THE ELECTORAL VOTE-CONDITION OF THE COUNTRY. SPEECH OF HON. WILLIAM A. PHILLIPS, OF KANSAS, IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, THURSDAY, JANUARY 4, 1877. The House being as in Committee of the done in time, even if it were a proper thing Whole on the state of the Union to do. All such propositions, therefore, so far as they are designed to affect this case, are simply disturbing elements. They affect to admit that which it is not necessary to admit, and only add flames to that political excitement which it should be the aim of every patriotic citizen to discourage. Neither can amendments to the Constitution be wisely undertaken under circumstances and at a time when partisan interests and partisan bitterness must deny them that impartial consideration which alone can confer on them utility and crowning glory. It is, therefore, an unhappy circumstance that makes it appear as if many of our public men had lost their balance or were endeavoring to feed themselves with ideas impregnated with anarchy and revolution. It has been the pride of our Government and the hope of the lovers of republicanism everywhere that we are not as the South American republics. Indeed, I cannot for one moment admit that there is even in this House a majority who will sustain any proposition to elect a President by any other means than the constitutional forms. These latter may not go into all the details we could wish, but their purpose is sufficiently clear to answer the necessity. A departure from them at such a time is simply revolution, and I will not believe that this House will present itself to the country in an attitude so humiliating until partisan folly leaves us no alternative. Mr. PHILLIPS, of Kansas, said: Mr. Chairman: Ever since this session began there has been a disposition to effervesce the moment a question touching in the most remote degree the late Presidential election came up. We are admonished by the belligerent spirit manifested by many on this floor that the political mind is in an unhealthy condition. Crude ideas of the powers of this House over the subject are entertained; theories hastily jumped at are wildly expressed-theories generally utterly at variance with our history and fundamental law. One of the political parties in the country, long out of power, but which has succeeded in gaining possession of one branch of Congress, makes haste to arrogate to it all the powers of Government, legislative, executive, and judicial. Even men whose whole lives have been devoted to rigid constructions of the Constitution startle us by seeming to keep in countenance schemes which do not find a particle of color in that document, theories obnoxious to its framers and diometrically opposed to our earlier, better history. I do not hesitate to pronounce these mischievous and revolutionary sentiments. And so are all the plans for compromise, bargain, or adjustment, other than the plain and simple methods pointed out by the Constitution. Nor do I hold in much higher estimation the numerous propositions to remodel the Constitution or add to If there is any tendency toward political it an amendment to be hurriedly adopted disease of this sort among Representatives, as a temporary expedient or used to bridge how is it with the people? It is undoubta real or imaginary emergency. It is not edly true that a profound interest is maninecessary to assume that the Constitution fested on the subject in the press and is faultless. Our experience has demon- throughout the country. It is not fair or strated that there are several desirable true to assume that the thousand and one modifications and a necessity for clearer schemes and theories announced make any definition of details, whether these can be serious impression on the public mind. In adopted or not. Yet every man of sagacity fact, it may be safely believed that the stamust feel that to take such steps for ability of character and purpose which has special purpose, to meet a special case, above all to intervene between the verdict of the people, expressed under the forms of Constitution and law, and the mere declaration of the result according to the mode prescribed under the existing Constitution, is obnoxious on principle and dangerous as a precedent. As a mere practical question, every man knows that it cannot be been the great pride of our Government and our people, rests like a deep and mighty sea beneath the light and frothy foam that fickle winds drive across its surface. The doctrinaire and the enthusiast are always on the skirmish line, and, whether their proposition be wise or otherwise, it is not safe to judge society by them. When we hear that a few of the lawyers of one city meet and speak and resolve that the times to have at least some powers reserved to are "parlous," and that it is necessary for them, and I am amazed at any one on the them to put their spoke in the wheel of other side of the House for calling them in Government, or that a few dozen of men question. The world witnesses the extracalling themselves the business men of the ordinary spectacle of a party, fresh from a country, and who are probably better poli- great war and rebellion, into which they ticians than business men, meet and re-entered under an extreme view of State solve that "it is a crisis," and that they have a panacea for it, we are reminded of the convocation of nine tailors, who began their resolutions, "We, the people of England;" and they also remind every thinking man that their studies in political science have not taught them the dangers of revolutionary innovation. Nor can it be admitted that the public mind is so diseased that it could tolerate the mere victory of party, no matter how illustrious the party might be, at the sacrifice of the stability of the Government or the public tranquillity. I do not deny that I should look upon the election of Mr. Tilden and the triumph of a reactionary party as a great calamity, but not half so great as the election of a President by fraud or revolutionary proceedings. The facts of the case are plain and simple. While more than two candidates were in the field no third or fourth candidate received a single State or electoral vote. Hayes or Tilden received them all, and as the electoral vote cannot be evenly divided one of them was of course elected. If the electoral vote could have been, and had been, equally divided there