While the result of the Presidential election of 1868 was, upon the
record of the electoral votes, an overwhelming victory for the
Republican party and its illustrious candidate, certain facts tended to
qualify the sense of gratulation and triumph on the part of those who
give serious study to the progress and results of partisan contests.
It was the first Presidential election since the close of the war, and
the candidates represented in sharp and definite outline the
antagonistic views which had prevailed among Northern men during the
period of the struggle. General Grant was the embodiment of the war
feeling, and presented in his own person the spirit of the contest for
the Union and the evidence of its triumph. The Democratic candidate,
if not open to the charge of personal disloyalty, had done much as
Governor of New York to embarrass the National Administration in the
conduct of the war, and would perhaps have done more but for the
singular tact and address with which Mr. Lincoln had prevented an open
quarrel or even a serious conflict of authority. Mr. Seymour was
indeed unpleasantly associated in the public mind with the riot which
had been organized in the city of New York against the enforcement of
the draft. He had been a great favorite of the Peace party, and at
the most critical point in the civil struggle he had presided over a
National convention which demanded that the war should cease.
Under these circumstances it was not altogether re-assuring to the
ardent loyalists of the country, that the city of New York, whose
prosperity depended in so great a degree upon the preservation of the
Union, should now give Mr. Seymour a majority of more than sixty
thousand over General Grant, and that the Empire State, which would
cease to be Imperial if the Union ceased to exist, should in a popular
contest defeat General Grant by fully ten thousand votes. New Jersey
made an equally discouraging record by giving Mr. Seymour a majority
of three thousand. The Pacific coast, whose progress and prosperity
depended so largely upon the maintenance of the Union, presented an
astonishing result,--California giving General Grant a majority of only
514, while Oregon utterly repudiated the great leader and gave her
electoral vote for Mr. Seymour. Indiana, in the test vote of the
October election for governor, was carried for the Republicans by only
961; Ohio gave a smaller majority in the hour of National victory than
she had given during any year of the civil struggle, while Pennsylvania
at the same election gave the party but ten thousand majority. In the
city and county of Philadelphia the Democrats actually had a majority
of nearly two hundred votes. The Republican majorities in these three
States were considerably increased in the November election by the
natural falling off of the Democratic vote, but the critical and
decisive battle had been fought in each State in October. It was a
very startling fact that if Mr. Seymour had received the electoral vote
of the solid South (which afterwards came to be regarded either as the
rightful inheritance or the fraudulent prerogative of the Democratic
part), he would, in connection with the vote he received in the North,
have had a majority over General Grant in the Electoral College.
Considering the time of the election, considering the record and the
achievements of the rival candidates, the Presidential election of 1868
must be regarded as the most remarkable and the most unaccountable in
our political annals.
The result was not comforting to the thoughtful men who interpreted its
true significance and comprehended the possibilities to which it
pointed. Of the reconstructed States (eight in number) General Grant
received the electoral votes of six,--North Carolina, South Carolina,
Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida. A full vote was secured
in each, and the lawfulness and fairness of the result under the system
of Reconstruction were not questioned. The vote of Georgia was
disputed on account of some alleged irregularity in her compliance
with the Acts of Reconstruction, and the suspicion that the
Presidential election was not fairly conducted. But in Louisiana there
was no moral doubt that violence and disorder had done their evil work.
The result in that State was declared to be in favor of Mr. Seymour.
The subject was brought before Congress, and the counting of the votes
of these States was challenged; but as the alleged irregularity in
Georgia and the alleged fraud in Louisiana had not been legally
investigated, Congress (Republican at that time by a large majority in
both branches) declined to exclude them from the electoral count.
There was great dissatisfaction on the part of a considerable number of
Republicans in Congress with the determination to admit the vote of
Louisiana without some qualifying record or explanation. In the House
General Schenck offered a resolution, declaring that "the vote of the
State was counted because no proof was formally submitted to sustain
the objections thereto." General Shanks of Indiana offered a much
more decisive resolution, declaring that "in the opinion of the House
the acceptance of the electoral vote of Louisiana will encourage the
criminal practice of enforcing elections in the States lately in
rebellion, and involves the murder of thousands of loyal people." The
rule of the House required unanimous consent to admit these
resolutions, and they were strenuously objected to by Fernando Wood,
Charles A. Eldridge, and other leading Democrats of the House.
