There was a general belief on the part of the
Republicans, that the House of Representatives, as constituted
for fourteen years of that time, and that the Presidency itself
when occupied by Mr. Cleveland, represented nothing but usurpation,
by which, in large districts of the country, the will of the
people had been defeated. There were some faint denials at
the time when these claims were made in either House of Congress
as to elections in the Southern States. But nobody seems
to deny now, that the charges were true. Mr. Senator Tillman
of South Carolina stated in my hearing in the Senate:
"We took the Government away. We stuffed ballot boxes. We
shot them. We are not ashamed of it. The Senator from Wisconsin
would have done the same thing. I see it in his eye right
now. He would have done it. With that system--force, tissue
ballots, etc.--we got tired ourselves. So we called a Constitutional
Convention, and we eliminated, as I said, all of the colored
people whom we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments.
"I want to call your attention to the remarkable change that
has come over the spirit of the dream of the Republicans;
to remind you, gentlemen of the North, that your slogans of
the past--brotherhood of man and fatherhood of God--have gone
glimmering down the ages.
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