Rensselaer Republican, Volume 19, Number 3, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 September 1886 — THE SOUTHERN QUESTION [ARTICLE]

THE SOUTHERN QUESTION

Strong Words by Mr. Blaine, Uttered In His Speech at Etna, Me. I spoke a few days since of the determination of the Democrats in Congress to keep Dakota knocking at; the doors of the Union for admission, even after she has ten times the population that certain Southern States had when they were admitted. The wrongfulness of this step is made the more marked and more intolerable when it is remembered that a material proportion of the vote by whieh the Democrats aocom-

plished the exclusion of Dakota is obtained by the disfranchisement of 6,000,000 of the Southern population, thus enabling them to cast from thirty-five to.,forty vote* in Congress to which they have no moral title, nor legal title, nor constitutional title, and no title at all except that which is founded upon force and fraud. I know it is regarded by a large number as uselees, if not unwise, to continue the discussion of the Southern vote. But in no feature connected with that vote can the end be so deplorable and destructive as that the whole nation should acquiesce in the outrage. I have only the voice and influence of a private. citizen, but as long os I have that I will protest against a wrong which not merely blots out all the rights of the colored men, but absolutely seize* the vote* to which they ere entitled, and with thati wrongfully acquired electoral strength controls the legislative power of the United Slates. [Cheer* and cries of “good.”] If the matter involved only the exclusion of the colored man from the ballot, and thus from the highest right of citizenship, it would surety-'be bad enough, but he is marked with the possession of the ballot and hi* electoral strength is turned to the support of the party whose success is his lasting injury. A Southern gentleman with whom I have long held personal relations of kindness, said to me, with a candor which was as surprising as his lack of perception of the enormity which he was apparently indorsing, that in a recent election in Mississippi and also in South Carolina, the colored men, who are in a large majority in both States, were actually well organized for the election, and would have carried it but for the great activity and vigilance of the white men at the last moment. I said to him, “Did these colored men intend any violence or fraud?” “Oh! no,” says he, “but they would have outvoted us if they had the numbers, and it took great exertion on our part to outvote them.” He was apparently quite unconscious of the magnitude of the crime which was involved in the destruction of the electoral rights of an entire race, and yet this incident shows the extent to which this disregard of natural and legal rights has proceeded in the South. The refusal to allow the colored men to vote, and the cool appropriation of. their electoral strength by the white men, has become the common custom and the common law of the South, and will remain so until some great moral shock shall awaken those people to the enormity of the offense. -It will read very strangely in the future history of the United States, that a minority of the white citizens of the country could neutralize and destroy the franchise of 6,000,000 colored people, seize their representative and electoral strength, and control the administration of the National Government against a large majority of the undoubted legal voters. And yet that is what is going on in the South, and what has gone on in the South ever since 1877. Acquiescence in its practice does not change its character, but only involves others in the moral responsibility attending so grave an offense. It is an extraordinary fact that the wealthiest, the most educated States of the Union quietly acquiesce in the wrong of giving the white men of Mississippi and Carolina double the political power in the country that any equal number of Northern white men possess. Government, by the free suffrage of the people, proceeds upon the assumption that the voting shall be legal and fair. When it becomes corrupted, either under the domination of violence or tfirough the influence of bribery, the whole republican system is impregnated with a deadly poison, which, if long continued, will flip its life. [Applause.] And yet we find many gentlemen in the Northern States justly and keenly alive to the evil influence of bribery, even in the smallest and most indirect manner, setting out to check it by the most stringent legislation, and yet constantly turning a deaf ear when it is suggested to them that the corruption.of the ballot in certain Southern States is chronic and universal, working out results that utterly destroy the principle of a majority government. Let me state the case in an arithmetical way. If you deprive the colored people of the right of suffrage and exclude them from the basis of representation, the Republican party would have had a majority in Congress at any time within the last ten years, and a majority of the electoral strength of the country; or, if you secure to the colored men perfect freedom of suffrage and include them in the basis of representation, the Republican party would readily have controlled Congress for the same period. But Democratic success has been attained by including them in the basis of representation, and excluding them from the enjoyment of suffrage, thus appropriating the electoral strength of the colored men for the sole benefit of the Democratic par±y. When the old . Scotch covenanter was stripped of all power to change the current of events against which he decreed, he still had the power to give his testimony and to enter protest. For myself, I said two years ago, and I say now, regardless of its popularity or its unpopularity, looking only to the injustice which oppresses and the wrong which outrages, that I will steadily give my testimony and enter my protest against it as a rank and odious injustice to the colored and white citizens alike. I protest against it as utterly destructive to republican government.' I know that I am thus protesting against consolidated power in the North, whieh gets the advantage, and the profit, and the gain of this unjust aggregation of political power in the hands of Southern white men. When the Southern States can say: “We are solid; we have the entire white vote of our States, aud we have seized the colored vote; we offer you a partnership; we offer to any minority of the Northern States that will join us in the complete government of the country,” the temptation, I say, is very strong. It imposes upon the party that entertains a proposition for such an alliance, the duty of carrying but three or four States in the North, and, when three or four States in the North find that they can cement the alliance, the temptation becomes so strong that poor human nature is not equal to resistance. Thus, in addition to the power of the white man of the South, they get a portion of the North committed by all the instincts of self-interest, to perpetuate the odious destruction of free suffrage. Ido not assume that my voice will be in the correction of a wrong so monstrous, of an evil so gigantic, of an injustice so flagrant; but I can, at least, be one of that great cloud of witnesses certain Jo arise in time, and of that great host, which in the future will find a remedy for the wrong and redress for the grievance. To doubt that the right will, in the end, is to despair of human justice, and to distrust the eternal law of God.