at the head of the Executive Department | speak a word unbefitting the dignity of the of the Government, elected as he was from office of a Senator of the United States. the North-elected by the whole people, But as there has been speculation here and but elected as a Northern man; elected on there on both sides as to what he would Republican principles, elected in opposi- do, it seems to me that the dead heroes of tion to the party that controls both branches the Union would rise from their graves if of Congress to-day-they naturally say, he should consent to be intimidated and "You shall not exercise your constitutional outraged in his proper constitutional powpower to veto a bill." ers by threats like these. Some gentleman may rise and say, "Do you call it revolution to put an amendment on an appropriation bill?" Of course not. There have been a great many amendments put on appropriation bills, some mischievous and some harmless; but I call it the audacity of revolution for any Senator or Representative, or any caucus of Senators or Representatives, to get together and say, "We will have this legislation or we will stop the great departments of the Government." That is revolutionary. I do not think it will amount to revolution; my opinion is it will not. I think that is a revolution that will not go around; I think that is a revolution which will not revolve; I think that is a revolution whose wheel will not turn; but it is a revolution if persisted in, and if not persisted in, it must be backed out from with ignominy. The democratic party in Congress have put themselves exactly in this position to-day, that if they go forward in the announced programme, they march to revolution. I think they will, in the end, go back in an ignominious retreat. That is my judg ment. The extent to which they control the legislation of the country is worth pointing out. In round numbers, the Southern people are about one-third of the population of the Union. I am not permitted to speak of the organization of the House of Representatives, but I can refer to that of the last House. In the last House of Representatives, of the forty-two standing committees the South had twenty-five. am not blaming the honorable Speaker for it. He was hedged in by partisan forces, and could not avoid it. In this Senate, out of thirty-four standing committees the South has twenty-two. I am not calling these things up just now in reproach; I am only showing what an admirable prophet the late vice-president of the Southern Confederacy was, and how entirely true all his words have been, and how he has lived to see them realized. very I do not profess to know, Mr. President, least of all Senators on this floor, certainly as little as any Senator on this floor, do I profess to know, what the President of the United States will do when these bills are presented to him, as I suppose in due course of time they will be. I certainly should never speak a solitary word of disrespect of the gentleman holding that exalted position, and I hope I should not All the war measures of Abraham Lincoln are to be wiped out, say leading democrats! The Bourbons of France busied themselves, I believe, after the restoration, in removing every trace of Napoleon's power and grandeur, even chiseling the "N" from public monuments raised to perpetuate his glory; but the dead man's hand from Saint Helena reached out and destroyed them in their pride and in their folly. And I tell the Senators on the other side of this Chamber,-I tell the democratic party North and South-South in the lead and North following, that, the slow, unmoving finger of scorn, from the tomb of the martyred President on the prairies of Illinois, will wither and destroy them. Though dead he speaketh. [Great applause in the galleries. The presiding officer, (Mr. ANTHONY in the chair.) The Sergeant-at-Arms will preserve order in the galleries and arrest persons manifesting approbation or disapprobation. Mr. BLAINE. When you present these bills with these threats to the living President, who bore the commission of Abraham Lincoln and served with honor in the Army of the Union, which Lincoln restored and preserved, I can think only of one appropriate response from his lips or his pen. He should say to you with all the scorn befitting his station: Is thy servant a dog that he should do this thing? States. I will read their names: Alabama, | dismissed twelve or fourteen million of Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, annual tax on tobacco. Mississippi, North Carolina, South Caro- This vast revenue is raised and to be lina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. These elev-raised for three uses. It is supplied in en States paid $13,627,192.89. Of this sum time of severe depression and distress, to more than six million and a half came from the tobacco of Virginia. Deducting the amount of the tobacco-tax in Virginia, the eleven States enumerated paid $7,125,462,60 of the revenues and supplies of the Republic. Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Will the Senater from New York allow me to ask him a question? Mr. CONKLING. If the Senator thinks that two of us are needed to make a statement of figures I will. Mr. HILL, of Georgia. Two no doubt can make it better. The PRESIDING OFFICER. Does the Senator from New York yield to the Senator from Georgia? Mr. CONKLING. After the expressed opinion of the Senator from Georgia that the statement needs his aid, I cannot decline. Mr. HILL, of Georgia. I will not interrupt the Senator if it is disagreeable to him, I assure him. I ask if in the computation he has made of the amount paid he does not ascribe to the States that adhered to the Union, to use his language, all pay debt inflicted by rebellion; to pay pensions to widows, orphans, and cripples made by rebellion; and to maintain the Government and enforce the laws preserved at inestimable cost of life and treasure. It can be devoted to its uses in only one mode. Once in the Treasury, it must remain there useless until appropriated by act of Congress. The Constitution so ordains. To collect it, and then defeat or prevent its object or use, would be recreant and abominable oppression. The Constitution leaves no discretion to Congress whether needful appropriations shall be made. Discretion to ascertain and determine amounts needful, is committed to Congress, but