would have been no election, and the election of President would have gone to the House. But one of them was elected under the forms of the Constitution. It might have been desirable that the majority should be larger, but it was not at all necessary. If a close result is to invite and justify revolutionary proceedings there is an end of Republican government. Does any one for an instant think that, if there had not been a Democratic majority in this House, there would have been an attempt or even a thought of trying to create confusion and throw the election into the House of Representatives? Is there one man of intelligence who reveres the Constitution who believes that the House has the slightest authority for pretending to select a President when it is an indisputable and positive fact that one man was certainly elected? We may dislike the machinery by which the result was determined in some States. We may have no faith in some of the State governments. We may even have a poor opinion of the people of some States. We did not make the latter, and it is doubtful if they would have been any better if we had. The State governments are supposed rights, clutching at the ghost of a coveted victory by sacrificing the last remnant of State rights, which no party has ever before dared to call in question. Do they object to reconstruction? Do they hold with Mr. O'Conor that when the Union army marched on Richmond the Constitution was forever broken, or do they hold that all that has happened since has been a chapter of war and violence and intrigue expedient to gain time and power? I think not. I believe patriotic gentlemen on the other side of this chamber who took the oath on this floor to support the Constitution meant honestly and honorably all they said. It behooves them to remember that, whatever faults reconstruction may have had or with whatever errors they may be inclined to charge it, but for reconstruction many of them would never have been here. Is it for them to break the pedestal on which they stand? Is it for them to benefit by just so much of it as may serve their party purposes? I believe they are wiser and shrewder men than to do that. There are many now in our party who believed that when a State failed to maintain a government loyal to the Union, and went to war against it, there was of necessity an end of its powers as a State in the Union, and as it was an integral portion of the territory of the United States that it should be treated as territory, and, when it could safely be done, that a territorial government of limited powers be given it until there was sufficient evidence that it could come in as a peaceful, loyal Union State. That plan was not adopted. There was in the minds of a number a horror of losing sight of the idea of an existing autonomy of all the States. To get rid of the war, which was a hard, incontrovertible fact, a fiction was resorted to, and on this plan of reconstruction, the most generous and liberal to those States, they were admitted to full fellowship and power. For the wisdom of that plan posterity will judge us. They will judge us when passion and sentiment and partisan bitterness have all passed away. We look to you gentlemen of the reconstructed States for a vindication of the magnanimous policy that gave you your power. It is for you to show to your country and the world that our course was not a rash experiment, and that your acceptance of the situation was honest and made with an honorable intention to carry out all it involved, and not a treacherous temporary expedient to gain power the better to defeat the necessities and purposes of reconstruction. There was a great question settled in the war, and a great plan for the future outlined in the generous scheme of reconstruction. It was not only that the "Union shall be preserved,” and that the heresy that a State has a right to secede was forever trodden out by the iron heel of war. It was not only that slavery forever perished in the war that had been precipitated for its benefit. There was something even better than these, and made up partially of both something, without which we could not have union or freedom, and without which there can be no peace, now or hereafter. The noblest, most useful, grandest gift of the Republican party to the country it governed was a united civilization, for between the old and new systems there is an irrepressible and eternal conflict. We had two warring systems in the colonies and the States. It was not only freedom and slavery, but the attempt to plant the fangs of aristocracy deep in our social and political systems was sedulously made. The genius of John Locke furnished the scheme of aristocracy for the southern colonies. There were to be barons for the baronies, palatines for the palatinates. The names perished, but the thing remained. Aristocratic Europe was aghast at the calamities that befel the barons, and the flight of the unhappy palatines. Aristocracy on this continent then allied itself with slavery, for aristocracy has always drawn its luxury and pomp from the toil of unrequited labor. There is a tenacity of grasp, I might almost say an immortality, in ideas. Look at the parallel case of religious dogma. Where Catholicism first touched the soil in East Canada, Maryland, the West India Islands, Mexico, and South America, it is there the dominant faith still. Where Episcopacy planted its foot, as in Virginia, it is still dominant. Where Presbyterianism or the various forms of Protestantism were planted they kept the first place, and where the Puritans with their hostility to the divine right of kings touched the coast of New England they took root and sent forth proselyting seeds to the ends of the earth. nas and the "best blood" of Georgia, and it is a wonder we did not hear of the "best blood" of Virginia. Is it possible that there is noble and ignoble blood in these regions? Do they have blood aristocratic, and blood plebeian, and as many upper and lower sections of society as there are strata in a geological map? What a country for a genealogist. We could form some conception of such a class in the days when there were tories. We can even carry them down to the days of the federalists; yea, even in the vicissitudes of an uncertain generation, we can imagine them in the period of the fossil whig; but when they come to label themselves democracy, we are dumbfounded. In