PART V.

SOUTHERN WAR CLAIMS.

The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution provides:

"SECTION 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations and claims shall be held illegal and void."

How have the Democratic House of Representatives respected and construed this provision of the Constitution? A few brief illustrations will serve to show. In a speech in the House on the 1st of May, 1878, by the Hon. Philip C. Hayes, of Illinois, he gives an enumeration of the bills introduced for the payment of Southern War Claims in the Forty-fifth Congress up to March 18, 1878, with name of claimant, cause of claim and amount in each case, ranging from ten thousand up to and over two hundred thousand dollars. They are more than four hundred in number, and cannot be enumerated in the space I have. The grand total is two hundred and five million dollars. The estimate from the book of Judge Barclay, the Southern gentleman who took upon himself the task of hunting up and formulating all Southern Claims is three hundred million dollars in private claims; and, recollect, this leaves in reserve the contemplated payment for slaves.

In this speech Mr. Hayes quotes thus from the Mobile (Alabama) Register—

"Was the letter written by Mr. Tilden a short time before the election, saying he would veto any bill proposed to pay Southern War Claims.

The writing of this letter was Mr. Tilden's great crime, for which the Southern people will never forgive him. His sad fate will doubtless be a warning to all future aspirants for the Presidency, who expect to be elected to that office by the aid of Southern Democratic votes. The fact is, no Democrat can be elected President without the votes of the solid South,' and while the solid South' may not ask a pledge in favor of paying Southern claims, it will hereafter support no one who is pledged against such payment. And, Mr. Speaker, what I have said in regard to aspirants for the Presidency can be said with equal truth in regard to the aspirant for any office at the South. No man can be elected to any office in that section who dares to proclaim himself opposed to paying these Southern claims.

Men who expect to succeed politically must be in harmony with their people in this respect,"

and continues his quotation from Judge Bartley's pamphlet, as follows:

"This fact is clearly understood by gentlemen from the South in this House, and it is because they understand it so clearly that they are so earnest and persistent in their efforts to secure the payment of these claims. In pushing these claims these gentlemen are only carrrying out the wishes, I may say the demands, of their constituents, who are not only determined that these claims shall be paid, but who urge their payment on the ground of justice to themselves. They hold to the idea that the Government is under obligation to pay them. They go so far as to declare that the claims for captured and abandoned property and for private property taken by the Union Army in the way of supplies, constitute a part of the war debt of the nation. Indeed, Judge Bartley, whose little pamphlet was distributed so freely among members of this body a few days ago, argues that the property taken for the subsistence of the Union Army saved the Government from raising money on the sale of its bonds in the sums represented by the value of the property seized and used, and that the claims for the payment for this property are as just and as valid a lien upon the Treasury as the bonded debt itself. In fact he thinks they should take precedence of the bonded debt in equity, because that debt draws interest while the claims do not. The Judge presents his case in the strongest light possible and closes his pamphlet of twenty pages with the following significant paragraph:

The foregoing views are expressed on mature consideration from a sense of duty to several hundred citizens of Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas, represented by the undersigned as their counsel. The positions assumed can and will be maintained and cannot be successfully controverted in or out of Congress. If the plain language used is expressive of some feeling, it arises simply from a deep sense of the wrong and injustice done to injured parties, and is not intended to be discourteous, but in all due deference and respectful regard for the public authorities.

Now, sir, it would be well to note this language carefully. Judge Bartley says he is working 'from a sense of duty to several hundred citizens' of the South who are pushing their claims with all the vigor and determination possible. He and his clients have taken a position that 'can and will be maintained and cannot be successfully controverted in or out of Congress.' He apologizes for the strong language used by saying that 'it arises simply from a deep sense of wrong and injustice done to injured parties.' He advocates the idea that the Government is in duty bound to pay these claims and that it has greatly wronged these claimants in not paying them long ago. And, sir, this same idea is advocated by thousands of southern men to-day. Only a few days ago I received a pamphlet written by Dr. J. F. Foard, of North Carolina, in which the writer discusses this subject at some length, declaring that the Government should pay these claims as a matter of justice and right. After devoting several pages to setting forth the losses sustained by the southern people, he uses these words: 'The easiest and best way to heal them—the wounds made by the war-'is to compensate those who lost so much in the conflict,'

In a subsequent chapter he says:

Let us go at this work promptly, earnestly and honestly, that it may be as a monument of truth and justice, erected in the hearts of our children to remind them of the importance of national honor, peace and good will.

