will not remove a grievance, and no disguise of state rights will close
the eyes of our people to the necessity of correcting a great national
wrong. Nor should the South make the fatal mistake of concluding that
injustice to the negro is not also injustice to the white man; nor
should it ever be forgotten, that for the wrongs of both a remedy will
assuredly be found.
“The war, with all its costly sacrifices, was fought in vain unless
equal rights for all classes be established in all the states of
the Union; and now, in words which are those of friendship, however
differently they may be accepted, I tell the men of the South here on
this floor and beyond this chamber, that even if they could strip the
negro of his constitutional rights, they can never permanently maintain
the inequality of white men in this nation; they can never make a white
man’s vote in the South doubly as powerful in the administration of the
government as a white man’s vote in the North.”
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