194 



CONGRESS, UNITED STATES. 



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 tnem, or in receiving and counting 

 fraudulent ballots in pursuance of a conspiracy to 

 make the lawful votes of such citizens of none eftect ; 

 and whether such citizens were prevented fron exer- 

 cising the elective franchise, or forced to use it against 

 their wishes by violence or threats, or hostile demon- 

 strations 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 

 Committee on the Judiciary shall have the right to 

 send for persons and papers. 



Mr. Blaine said : " Mr. President, the pend- 

 ing resolution was offered by me with a two- 

 fold purpose in view : 



"1. To place on record, in a definite and au- 

 thentic form, the frauds and outrages by which 

 some recent elections were carried by the Dem- 

 ocratic party in the Southern States ; 



"2. To find if there be any method by which 

 a repetition of these crimes against a free bal- 

 lot may be prevented. 



"The newspaper is the channel through 

 which the people of the United States are in- 

 formed of current events, and the accounts 

 given in the press represent the elections in 

 some of the Southern States to have been ac- 

 companied by violence, in not a few cases 

 reaching the destruction of life ; to have been 

 controlled by threats that awed and intimi- 

 dated a large class of voters; to have been 

 manipulated by fraud of the most shameless 

 and shameful description. Indeed, in South 

 Carolina there seems to have been no election 

 at all in any proper sense of the term. There 

 was instead a series of skirmishes over the 

 State, in which the polling-places were re- 

 garded as forts to be captured by one party 

 and held against the other ; and, where this 

 could not be done with convenience, frauds in 

 the count and tissue-ballot devices were resort- 

 ed to in order to effectually destroy the voice 

 of the majority. These in brief are the ac- 

 counts given in the non-partisan press of the 

 disgraceful outrages that attended the recent 

 elections; and, so far as I have seen, these 

 statements are without serious contradiction. 

 It is but just and fair to all parties, however, 

 that an impartial investigation of the facts 

 shall be made by a committee of the Senate, 

 proceeding under the authority of law and 

 representing the power of the nation. Hence 

 my resolution. 



" But we do not need investigation to estab- 

 lish certain facts already of official record. We 

 know that one hundred and six Representa- 

 tives in Congress were recently chosen in the 

 States formerly slave - holding, and that the 



Democrats elected one hundred and one or 

 possibly one hundred and two, and the Repub- 

 licans four or possibly five. We know that 

 thirty-five of these Representatives were as- 

 signed to the Southern States by reason of the 

 colored population, and that the entire politi- 

 cal power thus founded on the numbers of the 

 colored people has been seized and appropri- 

 ated to the aggrandizement of its own strength 

 by the Democratic party of the South. 



" The issue thus raised before the country, 

 Mr. President, is not one of mere sentiment 

 for the rights of the negro though far distant 

 be the day when the rights of any American 

 citizen, however black or however poor, shall 

 form the mere dust of the balance in any con- 

 troversy ; nor is the issue one that involves 

 the waving of the ' bloody shirt,' to quote the 

 elegant vernacular of Democratic vituperation ; 

 nor still further is the issue as now presented 

 only a question of the equality of the black 

 voter of the South with the white voter of the 

 South. The issue, Mr. President, has taken a 

 far wider range, one of portentous magnitude ; 

 and that is, whether the white voter of the 

 North shall be equal to the white voter of the 

 South in shaping the policy and fixing the des- 

 tiny of this country ; or whether, to put it still 

 more baldly, the white man who fought in the 

 ranks of the Union army shall have as weighty 

 and influential a vote in the government of 

 the Republic as the white man who fought in 

 the ranks of the rebel army. The one fought 

 to uphold, the other to destroy, the Union of 

 the States ; and to-day he who fought to destroy 

 is a far more important factor in the govern- 

 ment of the nation than he who fought to up- 

 hold it. 



"Let me illustrate my meaning by compar- 

 ing groups of States of the same representa- 

 tive strength North and South. Take the 

 States of South Carolina, Mississippi, and 

 Louisiana. They send seventeen Representa- 

 tives 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 Representa- 

 tives, then, it is evident that nine were appor- 

 tioned to these States by reason of their col- 

 ored 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 