In the Senate Mr. Morton of Indiana submitted a resolution, declaring
that "while there is reason to believe from common report and
information that the late Presidential election in Louisiana was
carried by force and fraud, still there being no legal evidence before
the Senate on that subject the electoral vote of Louisiana ought to be
counted." No debate being allowed under the rule regulating the
proceedings of the Senate in regard to the count of the electoral vote,
the resolution was defeated. It received however the support of
twenty-four Republican senators, some of them among the most prominent
members of the body. Mr. Sumner, Mr. Chandler, Mr. Conkling, Mr.
Cameron, Mr. Morton, Mr. Morgan, and Mr. Morrill of Vermont were among
those who thought some record should be made of the Senate's knowledge
of the frauds in Louisiana, even if they were unable on strictly legal
grounds to reject her electoral vote. Other Republican senators
evidently thought, as they were unable legally to reject the vote,
it was not wise to make any record on the question.
Subsequent investigation abundantly established the fact (of which at
the time Congress did not possess legal knowledge) that the State of
Louisiana had been carried for Mr. Seymour by shameless fraud, by
cruel intimidation, by shocking violence. As incidental and
unmistakable proof of fraud, it was afterwards shown from the records
that in the spring election of 1868, in the parish of Orleans 29,910
votes had been cast, and that the Republicans had a majority of 13,973;
whereas in the ensuing autumn, at the Presidential election, the
returns for the same parish gave General Grant but 1,178 votes, while
Mr. Seymour was declared to have received 24,668. In the parish of
Caddo, where in the spring election the Republicans had shown a decided
majority, General Grant received but one vote. In the parish of Saint
Landry, where the Republicans had prevailed in the spring election by
a majority of 678, not a single vote was counted for General Grant,
the returns giving to Mr. Seymour the entire registered vote--4,787.
In other parishes the results, if less aggravated and less startling,
were of like character, and the State, which the Republicans had
carried, at an entirely peaceful election in the spring, by a majority
of more than 12,000, was now declared to have given Mr. Seymour a
majority of 47,000.
There was no pretense that there had been a revolution of public
opinion in the State to justify these returns. It was not indeed
denied that General Grant was personally far stronger before the people
of Louisiana than any Republican candidate at previous State or Parish
elections. The change was simply the result of fraud, and the fraud
was based on violence. Various investigations ordered by Congress
establish this view. "From these investigations," as was stated in a
subsequent report, "it appears that over two thousand persons were
killed, wounded, and otherwise injured in that State within a few weeks
of the Presidential election of 1868; that half the State was overrun
by violence, midnight raids, secret murders, and open riots, which kept
the people in constant terror, until the Republicans surrendered all
claims, and then the election was carried by the Democracy."
The same report states that in the parish of Orleans "riots prevailed
for weeks, filling New Orleans with scenes of blood, and Ku-Klux
notices were scattered throughout the city warning the colored men not
to vote." In the parish of Caddo, where as already stated only one
vote was counted for General Grant, "there occurred one of the
bloodiest riots on record, in which the Ku-Klux killed and wounded over
two hundred Republicans, hunting and chasing them for two days and
nights through fields and swamps. Thirteen captives were taken from
the jail and shot, and a pile of twenty-five dead bodies were found
buried in the woods." These atrocious crimes immediately preceded
the election, and "having thus conquered the Republicans and killed
and driven off their white leaders, the masses of the negroes were
captured by the Ku-Klux, marked with badges of red flannel, enrolled
in clubs, led to the polls and compelled to vote the Democratic ticket,
after which they were given certificates of that fact."