the appropriation of whatever is needful after the amount has been ascertained, is commanded positively and absolutely. When, for example, the Constitution declares that the President and the judges at stated periods shall receive compensation fixed by law, the duty to make the appropriations is plain and peremptory; to refuse to make them, is disobedience of the Constitution, and treasonable. So, when it is declared that Congress shall have power to provide The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator money to pay debts, and for the common from New York declines to yield further. defense and the general welfare, the plain Mr. CONKLING. I have stated certain meaning is that Congress shall do these figures as they appear in the published things, and a refusal to do them is revoluofficial accounts: the Senator seems about tionary, and subversive of the Constituto challenge the process or system by which tion. A refusal less flagrant would be imthe accounts are made up. I cannot give peachable in the case of every officer and way for this, and must beg him to allow department of the Government within the me to proceed with observations which I reach of impeachment. Were the Presifear to prolong lest they become too weari-dent to refuse to do any act enjoined on some to the Senate. Mr. CONKLING. Having heard the Senator so far, I must ask him to desist. The laws exacting these few millions from eleven States, and these hundreds of millions from twenty-seven States, originated, as the Constitution requires all bills for raising revenue to originate, in the House of Representatives. They are not recent laws. They have been approved and affirmed by succeeding Congresses. The last House of Representatives and its predecessor approved them, and both these Houses were ruled by a democratic Speaker, by democratic committees, and by democratic majority. Both Senate and House are democratic now, and we hear of no purpose to repeal or suspend existing revenue laws. They are to remain in full force. They will continue to operate and to take tribute of the people. If the sum they exact this year and next year, shall be less than last year, it will be only or chiefly because recent legislation favoring southern and tobacco-growing regions has him by the Constitution, he would be impeachable, and ought to be convicted and removed from office as a convict. Should the judges, one, or some, or all of them, refuse to perform any duty which the Constitution commits to the judicial branch, the refusal would be plainly impeachable. Congress is not amenable to impeachment. Congressional majorities are triable at the bar of public opinion, and in no other human forum. Could Congress be dissolved instantly here as in England, could Senators and Representatives be driven instantly from their seats by popular disapproval, were they amenable presently somewhere, there would be more of bravery, if not less of guilt, in a disregard of sworn obligation. Legislators are bound chiefly by their honor and their oaths; and the very impunity and exemption they en joy exalts and measures their obligations, and the crime and odium of violating them. Because of the fixed tenure by which the members of each House hold wishes to seem and is determined to seem their places and their trusts, irreparable arraigned, merely for insisting that proharm may come of their acts and omis- visions appropriating money to keep the sions, before they can be visited with even Government alive, and provisions not in political defeat, and before the wrong themselves improper relating to other matthey do can be undone. A congressional ters, may be united in the same bill. With majority is absolutely safe during its term, somewhat of monotonous and ostentatious and those who suffered such impunity to iteration we have been asked whether in exist in the frame of our Government, corporating general legislation in appro must have relied on the enormity and priation bills is revolution, or revolutionturpitude of the act to deter the represen- ary? No one in my hearing has ever so tatives of the people and the representa- contended. tives of States from betraying a trust so Each House is empowered by the Conexalted and so sacred as their offices imply. stitution to make rules governing the Mr. President, it does not escape my at- modes of its own procedure. The rules tention, as it must occur to those around permitting, I know of nothing except conme, that in ordinary times obvious apho- venience, common sense, and the danger risms, I might say truisms like these would of log-rolling combinations, which forbids be needless, if not out of place in the Sen- putting all the appropriations into one ate. They are pertinent now because bill, and in the same bill, all the revenue of an occasion without example in Ameri- laws, a provision admitting a State into can history. I know of no similar instance the Union, another paying a pension to a in British history. Could one be found, widow, another changing the name of a it would only mark the difference between steamboat. The votes and the executive an hereditary monarchy without a written approval which would make one of these constitution, and a free republic with a provisions a law, would make them all a written charter plainly defining from the law. The proceeding would be outlandbeginning the powers, the rights, and the ish, but it would not violate the Constituduties of every department of the Govern- tion. ment. The nearest approaches in English experience to the transactions which now menace this country, only gild with broad light the wisdom of those who established a system to exempt America forever from the struggles between kingcraft and liberty, between aristocratic pretensions and human rights, which in succeeding centuries had checkered and begrimed the annals of Great Britain. It was not to transplant, but to leave behind and shut out the usurpations and prerogatives of kings, The assault which has been made on the nobles, and gentry, and the rude and vio- executive branch of the Government and lent resorts which, with varying and only on the Constitution itself, would not be partial success, had been matched against less flagrant if separate bills had been rethem, that wise and far-seeing men of sorted to as the weapons of attack. Supmany nationalities came to these shores