Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 18, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 June 1880 — A FREE BALLOT. [ARTICLE]

A FREE BALLOT.

Senator Voorhees on Federal Supervision of Elections. The bill to define the tenure of Chief Supervisors of Election being under consideration in the United States Senate, Mr. Voorhees, of Indiana, spoke as follows: I do not believe in Supervisors or Chief Supervisors of Elections. With all the strength of my convictions, heart and mind, I am against them all; for when it comes to me, either as a revelation or an affirmation, that the American people cannot govern themselves, either in township or county or in State, I will feel from my education that this Government is lost as a republic. I see nothing but evil in this Federal machinery, so called, to supervise the ingoing and the outcomingof the American ballot. Whatever other Senators may think upon this subject, I have no disguises about my opinion. If Senators on that side of the Chamber when they talk of a “nation” mean that a nation has the power to subvert the fundamental principles of popular sovereignty, of self-control, I do not believe in that sort of a nation. I believe in no loose confederacy from which an erratic star may shoot at its own pleasure. I believe' in no power of a State to break this Union. I said so during the war in my place in the House, and I believe just as little in the power of the Federal Government to usurp and supplant the power of the State in local self-government and home rule. There has been enormous abuse on this question. No wonder that the Senator from New York rises in his place to defend it; no wonder ho attempts to defeat this bill. It supplants, and if it did not supplant, the Chief Supervisor in New York I should not be for it. Tho amendment offered by the Senator from Ohio gives vital power, force, efficiency, and acceptability to this bill, and that is that no man who has heretofore held the office of Chief Supervisor, and, holding it, illustrated his tyranny, usurpation, oppression, and power of outrage, shall ever hold it again. But for that I would not vote for it. I have no hesitation in saying that I will vote for no bill that gives to tho President of the United States the power to keep Johnny Davenport and assimilated hirelings in politics the right to stay in office. I have heard this afternoon" a constant complaint of the danger of illegal voting. I ask tlie Senate to allow me to read a statement made by a member from the State of New York in the other branch of Congress. Speaking of the scenes and the practices that occurred at New York elections, he says:

A neighbor of mine, who had resided in the same district for seventeen years and a soldier in the Union army at that, was arrested. I was asked to go to the Republican headquarters in an adjoining district, whither he had been taken. The street for an entire block was lined with , carriages, in which the unfortunate citizens who had fallen into the hands of the Philistines had been or were to be conveyed. When I entered the building I found tho front room decorated with all the paraphernalia of a political headquarters, and filled with Republican politicians. In the back room a United States Commissioner was holding court. The door was closed, watched by a Cerberus. No one was allowed inside but the pris oners and the Republican managers. After about half an hour’s waiting, I was informed by the doorkeeper that the man I was looking for was no longer there. I asked whither he had been taken. “ Suppose to Fort Davenport,” was the laconic reply. Is that agreeable to Senators ou that side of the Chamber ? Is it agreeable to read that a Chief Supervisor has some place designated by his own name as a place of imprisonment for American citizens. “‘Fort Davenport,’ was the laconic reply.” Let me read now what “ Fort Davenport ” looked like when this man reached there : Such a scene as the rooms of this Court presented on that election day has never before been witnessed in this city or in this country, and it is to be hoped never will again. From early morning until after the polls were closed these rooms were packed and jammed with a mass of prisoners and Marshals. Not only were they crowded beyond their capacity, but the halls and corridors were thronged with those who were unable to obtain admission, so that the counsel representing the prisoners and the bondsmen who were offered to secure their release had the greatest difficulty, and were frequently unsuccessful in obtaining entrance. In addition to all this was that delectable iron “pen” on the upper floor, in which men were crowded until it resembled the Black Hole of Calcutta, and where they were kept for hours hungry, thirsty, suffering in every way, until their cases could be reached.

What a choice morsel of American history is here for those who stand on this floor and cry out for a nation to put people in an iron pen and keep them there. With scarcely au exception these men had gone to the polls expecting to be absent but a short time. Many of them were thinly clad; numbers had sick wives or relatives; some were sick themselves. There were carmen who had left their horses standing in the public streets; men whose situations depended on their speedy return; men who wished to leave the city on certain trains. Every imaginable vexation, inconvenience, injury and wrong which the mind can conceive existed in their cases, so that it was painful for the counsel who were endeavoring to secure their release to approach sufficiently near the railing to hear their piteous appeals and witness the distress which they had no power to alleviate. And over all this pushing, struggling, complaining crowd Mr. Commissioner John I. Davenport sat supreme, with a sort of Oriental magnificence, calmly indifferent to everything but the single fact that no man who was arrested was allowed to vote. No Turk invested with a Caliph’s power in some province under the sway of the Sultan ever outraged individual security, personal decency, personal liberty beyond what is there described; and I say to the Senators on the other side, on this question, as on all others, we will meet you and continue to meet you, discuss it with you, and we will triumph, unless American liberty shall die. As long as liberty lives, as long as the inherent, everlasting, glorious rights for which our fathers counseled, led the" armies, and fell on the field, live, so long we will be right and you will be wrong, and nobody knows it better than the Senators on that side themselves. No one knows the inherent force and pow’er of this issue more than they do. They spring up here and make false issues upon us, or seek to do so, dreading and knowing perfectly well that upon the great question of the right and power of the people, unsupervised, uninspected, unspied, to cast their votes, this side of the Chamber is entirely right. Mr. President, the Senator from Colorado has assumed to say—and I speak to him and of him with entire personal kindness ; it is not in my heart to speak otherwise of men unless I am compelled to do so—that we are afraid to meet issues like this. I will tell you who is afraid. The Senators on that side of the Chamber are afraid to trust the people ; they are afraid to trust the sovereign capacity of the people ; they are afraid to trust the intelligence of the people ; they are afraid to trust the virtue of the people ; they dare not do it, because without hindrance, without control, the people will condemn those who desire to put spies upon them and enact in the laws of this country a system of espionage. The Senators on that side are those who are afraid, and they are much more afraid than it would be possible for this side of the Chamber to be of that side. They are afraid of that great, majestic power of public opinion ; they are afraid of the great, untrammeled power of the people, and they cant—cant is the word—upon the subject of a nation. What is the meamng of it ? What do you mean by it ? Do you mean that a nation sfiall come in with imperial power to strike down the unrestrained and untrammeled voting capacity of the people ? Do you mean by that that it is necessary for Supervisors and Chief Supervisors and Deputy Marshals, clothed with insolent power as they are with their locust clubs, to go into my State and up and down the regions there to master and overmaster the people’s judgment and their will ? Who is it that is afraid here ? I will tell you who is afraid. The Senator from Vermont is afraid to trust the people ; the Senator from Vermont is afraid to take away his overseers ; he is afraid to take away his spies ; he is afraid to take away this system of espionage; he is afraid to take away this system of brute force. He desires John I. Davenport and his iron pen. He is afraid to trust the doctrines of the Revolution, which said that this Government was founded upon the virtue and the intelligence of the people.