The last page of his book contains the following, which will be read with great interest, especially by the Union men of the North :

That co-operative action be had in this matter, a form of a memorial to Congress is appended to these pages. Let every one who feels an interest in the great work copy and obtain the signatures of his neighbors to it, and inclose it to one of our Senators or Representatives in Congress as early as practicable, and urge its adoption:

STATE OF

County of

Form of a memorial to Congress.

187

To the honorable Senators and Members of the House of Representatives

of the United States in Congress assembled:

We, the citizens of the United States, most respectfully petition your honorable bodies to enact a law by which all citizens of every section of the United States may be paid for all their property destroyed for them by the governments and armies of both sides during the late war between the States, in bonds bearing 3 per cent, interest per annum, maturing within the next hundred years.

And we also petition that all soldiers, or their legal representatives, of both armies and every section, be paid in bonds or public lands for their lost time, limbs, and lives, while engaged in the late unfortunate civil conflict. And we will ever

pray, &c.

The speech will be found entire in the Congressional Record of May 3, 1878, and will well repay perusal.

PART VI.

THE SOLID SOUTH.-HOW IT WAS MADE SOLID FOR THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY, AND ITS REAL ATTITUDE NOW TOWARDS THE FEDERAL UNION."

By the first article of the Constitution the basis of representation in the popular branch of Congress (House of Representatives) was thus fixed:

Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons. The actual enumeration shall be made within three years after the first meeting of the Congress of the United States and within every subsequent term of ten years, in such manner as they shall by law direct. The number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand, but each State shall have at least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to choose three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five, and Georgia three.

When vacancies happen in the representation from any State, the Executive authority thereof shall issue writs of election to fill such vacancies.

The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other officers; and shall have the sole power of impeachment."

The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery, the Fourteenth declared who were citizens of the United States, and the Fifteenth Amendment enfranchised the then recently emancipated slaves of the sixteen slave States, and declared the fundamental law on the right of suffrage and its exercise.

Here are the amendments referred to:

"ARTICLE XIII.

SEC. 1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

SEC. 2. Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

ARTICLE XIV.

SEC. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State in which they reside.

ARTICLE XV.

SEC. 1. The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.

`SEC. 2. The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation."

The estimated number of slaves in the South was four millions. Under the Constitution, as it stood before the amendments, threefifths, or two million four hundred thousand of these were counted in, making up the basis of Congressional representation, and one million six hundred thousand were excluded. Under the amendments quoted this one million six hundred thousand were added to the basis of representation. The South by this change gained thirty-eight members of Congress, and a like number of electoral votes in the College of Presidential Electors.

The colored people were, and are to-day, Republicans, and when they were allowed to vote, voted that ticket, as it was most natural that they should. The men who had kept them in bondageslavery of body, soul and mind; slavery, that same fragrant plant that flourished around the hearth of Abraham and made Sarah a lady; slavery, that, except in finding a "deeper deep" of meanness and cruelty, never changed its character until the day when the second and better Abraham (Lincoln) struck it a blow that killed it forever these men that fought four years to establish a new government, a new nation, with slavery for its corner-stone, the colored people of the South knew to be their enemies; and they know as well that these same men were Democrats, and formed not a wing, but the great centre of the Democratic Party. These same emancipated American citizens know that the men of the North who had reddened the green grass of the South with their best blood, and spent millions, thousands of millions of dollars to maintain the Union and abolish slavery, were their friends, and that these formed the Republican party, centre and both wings. Where, then, could the blacks cast their votes except with the Republican party?

As a consequence of this change, the States of Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Florida and South Carolina became positive and assured Republican States. They were Republican in 1868, in 1870, in 1872 and partially so in 1874; and in 1876 the States of Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida were as certainly and as honestly Republican as they were in 1868 and 1872; but the Democratic programme of stamping out Republicanism in the South, and especially what the Southern Rebels boasted then, and boast now of, their success in the project of preventing the negro from ever more voting, and in time reducing him to what these inhuman wretches called his normal condition, so that he should be a slave de facto, though he was not, and could not be de jure, had not then been consummated. That consummation remained