pose in a separate bill, the majority had, in and founded " a government of the people, advance of the appropriations, repealed for the people, and by the people." Such the national-bank act and the resumption boisterous conflicts as the Old World had act, and had declared that unless the Exewitnessed between subjects and rulers-cutive surrendered his convictions and between privilege and right, were the yielded up his approval of the repealing warnings which our fathers heeded, the act, no appropriations should be made; dangers which they shunned, the evils which they averted, the disasters which they made impossible so long as their posterity should cherish their inheritance. Until now no madness of party, no audacity or desperation of sinister, sectional, or partisan design, has ever ventured on such an attempt as has recently come to pass in the two Houses of Congress. The proceeding I mean to characterize, if misunderstood anywhere, is misunderstood here. One listening to addresses delivered to the Senate during this debate, as it is called, must think that the majority is arraigned, certainly that the majority A Senator might vote against such a huddle of incongruities, although separately he would approve each one of them. If, however, they passed both Houses in a bunch, and the Executive found no objection to any feature of the bill on its merits, and the only criticism should be that it would have been better legislative practice to divide it into separate enactments, it is not easy to see on what ground a veto could stand. would the separation of the bills have palliated or condoned the revolutionary purpose? In the absence of an avowal that appropriations were to be finally withheld, or that appropriations were to be made to hinge upon the approval or veto of something else, a resort to separate bills might have cloaked and secreted for a time the real meaning of the transaction. In that respect it would have been wise and artfui to resort to separate bills on this occasion: and I speak, I think, in the hearing of at least one democratic Senator who did not overlook in advance the suggession now made. But when it was declared, or in tended, that unless another species of legislation is agreed to, the money of the people, paid for that purpose, shall not be used to maintain their Government and to enforce the laws-when it is designed that the Government shall be thrown into confusion and shall stop unless private charity or public succor comes to its relief, the threat is revolutionary, and its execution is treasonable. In the case before us, the design to make appropriations hinge and depend upon the destruction of certain laws is plain on the face of the bills before us,-the bill now pending, and another one on our tables. The same design was plain on the face of the bills sent us at the last session. The very fact that the sections uncovering the ballotbox to violence and fraud, are not, and never have been separately presented, but are thrust into appropriation bills, discloses and proves a belief, if not a knowledge, that in a separate bill the Executive would not approve them. Moreover both Houses have rung with the assertion that the Executive would not approve in a separate measure the overthrow of existing safeguards of the ballot-box, and that should he refuse to give his approval to appropriations and an overthrow of those safeguards linked together, no appropriations should be made. The plot and the purpose then, is by duress to compel the Executive to give up his convictions, his duty, and his oath, as the price to be paid a political party for allowing the Government to live! Whether the bills be united or divided, is mere method and form. The substance in either form is the same, and the plot if persisted in will bury its aiders and abettors in opprobrium, and will leave a buoy on the sea of time warning political mariners to keep aloof from a treacherous channel in which a political party foundered and went down. The size of the Army and its pay, have both been exactly fixed by law-by law enacted by a democratic House, and approved by a second democratic House. It has been decided and voted that the coast defenses and the Indian and frontier service, require a certain number of soldiers; and the appropriations needed for provision and pay have been ascertained to a farthing. Nothing remains to be done, but to give formal sanction and warrant for the use of the money from time to time. This was all true at the last session. But a democratic House, or more justly speaking the democratic majority in the House refused to give its sanction, refused to allow the people's zaoney, to reach the use for which the people paid it unless certain long-standing laws were repealed. When the Senate voted against he repeal, we were bluntly told that unless that vote was reversed, unless the Senate and the Executive would accept the bills, repealing clauses and all, the session should die, no appropriations should be made, and the wheels of the Government should stop. The threat was executed; the session did die, and every branch of the Government was left without the power to execute its duties after the 30th of next June. We were further told that when the extra session, thus to be brought about, should convene, the democrats would rule both Houses, that the majority would again insist on its terms, and that then unless the Executive submitted to become an accomplice in the design to fling down the barriers that block the way to the ballot-box against fraud and force, appropriations would again be refused, and again the session should die leaving the Government paralyzed. The extra session has convened; the democrats have indeed the power in both Houses, and thus far the war and the caucus have come up to the manifesto. So far the exploit has been easy. The time of trial is to come; the issue has been made, and of its ignominious failure, there can be no doubt if the Executive shall plant itself on constitutional right and duty, and stand firm. The actors in this scheme have managed themselves and their party into a predicament, and unless the President lets them out they will and they must back out. [Laughter, and manifestations of applause in the galleries.] Should the Executive interpose the constitutional shield against the political enormities of the proposed bills, and