* The Democratic Party of the North persistently opposed the Fourteenth Amendment. Ohio and New Jersey, which, while they were Republican States, had adopted it, subsequently became Democratic and rejected it. But the six States of Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Alabama, when reconstructed adopted it, and July 20, 1868, Secretary Seward, in a characteristic paper, certified that it was ratified by 29 States, if Ohio and New Jersey had no right to retract. July 21, 1868, Congress declared it ratified, the Senate without a count, the House by 126 yeas to 32 Democratic nays. June 30, 1868, Frank P. Blair, who became Democratic candidate for VicePresident, declared that "there is but one way to restore the government and the Constitution, and that is by the President-elect to declare these acts null and void, compel the army to undo its usurpations at the South, disperse the carpet-bag State governments, allow the white people to reorganize their own governments and elect senators and representatives. The House of Representatives will contain a majority of Democrats from the North, and they will admit the representatives elected by the white people of the South, and, with the co-operation of the President, it will not be difficult to compel the Senate to submit once more to the obligations of the Constitution." The Seymour and Blair Convention of 1868 declared as follows: "We regard the reconstruction acts, so called, of Congress, as such, as usurpations, unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void." And as late as February 6, 1879, Senator, now Mr. Justice, Lamar, and Senators Bayard and Garland voted "no" on the proposition that the constitutional amendments had been legally ratified and that Congress ought to protect all qualified citizens in the right to vote for representatives in Congress.

It was, therefore, found impossible to make the Fourteenth Amendment a part of the Constitution under the Johnson plan of reconstruction. This defiant rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment by the rebel States and the Democratic Party, aided by President Johnson, who had betrayed and abandoned the Republican Party, took place before March 23, 1867, the date of the first of the reconstruction measures of Congress looking toward negro suffrage. A fair estimate of the representation in the national House and in the electoral colleges, based upon three-fifths of the colored population, is 24; add 16 for the other two-fifths, and 40 is to-day the number of southern representatives and electors based upon that population; and under the Democratic plan of reconstruction the increase of 16 was to be given to the South as a reward for their causeless and bloody rebellion. These 40 votes were, in 1884, all cast for Cleveland for President; 19 of them would have chosen Blaine, and all of the colored men entitled to wield the power of these votes earnestly desired to effect Blaine's election. Of the 40 votes 10 would have made the present House of Representatives Republican, and would avert all danger of the passage of the Mills tariff bill, which is threatening so many American industries.

It was simply impossible that the victorious North should submit to such an immediate return to national political power of southern rebels. Language cannot add to the forcible expressions on this point in the reconstruction report, already quoted, from the pen of that strong and brilliant writer and speaker, William Pitt Fessenden. There were but two courses possible: one, to keep the southern States for an indefinite period under military domination; the other, to organize southern civil gov ernments upon some plan which would afford justice and protection to the colored people, and security against increased southern power and rebel rule in the nation. Continued military control was repugnant to both North and South, and found few advocates. Therefore, there inevitably came the reconstruction measures of Congress, based upon manhood suffrage. This, whether wise or unwise, the southern leaders brought upon themselves, by their contumacy and obstinacy in demanding to

control, with more than their old power, that country which by deadly war they had fought for four years to destroy.

It also seems clear, after this lapse of years, and with all our experiences, good and bad, of negro suffrage, that it was right and best in itself. The southern whites, during their brief period of reconstruction under President Johnson's plan, had shown that they accepted the abolition of slavery as a form merely, and that, by means of atrocious vagrant and labor laws, they intended again to reduce the colored race to a state not far removed from slavery.

Without suffrage for the negro northern public sentiment and honor would have demanded the constant interposition of the federal power in the southern States for the protection of the always loyal and now free colored citizens. The southern whites would have broken any promises which they might have made, and would have evaded or defied any national laws not enforced by federal officials. A perpetual irritation would have resulted from the measures of national protection extended to the disfranchised colored people. Any expedient for their protection which did not include the ballot in their own hands would have proved futile.

Senator Hampton, in 1879, said:

"When the negro was made a citizen it followed, as a logical consequence, under the theory of our institutions, that he must become a voter. My objection to his enfranchisement, therefore, is confined to the time when, and the mode in which, this privilege was conferred upon him."

