as far as they had been reconstructed and admitted into the Union, by negro suffrage and disfranchisement of the whites, and, although quite a fragment of the party broke away from General Grant because of the Southern policy of the Republicans, he received 3,012,833 votes and Seymour received 2,703,249. Of the electoral votes, Grant received 214 and Seymour 80, to wit: New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Louisiana, Kentucky and Oregon. Virginia, Mississippi and Texas did not vote and the electors of Florida were chosen by the legislature.

CHAPTER XVII.

HISTORY UNDER PRESIDENT

GRANT, 1869-1877.

HE first act signed by General Grant after he became

THE

President was one declaring that all the notes and interest-bearing obligations of the United States, except when the law authorizing the issue had expressly provided for the payment of the same in lawful money or other currency than gold or silver, should be paid in coin or its equivalent. In both Houses of Congress the Democrats opposed this measure as greatly increasing the burdens upon the people and unjustly adding to the wealth of the bondholders. When General Grant became President all the Southern States had been reconstructed and admitted to representation in Congress except Virginia, Texas and Mississippi. In these States there had been a delay in adopting their new constitutions because they contained disfranchising clauses. Congress authorized the President to submit to a separate vote such portions. of their constitutions as he pleased, and added the requirement that they should ratify the Fifteenth Amendment as well as the Fourteenth. By January 30, 1871, all the States had been readmitted and reconstruction by Congress was complete.

The limits assigned to this article will not permit us to dwell upon the history of the South under reconstruction. Suffice it to say that for the next five or six years there was a saturnalia of profligacy and corruption combined with a perfect travesty of free government in those States of the South where negro suffrage controlled and where the "carpet-bagger" who, with very rare exceptions was a political adventurer without character and bent only on plunder, directed the legislation of the States, and where the army of the United States was used by the President to prop up this worthless and corrupt pretence to State government. Bonds were issued as long as there was a market to negotiate them in, and in one single State (South Carolina) the debt increased $25,000,000 between 1868 and 1872. The Southern policy of the administration gradually alienated a large and most respectable section of the party, and in 1872 an effort was made to defeat General Grant for re-election, and a section of the Republican party calling themselves Liberal Republicans met and nominated Horace Greeley, of New York, and B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, as candidates upon a platform arraigning the President and the Republican party in severe terms for their partisan control of the administration; for keeping alive the passions and resentments of the war to use to their own advantage, and for making the Civil Service the instrument of partisan tyranny, personal ambition and an object of selfish greed. They demanded a system of Federal taxation which shall not necessarily interfere with the rights of the people, and which shall provide the means necessary to conduct the ex