One of the most alarming features connected with this series of
outrages was the promptness with which Louisiana resorted to violence
after her re-admission to the right of representation in Congress. Her
senators and representatives had taken their seats in their respective
Houses only the preceding summer, and her right to participate in the
Presidential election was established at the same time. Within less
than five months after her formal reconstruction, outrages which would
be exceptional in the governments of Algiers or Egypt were committed
in utter defiance of law, and without any attempt at punishment by the
authorities of the State. Not to punish was in effect to approve.
As a mere question of figures, it is impossible that Mr. Seymour could
have received the 80,225 votes with which he was credited. Indeed, his
alleged majority of 47,000 over General Grant was greater than the
total vote which the Democratic party could honestly cast in Louisiana.
In the Presidential election of 1860, when circumstances tended to call
every Democrat in the South to the polls, the united vote of
Breckinridge and Douglas in Louisiana was but 30,306, while the total
vote, including that given for John Bell, was but 50,510. In 1867 the
entire registered white vote of Louisiana was but 45,199. The white
voting population of the State, therefore, was certainly no larger in
1868 than in 1860--if as large. It was not denied that since the
close of the war a considerable number of white men had joined the
Republican party; white it was not even claimed that a single negro
voted the Democratic ticket in 1868, except as he was led to the polls
under the cover of Ku-Klux weapons, terrorized by the violence of that
association of lawless men.
It amounts therefore to a mathematical demonstration, that nearly
one-half of Mr. Seymour's vote was fraudulent; and of that fact
concealment is no longer attempted from any respectable source. It has
been matter of surprise to the cotemporaries of Mr. Seymour, that
sensitive as he has shown himself on many occasions in regard to the
record of his political life, he would consent, after investigation and
exposure of the atrocities had been made, to remain in history without
protest as the beneficiary of a vote that was demonstrably fraudulent in
its character,--a vote that was tainted with crime and stained with the
blood of innocent men. It is assuredly not to be presumed that violent
acts and murderous deeds are less repulsive to Mr. Seymour than to any
other refined Christian gentleman. But his silence in respect to the
wicked transactions of his supporters in Louisiana, when he was a
candidate for the Presidency, has persuaded many honest-minded
Democrats that the whole narrative of crime was a slander, concocted
in the interest of the Republican party. It has served also a far more
deplorable purpose, for it has in large measure aided in screening from
public reprobation, and possibly from exemplary punishment, the guilty
principals and the scarcely less guilty accomplices in the maiming and
murder of American citizens, who were only seeking to exercise their
Constitutional right of suffrage.
The Republican victory of 1866 led to the incorporation of impartial
suffrage in the Reconstruction laws. The Republican victory of 1868,
it was now resolved in the councils of the party, should lead to the
incorporation of impartial suffrage in the Constitution of the United
States. The evasive and discreditable position in regard to suffrage,
taken by the National Republican Convention that nominated General
Grant in 1868, was keenly felt and appreciated by the members of the
party when subjected to popular discussion. There was something so
obviously unfair and unmanly in the proposition to impose negro
suffrage on the Southern States by National power, and at the same
time to leave the Northern States free to decide the question for
themselves, that the Republicans became heartily ashamed of it long
before the political canvass had closed. When Congress assembled,
immediately after the election of General Grant, there was found to
be a common desire and a common purpose among Republicans to correct
the unfortunate position in which the party had been placed by the
National Convention; and to that end it was resolved that suffrage, as
between the races, should by organic law be made impartial in all the
States of the Union--North as well as South.
Various propositions were at once offered, both in the Senate and
House, to amend the Constitution of the United States in order to
attain impartial suffrage. It was both significant and appropriate
that the draught proposed by Mr. Henderson of Missouri was taken as
the basis of the Amendment first reported to the Senate. In the
preceding Congress, when the Fourteenth Amendment was under
consideration (in the spring of 1866), Mr. Henderson had proposed
substantially the same provision, and had solemnly warned his
Republican associates that though they might reject it then, it would
be demanded of them in less than five years. This declaration was
all the more suggestive and creditable, coming from a senator who
represented a former slave-holding State. And it was not forgotten
that Mr. Henderson had with equal zeal and equal foresight been among
the earliest to propose the Thirteenth Amendment. Mr. Henderson's
proposition, now submitted and referred to the Judiciary Committee, was
in these words: "No State shall deny or abridge the right of its
citizens to vote or hold office, on account of race, color, or previous
condition." It was reported from the Judiciary Committee by Mr.
