Speech #470006247

I always said if the returns were shown to me that would prove that he carried the State. by no word or by no act of mine would I endeavor to falsify those returns. Mr. President. the spirit in which the words quoted there by the Senator from Massachusetts. saying that the way to make the ballot pure was to insist upon the white men trying to have a fair count. were used means this. and nothing more: There are men in South Carolina who are struggling for that great object. there are men there who know we are confronted with the gravest problem ever given to a people for solution. and there are men there who know we have submitted more than any freemen on the American continent. and I say to the Senator from Massachusetts if he would reverse the picture. if he could and the libertyloving people of Massachusetts could in one moment see all their government overturned. if he could see ignorance and vice and inexperience immediately placed in high power. if there could be an immigration of Chinese (even as intelligent people as they) who should come into that State and take possession of every office in that State. and if they would. without paying one dollar of tax themselves. tax the propertyowners there to practical confiscation. it would not be fortyeight hours before those Chinamen would be hung to the nearest lamppost in Massachusetts. I say that. and yet for years and years of agony we went through that. we were subjected to that. and subjected to it not by republicans. because there is a mistake that you gentlemen of the North make when you speak of the carpetbagger as a republican. He is not arepublican. he is a bird of prey. he is athief and nothing but a thief. as a general rule.