Federal soldiers with fixed bayonets marching into the legislative hall of a State and invading the legislature assembled in the place and at the time fixed by law, dragging out of the body by force men universally recognized as claimants for membership, and having been seated; soldiers deciding contested-election cases and organizing a legislative body; the Lieutenant-General suggesting to the President to outlaw by proclamation a numerous class of people by the wholesale that he may try them by drum-head court-martial, and then the Secretary of War in forming the Lieutenant-General by telegraph that “all of us,” the whole Government, have full confidence in his judgment and wisdom. And after all this the whites of the South gradually driven to look upon the National Government as their implacable and unscrupulous enemy, and the people of the whole country full of alarm and anxiety about the safety of republican institutions and the rights of every man in the land.
Ah, Senators, you did not mean this, I trust; but there it is. Not a single one of these things has happened without exciting in your hearts an emotion of regret and anxiety, and the wish that nothing similar should come again; but you followed step by step, reluctantly, very reluctantly, perhaps, but you followed, and you know not where you may have to go unless now at last you make a stand. You did not mean this. You meant only to protect colored men in their rights and to this end to keep your friends in power. You did not mean to do it by the Russian method, but from small beginnings something has grown up, something that is of near kin to it. A few steps further and you may have the whole. Senators, if you do not mean to go on, then I say to you it is the highest time to turn back. It will not do to permit such things to be done as we now behold, without rebuke and resistance, for to permit them is to urge them on.