the settlements of the war, and in the solemn compromises of reconstruction, in which immunity was granted and power restored, the following items constituted the letter and essence of the agreement: First, the perpetuity of the Union; second, the abolition of slavery; third, the perfect equality of the colored race before the law. That this should be faithfully carried out in every particular necessary to give it complete success were the terms on which those who had forfeited every right came back. How has the compact been observed? I need not tell you that there has been a constant effort to organize and build up a reactionary party in those States. The systems of education wisely devised by the Republican party for the elevation of a race long enslaved have in nearly all of these States become a mere mockery and shadow of what they were. Bitter prejudice drew to its aid secret military organizations to threaten and overawe a poor and ignorant race. Elections, too, became a mockery. Whenever the machinery for controlling them passed into the hands of those who had not been the authors of the amendments to the Constitution, and who had merely accepted them as the price of restoration, States were carried by a process unknown to better regulated and more peaceable communities. In many cases these "elections" should not be called elections. They were mere armed revolutions. They indicate a spirit the existence of which is a constant menace to the rights of the people, the public safety, and the perpetuity of the Union. It naturally occurs to every thoughtful American how far can we leave to States And so it is with the aristocratic forms of society, where aristocracy was first estab-in such a semi-revolutionary condition the lished in this country even its vices seem enduring. It has undergone many vicissitudes, suffered many calamities, but still tries to struggle above them all. Even in the last session of the present Congress we heard of the “best blood" of the Caroli settlement of the gravest question on which the peace and existence of the Government depend. The larger number of States are in a happier condition. In these elections mean something. In a few instances, especially in one great city, the people have lost all confidence in the purity of the ballot-box; but these are rare and exceptional. In the great mass elections are rigidly canvassed, and the ballot is not an unfaithful exponent of the public will. Ballot-box stuffing and false returns would not be tolerated; while secret armed organizations to control and intimidate are unknown, and if attempted would bring on the offenders condign punishment. In these States elections are what they should be and must be to retain popular confidence. What shall we say of many of the reconstructed States? They have scarcely thrown aside all the garments of war. The ideas of the reconstructed Republic are little understood and less liked. No new political issues have impressed them sufficiently to destroy all the heresies in regard to the right of States to secede or blot out the prejudices in which they were reared. In most of those States there are two evils of great magnitude which have tended to confusion, and which are incident to the peculiar circumstances of society in the Southern States. On the one hand are nearly four million of people fresh from a bondage compared with which the bondage of Israel in Egypt was tender mercy. They are guaranteed freedom, civil right, and political power equal with the proudest in these States. The Republican party in the moment of victory might have confiscated the large landed estates of those who had aided the rebellion and divided them into small tracts for the liberated bondsmen, first as an act of stern justice, second, as an act of policy, on the theory that the freedman to maintain his rights must be the owner of the soil on which he places his feet. A more generous policy was pursued to you, gentlemen on the other side of the chamber. The wealth of your position had bestowed on you all the learning and ability of a privileged aristocratic class. Its refinements and luxuries gave you the influence and address which are the potent weapons of accomplished gentlemen. You had the pride of family, prized even by colored people in their esteem for late masters. These poor people were your tenants at will. Of the houses that sheltered them you could deprive them. The soil they tilled was yours. Their labor was worthless without your patronage. These were your eminent advantages and their unhappy misfortune. The other chronic evil of the South is an idle white class; sometimes the poorer relatives of the great, always their attachés or hangers-on. In old slaveholding days they were ever ready to follow a panting fugitive slave with bloodhounds, or back up the men they admired in all difficulties, | warlike or political. When they worked it was in the supervising tasks incident to slavery. The overthrow of slavery left them without an occupation. Hard honest labor they were disinclined to perform. They clung to the skirts of the more intelligent, patriotic gentlemen of the Southern States. They were like the evil spirits invoked by the wizard, Michael Scott, whom he had to keep in work or they would drag him to the infernal regions. Gentlemen of the reconstructed States, I do not underestimate your great difficulties. You were permitted to retain all your privileges on an implied pledge of the most sacred character. It was that you should, in accepting the situation, honestly maintain freedom, civil rights, and a perfect equality of political power with that colored race, and join hands with us to build the new civilization from the lakes to the Gulf. How have you kept these pledges? Have you seen to it that every facility to educate and raise them was afforded? Have you seen that there was no oppressive injustice or dictation from yourselves as landlords? Have you seen that no secret political or military organizations were formed hostile to their interests? Have you seen to it that the ballot-box was never outraged? Have you seen to it that no armed band threatened poor and helpless voters? 