CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



175 



of any secret political organization in that 

 State. 1 know there are bad men in both par- 

 ties; bad men do wrong everywhere; but I 

 aver that I do not believe that the organization 

 committing these outrages amounted to fifty 

 men, and they confined to one locality. 



"What evidence is there that they were 

 Confederate soldiers? There is no proof of it. 

 That outrages have been committed I do not 

 deny ; but I undertake to say that if the gentle- 

 man will give me an investigating committee I 

 can go to the great capital of Ohio, which the 

 honorable Senator represents, and show more 

 crime and more outrage committed in the 

 single city of Cincinnati than have been com- 

 mitted in the entire Commonwealth of Ken- 

 tucky for the last ten years. I might go to the 

 State of Indiana and find vigilance committees 

 who hang half a dozen at a time." 



Mr. Thurman, of Ohio, said : " And not one 

 of the. men punished, either." 



Mr. Stevenson, of Kentucky, said : " I might 

 go to every State ; but God forbid that I shall 

 ever seek to seize isolated cases in the calendar 

 of crime in order to obtain materials for a cam- 

 paign speech for the next presidential election ! 

 I doubt whether my friend from Ohio would 

 have done it so early in advance except for the 

 recent family jars in his own party. Desperate 

 diseases require desperate remedies; and I 

 think that the honorable Senator felt that he 

 had to give a slap at Kentucky in order to in- 

 flame the public mind and to revive the sinking 

 fortunes of the Republican party." 



Mr. Sawyer, of South Carolina, said: "Mr. 

 President, I believe the existence of these out- 

 rages is in some degree indirectly due to the 

 fact that, when tbe new State governments 

 were formed in the South, men who by educa- 

 tion, by previous social position, and by expe- 

 rience in such affairs were best fitted to become 

 State officers, were by the laws and Constitu- 

 tion excluded from such positions. In South 

 Carolina it is manifest that the discontent, the 

 resistance to law, and the violations of private 

 rights, do not necessarily imply hostility to the 

 United States Government. Doubtless there 

 are attempts there to evade the revenue laws; 

 there have been, I believe, one or two cases 

 where violent resistance has been made to offi- 

 cers attempting to suppress illicit distillation 

 by seizures and destruction of stills. But the 

 same thing has occurred in other parts of the 

 United States where there was no disloyalty 

 suspected, but simply a desire to get unlawful 

 gains and to escape the payment of taxes. It 

 is doubtless a species of disloyalty to evade the 

 payment of whiskey taxes, income taxes, or any 

 other taxes ; but, if we reason from such at- 

 tempts on the part of individuals that the com- 

 munity in which they live needs special legisla- 

 tion to protect loyal men, we shall make an 

 egregious error. 



" I believe that in South Carolina, at least, 

 and probably in many other States, the turbu- 

 lent and riotous spirit which induces these out- 



rages comes from opposition to the local ad- 

 ministration. I do not think the men who 

 commit the atrocities of which we hear so 

 much are more to be excused for their conduct 

 because their action proceeds from the one 

 cause rather than from the other. But I wish 

 the fact to be clearly understood, that, while 

 here and there the so-called Ku-klux Klan 

 may declare their hostility to the national Gov- 

 ernment, it is generally against those who sup- 

 port and affiliate with the State officers that 

 their blows are aimed. The pretext for their 

 action is maladministration of State and county 

 affairs. Their devilish doings are claimed by 

 them to be in the interest of just punishment for 

 crimes which otherwise would go unwhipped 

 of justice. 



" The monstrous character of such a policy 

 needs no comment. All right-minded men see 

 that it is anarchy, and that all the dearest 

 rights of man and of society are sacrificed by 

 its prevalence. "When men, on never so plausi- 

 ble an excuse, take the administration of jus- 

 tice from the proper tribunals into their own 

 hands, society is thrown back into a state of 

 barbarism ; government, in a proper sense, 

 ceases to exist. If there be power under the 

 Constitution to cure this evil, we cannot afford 

 to refuse or postpone the labor of devising a 

 remedy. 



"I am not prepared to deny that maladmin- 

 istration has occurred in many of the Southern 

 States. I know such to have been the fact. 

 I do not think it would have been less likely 

 to occur if the government had been in Demo- 

 cratic hands. On the contrary, other things 

 being equal, I think quite the reverse would 

 have been the case." 



Mr. Thurman, of Ohio, said: "Mr. Presi- 

 dent, no one underrates the necessity of put- 

 ting a stop to the outrages spoken of, so far 

 as they exist. There may be a difference of 

 opinion as to the extent to which they do ex- 

 ist ; but no one, I am sure, of any party, de- 

 sires that they should continue. Every one, 

 at least, in this chamber, desires that they 

 should cease. But, desirable as it is that these 

 outrages should cease, important as any Sena- 

 tor may consider it to be that an end should 

 be put to them, there is another thing of more 

 importance than even that ; and that is that 

 you shall respect and obey the Constitution 

 of the United States. These evils that exist, 

 great as they may be, admit them to be as 

 great as even exaggeration has depicted them, 

 are not near so great as would be an overthrow 

 of the fundamental law of the land and the 

 assumption of all power by the Congress of 

 the United States. 



" There have been bills introduced in one or 

 the other House of this Congress by Northern 

 members, and, if any thing could more com- 

 pletely demonstrate than another the danger 

 of proceeding in hot haste upon such a subject, 

 it would be those bills. They are bills that 

 shock every sense of constitutional law in any 