Stewart of Nevada, with an amendment proposing another form of
statement; namely, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote
and hold office shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or
any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."
During the debate on the question Mr. Hendricks of Indiana reproached
the Republican party for forcing this question now upon Congress, when
in the platform of principles upon which they appealed for popular
support they had distinctly waived it, and when the Legislatures to
which it must go for ratification had been elected without the
slightest reference to it in the popular mind. In order to prevent
what might seem to be an unfair submission of the Amendment, Mr. Dixon
of Connecticut proposed that it should be referred to conventions in
the respective States instead of to the Legislatures, and thus give the
people, in the election of members of the conventions, a full
opportunity to pass upon the merits of the question. It was contended
on the other hand by Republican senators, that no subject had been
more fully matured in the popular mind than this had been by the
discussion which had taken place since the beginning, and especially
since the close, of the war. But this was not a candid or truthful
statement of the case, as had been abundantly shown by the action of
the National Republican Convention. Only a few of the leaders of the
party had openly announced themselves in favor of negro suffrage in
the Nation; a few were openly hostile, while the great majority of the
prominent members feared it and refrained from open expression in
regard to it. The mass of the party, as is usual on questions of this
character, had made their own conclusions, and their earnestness of
convictions finally forced, if it did not persuade, the reluctant
chiefs to adopt it. When they at last came to it, there was a natural
disposition to represent it as one of the cardinal principles of the
party. The Democratic criticisms, as to the time and method of
presenting the Amendment, were well aimed and practically remained
unanswered for the simple reason that no adequate or logical response
could be made to them.
Mr. Garrett Davis of Kentucky charged that the Republican party, in
proposing this Amendment, was simply seeking to perpetuate its power
in the country; but on this point he was effectively answered by Mr.
Wilson of Massachusetts. "The senator from Kentucky knows, and I
know," said Mr. Wilson, "that this whole struggle to give equal rights
and equal privileges to all citizens of the United States has been an
unpopular one; that we have been forced to struggle against passion and
prejudice engendered by generations of wrong and oppression; that we
have been compelled to struggle against great interests and powerful
political organizations. I say to the senator from Kentucky that the
struggle of the last eight years to give freedom to four and a half
millions of men who were held in slavery, to make them citizens of
the United States, to clothe them with the right of suffrage, to give
them the privilege of being voted for, to make them in all respects
equal to the white citizens of the United States, has cost the
Republican party a quarter of a million votes."
The House of Representatives had been considering the question of the
suffrage amendment at equal step with the Senate. On the 11th of
January Mr. Boutwell of Massachusetts, from the Committee on the
Judiciary, proposed an Amendment to the Constitution in these words:
"The right of any citizen of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or any State, by reason of
the race, color, or previous condition of slavery of any citizen or
class of citizens of the United States.--The Congress shall have power
to enforce by proper legislation the provisions of this Article."
Mr. Boutwell made one of the strongest and most pointed arguments
delivered in Congress for the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment.
He showed that by the Fourteenth Amendment we had declared that "all
persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the
States wherein they reside." "There are," said he, "citizens in
Kentucky and Maryland eligible to-day to the office of President or
Vice-President of the United States, yet who cannot vote for
representatives in Congress, or even for a State, county or town
officer. What is the qualification for the office of President? He
must be a native-born citizen of the United States and thirty-five
years of age. Nothing more! These are the only qualifications for
the office of President. By the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution, we have declared that all the black men in Maryland and
other States shall be citizens of the United States. Certain State
governments have for the present denied those people the right to vote,
and yet one of them is eligible to the Presidency of the United States
and another to the Vice-Presidency. Is there such an anomaly in our
Government? Are we prepared to admit its existence unless the
Constitution imperatively requires it?"
