92 



ELAINE, JAMBS G1LLESP1E. 



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 magni- 

 tude: 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 destiny 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 Government of the 

 nation than he who fought to uphold it. 



Let me illustrate my meaning by comparing groups 

 of States of the same representative strength North 

 and South. Take the States of South Carolina, Mis- 

 sissippi, and Louisiana. They send 17 Representa- 

 tives to Congress. Their aggregate population is 

 composed of 1,035,000 whites and 1,224,000 colored, 

 the colored being nearly 200,000 in excess of the 

 whites. Of the 17 Representatives, then, it is evident 

 that 9 were apportioned to these States by reason of 

 their colored population, and only 8 by reason of their 

 white population; and yet in the choice of the entire 

 17 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 

 1.035,000 white people had the sole and absolute 

 choice of the entire 17 Representatives. In contrast, 

 take 2 States in the North, Iowa and Wisconsin, 

 with 17 Representatives. They have a white popula- 

 tion of 2,247,000 considerably more than double the 

 entire white population of the 3 Southern States I 

 have named. In Iowa and Wisconsin, therefore, it 

 takes 132,000 white population to send a Representa- 

 tive to Congress, but in South Carolina, Mississippi, 

 and Louisiana every 60,000 white people send a repre- 

 sentative. In other words, 60,000 white people in 

 those Southern States have precisely the same po- 

 litical power in the government of the country that 

 132,000 white people have in Iowa and Wisconsin. 



The patent, undeniable intent of the fourteenth 

 amendment was that if any class of voters were de- 

 nied or in any way abridged in their right of suffrage, 

 then the class so denied or abridged should not be 

 counted in the basis of representation ; or, in other 

 words, that no State or States should gain a large 

 increase of representation in Congress by reason of 

 counting any class of population not permitted to take 

 part in electing such Representatives. But the con- 

 struction given to this provision is that before any 

 forfeiture of representation can be enforced the denial 

 or abridgment of suffrage must be the result of a law 

 specifically enacted by the State. Under this con- 

 struction every negro voter may have his suffrage 

 absolutely denied or fatally abridged by the violence, 

 actual or threatened, of irresponsible mobs, or by 

 frauds and deceptions of State officers from the gov- 

 ernor down to the last election clerk, and then, unless 

 some State law can be shown that authorizes the de- 

 nial or abridgment, the State escapes all penalty or 

 peril of reduced representation. This construction 

 may be upheld by the courts, ruling on the letter of 

 the law, ' which killeth," but the spirit of justice cries 

 aloud against the evasive and atrocious conclusion 

 that deals out oppression to the innocent and shields 

 the guilty from the legitimate consequences of willful 

 transgression. 



The political power thus appropriated by Southern 

 Democrats by reason of the negro population amounts 

 to 35 Representatives in Congress. It is massed almost 

 solidly and offsets the great State of New York ; or 

 Pennsylvania and New Jersey together ; or the whole 

 of New England ; or Ohio and Indiana united ; or the 

 combined strength of Illinois, Minnesota, Kansas, 

 California, Nevada, Nebraska, Colorado, and Oregon. 



The seizure of this power is wanton usurpation ; it is 

 flagrant outrage ; it is violent perversion of the whole 

 theory of republican government. It inures solely to 

 the present advantage, and yet, I believe, to the per- 

 manent dishonor of the Democratic party. It is by 

 reason of this trampling down of human rights, this 

 ruthless seizure of unlawful power, that the Demo- 

 cratic party holds the popular branch of Congress 

 to-day, and will, in less than ninety days, have con- 

 trol of this body also, thus grasping the entire legisla- 

 tive department of the Government through the 

 unlawful capture of the Southern States. 



In May, 1879, when the debate on the Appro- 

 priation bill ran into a discussion of the ques- 

 tion of national and State sovereignty, Mr. Blaine 

 made a speech, in the course of which he said : 



I do not think the evil that has been done to the 

 Southern country by the schoolbooks in the hands 

 of their children has been measured. Many of the 

 books put into the hands of the rising generation of 

 the South are tinctured all through with prejudice 

 and misrepresentation and with a spirit of hatred. 

 We are accused by our friends on the opposite side 

 of the Chamber ot stirring up strife and generating 

 hatred. I do not believe it would be possible to find, 

 in all the literature of the North for the schools and 

 for the young, a solitary paragraph intended or cal- 

 culated to arouse hatred or suggest unpatriotic feel- 

 ings toward any portion of the Union. A large por- 

 tion of the South has been furnished witli special 

 schoolbooks calculated for the meridian, with the 

 facts appended to suit that particular locality. It was 

 said that for two generations a large portion of the 

 P^nglish people believed that the American colonies 

 had never achieved their independence, but had been 

 kicked off as a useless appendage to the British Em- 

 pire, and that they were glad to be rid of us. Then: 

 is a large number of the school children in the South 

 who are educated with radically wrong notions and 

 radically erroneous facts. I saw an arithmetic that 

 was filled with examples think of putting politics 

 into an arithmetic! such as this: If 10 cowardly 

 Yankees had so many miles the start, and 5 brave 

 Confederates were following them, the first going at 

 so many miles an hour, and the others following at 

 so many miles an hour, how long before the Yankees 

 would be overtaken ? Now, think of putting that de- 

 liberately in a schoolbook, and having school histories 

 made up on that basis for children ! . . . Throughout 

 the length and breadth of the South the one evil 

 omen of to-day is the literature that is given to the 

 children and the intellectual food that is offered to 

 all the young and rising men in the institutions of 

 learning, in their academies, their colleges, their uni- 

 versities. . . . Every step has been taken since the 

 Democratic party got into power in the House and in 

 the Senate in one direction, and that direction has 

 been to the striking down of the Federal power and 

 the exaltation of the State power. This measure is 

 but one. Others have gone before it; others are to 

 follow it. What may be their fate I do not know. 

 We on this side will resist by every constitutional 

 means, and you on that side, despite the threats of the 

 Senator from Connecticut, will be obliged to submit 

 in the end, and the power of this Government will 

 not be put down by a threat ; it will not be put down 

 by a combination ; it will not be put down by a po- 

 litical party. It was not put down by a rebellion. 

 It can meet another, either in the form of organized 

 resistance in withholding supplies, or in the more 

 serious form which the language of the Senator from 

 South Carolina seemed to foreshadow. 



Mr. Blaine supported the bill favoring the ex- 

 clusion of Chinese immigrants, and some of his 

 reasons are given in a memorable speech. After 

 declaring that Chinese immigration was not, in 

 the proper sense of the word, immigration at all 

 that it was a congregating in our towns of masses 