66 If you have done all this you have done a noble work under great embarrassments. If you have not done, if your acceptance has been evasion, and your kind regard for these colored people the mercy of the "vulture to the leveret, the tiger to the fawn," for all these things you will be called into judgment. Your country will judge you. The world will judge you. "He who sitteth in the heavens" will judge you; and in the moment of temporary victory pause and recall the language of the most eminent statesman of Virginia, "I tremble for my country when I remember that God is just." How many men in the country at large believe in the fairness and purity of the elections in Mississippi and Alabama, or rather how few have the slightest confidence in them. Louisiana, Florida, and both the Carolinas may be considered in an unsettled condition. Georgia under a fair, impartial system would probably be Democratic; but I doubt if an unprejudiced man, at all competent to pass upon the question, or familiar with the character of the population or the statistics of the elections for the past ten years in all the others mentioned, believes that one of them, of its own free will, would have time and that place are elements in the legality of such electoral vote. Both Houses are to be present when the President of the Senate, who is the custodian of the votes, shall open the votes and count them, as witnesses, and no other powers are given them over the electoral vote or over the question, unless there is a tie or no one has a majority. of the returns. gone other than Republican. I would quote from the report of the committee of last year, of which the Senator from Massachusetts [Mr. Boutwell] was chairman; but I do not wish at this time to aggravate the sensibilities of my hearers or excite fresh feeling by repeating its horrors. It is enough to quote from the report that the Democracy of Mississippi "at last have gained supremacy in the State by acts of The language of the Constitution is thereviolence, fraud, and murder, fraught with fore plain. As the Constitution originally more than all the horrors of open war, stood the electors made a list of the votes without its honor, dignity, generosity, or and sent it with a certificate to the Presijustice." The measures suggested as reme-dent of the Senate, who was the custodian dies are given, one of which is to deny a State in anarchy or controlled by bodies of armed men representation in Congress. Another is to remand States where such disorders exist to a territorial condition. Of the election in that State last November I will give but one specimen. friend from the sixth district of Mississippi was elected to this Congress by 18,000 majority, as I have been informed. Last November he was defeated or, as he says, "counted out" by 5,000 majority. Is there not something astounding in such a change? Can it be accounted for on any reasonable hypothesis? Has not the thing been so much overdone as to startle us as to the Our meaning of what they called an election there? Is it not a revolution, varying only in its mode of operation from the revolution that sought to overthrow the Union? It has been stated on this floor on the evidence of General Sheridan that there were three thousand political murders in Louisiana, and that nearly that number of colored voters were slain. Are we then to consider the region we tried to reconstruct in a state of anarchy? Shall we throw out the votes and reject the representation from Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, South Carolina, and shall we examine the vote of North Carolina? And this brings us directly to the main question, what are the powers of Congress on the subject? Has either House or both the right to say that any portion of the vote of a State shall be accepted or rejected? Has Congress the right to act as a returning board to purge the vote of any or all States? Was this power conferred on it by the Constitution? Would it have been wise to so confer it? In article 2 of the Constitution it is simply provided that "each State may appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct," such electors as it is entitled to. In the same article Congress is given the power to determine the time when the electors shall be chosen and the day on which they shall cast their votes, and these for an obvious reason, and that The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted. meet in their respective States and ballot As it now stands in article 12, the electors make distinct lists of persons voted for by for President and Vice President. They the State vote. They certify these distinct the electors, but are not required to show lists and signing them send them to the President of the Senate, who is the custodian; and in the same manner as it originally stood the President of the Senate, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, opens all the certificates President of the Senate open and does some one else count? Certainly not. There may be tellers, but they have certainly no judicial functions, whether he has or not. If there is any doubt on that point the early practice ought to determine it. and the votes are then counted. Does the In September, 1787, the Constitution was submitted to the Legislatures of the sevthe following resolution was adopted by eral States for adoption, and among others the convention : Resolved, That it is the opinion of this convention that, as soon as the conventions of nine States shall have ratified this Constitution, the United States in Congress assembled should fix a day on which shall have ratified the same, and a day on which electors should be appointed by the States which the electors should assemble to vote for the President, and the time and place for commencing such publication the electors should be appointed proceeding under the Constitution. That after and the Senators and Representatives elected; that the electors should meet on the day fixed for the election of the President, and should transmit their votes-certified, sealed, and directed as the Constitution requires-to the Secretary of the United States in Congress assembled; that the the time and place assigned; that the Senators Senators and Representatives should convene at should appoint a President of the Senate for the sole purpose of receiving, opening, and counting chosen the Congress, together with the President, the votes for President; and that after he shall be should without delay proceed to execute this Constitution. The above is no carelessly worded resolution, but attests the precision and skill of Franklin, Hamilton, and Madison, |