The speech of Mr. Boutwell was answered by Mr. Beck of Kentucky and Mr.
Eldridge of Wisconsin, their respective arguments resting mainly upon
the propriety of leaving the regulation of suffrage within the power
of the States, where it was originally left by the Constitution. After
several ineffectual attempts to amend the Constitutional Amendment as
reported from the Judiciary Committee, the House, on the 30th of
January (1869), passed it by _ayes_ 150, _noes_ 42, not voting 31.
When the House Amendment reached the Senate it was at once taken up for
consideration, and the Amendment which that body had been considering
was laid aside. This was done for the purpose of expediting an
agreement between the two branches. Numerous modifications and
additions were then proposed, including the one originally reported by
the Judiciary Committee. Every modification or substitute failed,
until Senator Wilson offered the following: "No discrimination shall
be made in any State among the citizens of the United States in the
exercise of the elective franchise, or in the right to hold office in
any State, on account of race, color, nativity, property, education,
or religious creed." Mr. Trumbull declared that the adoption of this
Amendment would abolish the constitutions of perhaps all, certainly of
half, the States of the Union. He then pointed out that the
constitution of almost every State prescribed a qualification of age
for the governor of the State, and of a certain length of residence,
many of them requiring a natural-born citizen; and that the effect
of Mr. Wilson's Amendment would be to level all the constitutions,
and radically reverse the deliberate judgment of the people of the
States who had ordained them. Serious objections were also made
against prohibiting an educational test, as would be the effect of Mr.
Wilson's Amendment. Mr. Wilson frankly avowed his hostility to an
educational test, and declared that the one existing in Massachusetts
had never proved valuable in any sense. Against all objections and
arguments Mr. Wilson's Amendment was adopted by the Senate.
A proposition was now introduced and supported with equal zeal by Mr.
Morton of Indiana and Mr. Buckalew of Pennsylvania, proposing an
amendment to the pending resolution, which should in effect be a
sixteenth amendment to the Constitution. Its aim was to take from the
States the power now confided in them by the Constitution, to direct
the manner in which electors of President and Vice-President shall be
chosen. The declared motive for the change was to prevent the
possibility of the electors being chosen by the State Legislatures,
as had been done in some cases, and to guarantee the certainty of a
popular vote in their selection in every State of the Union. To
insure this result it was proposed in the amendment that the entire
power over the choice of electors should be transferred to Congress.
After a brief debate the amendment was agreed to,(1) and the two
proposed articles, included under one resolution, were adopted by
_ayes_ 39, _noes_ 16, and sent to the House for concurrence.
The House not being willing to accept the Senate's Amendments, refused
by formal vote to concur, and asked for a conference. The Senate took
the unusual step of declining a conference, promptly receded from its
own Amendments, and sent to the House the original proposition of that
body. The House, not to be outdone by the Senate in capricious change
of opinion, now refused to agree to the form of amendment it had before
adopted, and returned it to the Senate with the added requirement of
nativity, property, and creed, which the Senate had originally
proposed. The rule indeed seemed to be for each branch to desert its
own proposition as soon as there was a prospect that the other branch
would agree to it. The strange controversy was finally ended and the
subject brought into intelligible shape by a conference committee,
which reported the Fifteenth Amendment in the precise form in which it
became incorporated in the Constitution. It received the sanction of
the house by a vote far beyond the two-thirds required to adopt it, the
_ayes_ being 145, the _noes_ 44. In the Senate the _ayes_ were 39, the
_noes_ were 13. The action of Congress on the Amendment was completed
on the 26th of February, six days before General Grant was installed
in the Presidency.
The gradual progress of public opinion in the United States on
questions relating to slavery and to the personal and political rights
of the negro race, may be clearly traced in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth,
and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution.
--The Thirteenth Amendment, proposed by Congress while the war was yet
flagrant, simply declared that neither slavery nor involuntary
servitude shall exist within the United States or in any place subject
to National jurisdiction.