then should the majority carry out the threat to desert their posts by adjournment without making the needed appropriations, I hope and trust they will be called back instantly and called back as often as need be until they relinquish a monstrous pretension and abandon a treasonable position. The Army bill now pending, is not, in its political features, the bill tendered us at the last session a few days ago; it is not the same bill then insisted on as the ultimatum of the majority. The bill as it comes to us now, condemns its predecessor as crude and objectionable. It was found to need alteration. It did need alteration badly, and those who lately insisted on it as it was, insist on it now as it then was not. A grave proviso has been added to save the right of the President to aid a State gasping in the throes of rebellion or invasion and calling for help. As the provision stood when thrust upon us first and last at the recent session, it would have punished as a felon the President of the United States, the General of the Army, and others, for attempting to obey the Constitution of the United States and two an cient acts of Congress, one of them signed by George Washington. Shorn of this absurdity, the bill as it now stands, should it become a law, will be the first enactment of its kind that ever found its way into the statutes of the United States. A century, with all its activities and party strifes, with all its passionate discords, with all its expedients for party advantage, with all its wisdom and its folly, with all its patriotism and its treason, has never till now produced a congressional majority which deemed such a statute fit to be enacted. and fraud, and blood, and that the nation shall not confront them with one armed man. State troops, whether under the name of rifle clubs or white leagues, or any other, armed with the muskets of the United States, may ccastitute the mob, may incite the mob, but the national arm is to be tied and palsied. I repeat such an act of Congress has never yet existed. If there ever was a time when such an act could safely and fitly stand upon the statute-book, that time is not now, and is not likely to arrive in the near future. Until rebellion raised its iron hand, all parties and all sections had been content to leave where the Constitution left it the power and duty of the President to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The Constitution has in this regard three plain commands: The President "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed." Let me state the meaning of the amendments proposed under guise of enlarging liberty on election day-that day of days when order, peace, and security for all, as well as liberty, should reign. The amendments declare in plain legal effect that, no matter what the exigency may be, no matter what violence or carnage may run riot and trample down right and life, no matter what mob brutality may become master, if the day be election day, any officer or person, civil, military, or naval, from the President down, who attempts to interfere, to prevent or quell violence by the aid of national soldiers, or armed men not soldiers, shall be punished, and may be fined "The actual service of the United $5,000 and imprisoned for five years. This States" some man may say means war is the law we are required to set up. Yes, merely, service in time of war. Let me read not only to leave murderous ruffianism un- again," Congress shall have power to protouched, but to invite it into action by as-vide for calling forth the militia." For surances of safety in advance. what? First of all, "to execute the laws of the Union." Again, "The President shall be Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several States, when called into the actual service of the United States." In the city of New York, all the thugs and shoulder-hitters and repeaters, all the Yes, Congress shall have power "to procarriers of slung-shot, dirks, and blud- vide for calling forth the militia to execute geons, all the fraternity of the bucket- the laws of the Union." Speaking to lawshops, the rat-pits, the hells and the yers, I venture to emphasize the word slums, all the graduates of the nurseries" execute." It is a term of art; it has a of modern so-called democracy, [laughter;] long-defined meaning. The act of 1795, all those who employ and incite them, from re-enacted since, emphasized these constiKing's Bridge to the Battery, are to be told tutional provisions. Another bill, already on our tables, strikes down even police officers armed, or unarmed, of the United States. * * The election law came in to correct in advance that on the day when the mil-* lion people around them choose their members of the National Legislature, no abuses which reached their climax in 1868 matter what God-daring or man-hurting in the city of New York. In that year in enormities they may commit, no matter the State of New York the republican what they do, nothing that they can do candidate for governor was elected; the will meet with the slightest resistance democratic candidate was counted in. from any national soldier or armed man Members of the Legislature were frauduclothed with national authority. lently seated. The election was a barbarous burlesque. Many thousand forged naturalization papers were issued; some of them were white and some were coffee-colIn South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Mis- ored. The same witnesses purported to sissippi, and in the other States where the attest hundreds and thousands of naturalcolored citizens are counted to swell the ization affidavits, and the stupendous representation in Congress, and then robbed fraud of the whole thing was and is an of their ballots and dismissed from the open secret. Some of these naturalization political sun-in all such States, every papers were sent to other States. So plenrifle club, and white league, and mur-ty were they, that some of them were sent derous band, and every tissue ballot-box to Germany, and Germans who had never stuffer, night-rider, and law-breaker, is to left their country claimed exemption from be told that they may turn national elec- the German draft for soldiers in the Frantions into a bloody farce, that they may co-Prussian war, because they were natu choke the whole proceeding with force ralized American citizens! [Laughter.] |