Something of Men I Have Known | Page 8

final determination of the Commission, bitter opposition was manifested upon the part of friends of Mr. Tilden, and a heated partisan debate resulted, and during this debate I spoke as follows:
"When this Congress assembled in December, it witnessed the American people from one end of the country to the other divided upon the question as to which candidate had been lawfully elected to the high office of President of the United States. The business industries of the country were paralyzed, public confidence destroyed, and the danger of civil war was imminent. That Mr. Tilden had received a majority of more than two hundred thousand of the popular vote was not disputed. That he had secured a majority of the Presidential electors in the several States, and was lawfully entitled to be inducted into the great office, was the firm belief of fully one-half of the people of this country. The hour was one of great peril to our institutions, and many were apprehensive that we were but entering into the dark night of anarchy and confusion. After many weeks of angry discussion, which resulted in still further arousing the passions of the people, a measure of adjustment was proposed. It was believed that there was still patriotism enough left in the American Congress to secure an honorable and fair settlement of this most dangerous question. We all recall how our hopes revived, and how gladly we hailed the introduction of the bill recommended by a joint committee of conference of the Senate and House of Representatives. It was welcomed as the harbinger of peace by the entire people of our country.
"I gave that bill my earnest support. It had in the House no friend more ardent in its advocacy than myself. I believed it to be a measure in the interest of peace. I believed that those who framed it, as well as those who gave it their support upon the floor, were honest in their statements, that no man could afford to take the Presidency with a clouded title, and that the object of the bill was to ascertain which of the candidates was lawfully entitled to the electoral votes of Florida and Louisiana. I never mistrusted for a moment that statesmen of high repute could in so perilous an hour, upon so grave a question, palter with words in a double sense.
"We who are the actors in this drama know, and history will record the fact, that the Conference Bill became a law, and the Electoral Commission was organized, not for the purpose of ascertaining which candidate had prima facie a majority of the electoral votes; not for the purpose of ascertaining that the Governor of Florida, and the de facto Governor of Louisiana, had given certificates to the Hayes electors. It was never dreamed that a tribunal, consisting in part of five judges of the highest court on earth, was to be constituted, whose sole duty was to report a fact known to every man in the land, that the returning-board of Louisiana had given the votes of that State to the Hayes electors. The avowed object of that bill was to ascertain which candidate had received a majority of the legal votes of those States. The avowed object of the bill was the secure the ends of justice; to see that the will of the people was executed; that the Republic suffered no harm; to see that the title to this great office was not tainted with fraud. How well the members of this tribunal have discharged the sacred trust committed to them, let them answer to history.
"The record will stand that this tribunal shut its eyes to the light of truth; refused to hear the undisputed proof that a majority of seven thousand legal votes in the State of Louisiana for Tilden was by a fraudulent returning-board changed to eight thousand majority for Hayes. The Republican Representative from Florida, Mr. Purman, has solemnly declared upon this floor that Florida had given its vote to Tilden. I am not surprised that two distinguished Republican Representatives from Massachusetts, Mr. Seelye and Mr. Pierce, have in such thrilling tones expressed their dissent from the judgment of this tribunal. By this decision fraud has become one of the legalized modes of securing the vote of a State. Can it be possible that the American people are prepared to accept the doctrine that fraud, which vitiates all contracts and agreements, which taints the judgments and decrees of courts, which will even annul the solemn covenant of marriage--fraud, which poisons wherever it enters --can be inquired into in all the relations of human life save only where a returning-board is its instrument, and the dearest rights of a sovereign people are at stake?
"But we are told that we created this tribunal