--The Fourteenth Amendment advanced the negro to the status of a
citizen, but did nothing affirmatively to confer the right of suffrage
upon him. Negatively it aided him thereto, by laying the penalty of a
decreased representation upon any State that should deny or in any
way abridge his right to vote at any election for the choice of
electors for President and Vice-President of the United States,
representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a
State, or the members of the Legislature thereof.
--The Fifteenth Amendment, now proposed, did not attempt to declare
affirmatively that the negro should be endowed with the elective
franchise, but it did what was tantamount, in forbidding to the United
States or to any State the power to deny or abridge the right to vote
on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. States
that should adopt an educational test or a property qualification might
still exclude a vast majority of negroes from the polls, but they would
at the same time exclude all white men who could not comply with the
tests that excluded the negro. In short, suffrage by the Fifteenth
Amendment was made impartial, but not necessarily universal, to male
citizens above the age of twenty-one years.
The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment seriously modified the effect
and potency of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment. Under
that section a State could exclude the negro from the right of
suffrage, if willing to accept the penalty of the proportional loss
of representation in Congress, which the exclusion of the colored
population from the basis of apportionment would entail. But
the Fifteenth Amendment took away absolutely from the State the
power to exclude the negro from suffrage, and therefore the second
section to the Fourteenth Amendment can refer only to those other
disqualifications never likely to be applied, by which a state might
lessen her voting population by basing the right of suffrage on the
ownership of real estate, or on the possession of a fixed income, or
upon a certain degree of education, or upon nativity, or religious
creed. It is still in the power of the States to apply any one of
these tests or all of them, if willing to hazard the penalty prescribed
in the Fourteenth Amendment. But it is not probably that any one of
these tests will ever be applied. Nor were they seriously taken into
consideration when the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed by Congress.
Its prime object was to correct the wrongs which might be enacted in
the South, and the correction proposed was direct and unmistakable;
viz., that the Nation would exclude the negro from the basis of
apportionment wherever the State should exclude him from the right of
suffrage.
When therefore the nation by subsequent change in its Constitution
declared that the State shall not exclude the negro from the right of
suffrage, it neutralized and surrendered the contingent right before
held, to exclude him from the basis of apportionment. Congress is thus
plainly deprived by the Fifteenth Amendment of certain powers over the
representation in the South, which it previously possessed under the
provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment. Before the adoption of the
Fifteenth Amendment, if a State should exclude the negro from suffrage,
the next step would be for Congress to exclude the negro from the basis
of apportionment. After the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, if a
State should exclude the negro from suffrage, the next step would be
for the Supreme Court to declare that the act was unconstitutional, and
therefore null and void. The essential and inestimable value of the
Fourteenth Amendment still remains in the three other sections, and
pre-eminently in the first section.
The contentions which have arisen between political parties as to the
rights of negro suffrage in the Southern States, would scarcely be
cognizable judicially under either the Fourteenth or the Fifteenth
Amendment to the Constitution. Both of those Amendments operate as
inhibitions upon the power of the State, and do not have reference
to those irregular acts of the people which find no authorization in
the public statutes. The defect in both Amendments, in so far as their
main object of securing rights to the colored race is involved, lies in
the fact that they do not operate directly upon the people, and
therefore Congress is not endowed with the pertinent and applicable
power to give redress. By decisions of the Supreme Court, the
Fourteenth Amendment has been deprived in part of the power which
Congress no doubt intended to impart to it. Under its provisions, as
construed by the Court, little, if any thing, can be done by Congress
to correct the evils or avert the injurious consequences arising from
such abuses of the suffrage as distinguished the vote of Louisiana in
the Presidential election of 1868, and in the numerous and flagrant
cases which followed that baleful precedent of unrestrained violence
and unlimited wrong. Those outrages are the deeds of individual
citizens or of associated masses, acting without authority of law and
in defiance of law. Yet when a vitiated public opinion justifies
their course, and when indictment and conviction are impossible, the
injured citizen loses his rights as conclusively as if the law had
denied them, and indeed far more cruelly.