In 1888 we find him laboring to prove that "negro supremacy would bring disgrace and ruin to any State of the Union, and would be a perpetual menace to our republican institutions." His point is difficult to understand. Since 1876, when he became governor of South Carolina, the votes of the negroes of that State have been effectually suppressed, and for twelve years there has been no danger of what he calls "negro supremacy." Has the time yet come when the privilege of suffrage can be conferred upon the colored men of South Carolina, and they be allowed to freely exercise it, without the danger of "negro supremacy"? Doubtless not, in Mr. Hampton's opinion; and such a time never will come, so long as those colored men

persist in the desire to vote with the Republican Party. When they decide to give up their efforts to vote as they please, and conclude to vote as Mr. Hampton wishes them to, the "time when, and the mode in which," will in his opinion have arrived, and their votes will cease to threaten "negro supremacy," "disgrace, and ruin " to the State, and to be "a perpetual menace to

our republican institutions."

In the adoption of manhood suffrage as the basis of reconstruction there was included no injurious proscription of the whites. All male citizens twenty-one years of age were allowed to vote and to hold office in the conventions to frame constitutions, except the limited class disqualified from holding office by the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. The constitutions so made left the right of suffrage in the hands of the great mass of southern whites. If they had freely and in good temper participated in the work of reconstruction, all the bad government of which so much complaint has been made would have been avoided. But the southerners who had perjured themselves to become rebels, and who were, therefore, under limited and temporary disfranchisement, were sullen and indignant. They were encouraged by the utterances of the northern Democrats, and were renewing with them their former political relations, with the view again to rule the nation by a solid South allied with a contingent of northern congressional and electoral votes. They kept the white men aloof from reconstruction. They stigmatized as a "carpet-bagger" every northern man who for any purpose made his home in the new free South and became a Republican. They even more bitterly denounced as a "scalawag" any southern white man who joined in organizing civil government. They preferred anarchy and chaos to impartial suffrage. They never for one moment rendered true allegiance to the new governments, and as soon as they dared they began to tear them down by violence and political murders.

This page of American history is more disgraceful, if possible, than were the crimes of slavery and rebellion. The bloody deeds planned and incited by cruel and brutal men, who yet claimed to be civilized and refined, and who even now consider themselves the only natural rulers of free America, can

never be hidden or obscured by interposing the faults and defects of those loyal governments under which a race of slaves, unaided, despised, and hated by their unrepentant and unsubdued late masters, were slowly groping their way from a condition allied to that of the brutes up to manhood, from bondage to liberty, and from ignorance to knowledge, performing as well and nobly as they could their new duties of freemen and citizens.

The State of Louisiana will always be dishonored by the political massacres of the Mechanics' Institute, of Bossier, Caddo, St. Landry, St. Bernard, Colfax Parish, Grant Parish, Coushatta, Catahoula, Tensas, and Ouachita; the State of South Carolina by those of Hamburgh and Ellenton; and the State of Mississippi by those of Clinton, Copiah, and Kemper; and the records of the Kuklux outrages, the cruelties, the assassinations, and the frauds which characterized the destruction by the southern Democrats, encouraged by northern Democrats, of the only lawful and the first free governments of the South are, without exception, the most shameful and infamous in the annals of civilized humanity. The words of Reverdy Johnson, a Democrat, while unsuccessfully defending before a jury some of the Kuklux ruffians, will bear repeating:

"I have listened with unmixed horror to some of the testimony which has been brought before you. The outrages proved are shocking to humanity; they admit of neither excuse nor justification; they violate every obligation which law and nature impose upon men; they show that the parties engaged were brutes, insensible to the obligations of humanity and religion.”

To the pre-eminent dishonor of Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, that city has furnished the latest illustration of southern political methods. In order to overthrow a city government simply because it was Republican, the federal officials there resident, J. Bowmar Harris, U. S. district attorney, Samuel Livingston, deputy U. S. marshal, and R. E. Wilson, deputy collector of internal revenue, headed a movement to prevent the colored citizens from voting. A secret, oath-bound, white league was organized to lynch negroes, and to attend armed at the voting precincts, the leading spirit in which band of assassins was one John H. Martin, editor of the "New Mississippian." The movement was successful on January 2, 1888; but mark the sequel! On the second day of May, 1888, at Jackson, Mar