Undoubtedly a large proportion of the members of Congress, while
following the lead of those who constructed the Fourteenth Amendment,
sincerely believed that it possessed a far greater scope than judicial
inquiry and decision have left it. It is hazarding little to say that
if the same political bodies which submitted the Amendment to the
people could have measured both the need of its application and the
insufficiency of its power, it would have been seriously changed, and
would have conferred upon the National Government the unquestioned
authority to protect individual citizens in the right of suffrage, so
far as that suffrage is used in the choice of officers of the United
States. The opportunity was neglected and may never return. It is not
at all probable that any political party will succeed in time of peace,
upon financial and industrial issues, in electing two-thirds of the
Senate and two-thirds of the House of Representatives. No further
change in the Constitution of the Republic is probable therefore,
within any period whose line of thought or action may now be
anticipated with reasonable certainty; and if a sudden political
convulsion should possibly give two-thirds of each branch of Congress
to one political party, it would be found impracticable to propose any
change in the Constitution, in the direction of enlarging the scope
of liberty, that would be likely to secure the support of three-fourths
of the States of the Union.
The Constitutional Amendments were proposed and adopted under the
belief that they would be honorably observed and enforced in all the
States alike. The presumption was certainly in favor of that loyal
obedience to the organic law of the Republic without which Anarchy
has already begun its evil work. If however, by reason of infidelity
to the Constitutional provisions in some sections, if by violence in
resisting them in others, it be suggested that they should have been
drawn with greater circumspection, with a broader comprehension of all
the contingencies of the future, the fact yet remains that they are of
priceless value to the Government and the people. They have added
largely to the muniments of personal liberty; they have immeasurably
increased the just power of the National Government; they have exerted
a constantly growing force against the spirit that organized the
Rebellion; they have strengthened the bonds of the Union against every
form of danger which it has hitherto encountered.
Without the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments the Thirteenth would
have proved of little value to the oppressed race which it declared to
be free. In every step taken after the simple article of emancipation
was decreed, the Republicans who controlled the Government met with
obstacles from without and from within. There were thousands in their
own ranks who did not wish the negro advanced to citizenship; there
were tens of thousands who were unwilling to see him advanced to the
elective franchise. But happily there were hundreds of thousands who
plainly saw that without the rights of citizenship his freedom could
be maintained only in name, and that without the elective franchise his
citizenship would have no legitimate and (if the phrase be allowed) no
automatic protection.
To the brave men who led the Republican party to its duty and its
mission, who overcame the numbers of the opposition, who lifted their
associates from the slough of prejudice and led them out of the
darkness of tradition, let there be all honor and praise. They gave
hope to the hopeless, help to the helpless, liberty to the downtrodden.
They did more: they elevated the character and enlightened the
conscience of the oppressing race. The struggle is not yet ended, the
final battle is not yet fought; but complete victory sooner or later
is assured. The three great Amendments to the Constitution were bought
with a great price--even the blood of the slain--and they will
assuredly, in their letter and in their spirit, be vindicated and
enforced. Mr. Lincoln taught his countrymen the lesson that he who
would be no slave must be content to have no slave. It is yet to be
learned with equal emphasis that he who would preserve his own right
to suffrage must never aid in depriving another citizen of the same
great boon. In moral as in physical conflicts it may be easy to
determine who strikes the first blow, but it is difficult to foresee
who may strike the last.
[(1) The proposition of Messrs. Morton and Buckalew for a Sixteenth
Article of Amendment was as follows:--
"The second clause, first section, second article of the Constitution
of the United States shall be amended to read as follows: 'Each State
shall appoint by vote of the people thereof qualified to vote for
representatives in Congress, a number of electors equal to the whole
number of senators and representatives to which the State may be
entitled in the Congress; but no senator or representative, or person
holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be
appointed an elector; and the Congress shall have power to prescribe
the manner in which such electors shall be chosen by the people.'"]