OF

ROSCOE CONKLING.

The Senate having under consideration the bill (H. R. No. 1) making appropriations for the support of the Army for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1880, and for other purposesMr. CONKLING said:

Mr. PRESIDENT: During the last fiscal year the amount of national taxes paid into the Treasury was $234,831,461.77. Of this sum one hundred and thirty million and a fraction was collected under tariff laws as duties on imported merchandise, and one hundred and four million and a fraction as tax on American productions. Of this total of $235,000,000 in round numbers, twenty-seven States which adhered to the Union during the recent war paid $221,204,268.88. The residue came from eleven States. I will read their names: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia. These eleven States paid $13,627,192.89. Of this sum 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 Senator 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 ÖFFICER. 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

Mr. CONKLING. Having heard the Senator so far, I must ask him to desist. The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New York declines to yield further.

Mr. CONKLING. I have stated certain figures as they appear in the published official accounts: the Senator seems about to challenge the process or system by which the accounts are made up. I cannot give way for this, and must beg him to allow me to proceed with observations which I fear to prolong lest they become too wearisome to the Senate.

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 a 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 dismissed twelve or fourteen million of annual tax on tobacco.

This vast revenue is raised and to be raised for three uses. It is supplied in time of severe depression and distress, to 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 money to pay debts, and for the common defense and the general welfare, the plain meaning is that Congress shall do these things, and a refusal to do them is revolutionary, and subversive of the Constitution. A refusal less flagrant would be impeachable in the case of every officer and department of the Government within the reach of impeachment. Were the President to refuse to do any act enjoined on 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 enjoy 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 their places and their trusts, irreparable harm may come of their acts and omissions, before they can be visited with even political defeat, and before the wrong they do can be undone. A congressional majority is absolutely safe during its term, and those who suffered such impunity to exist in the frame of our Government, must have relied on, the enormity and turpitude of the act to deter the representatives of the people and the representatives of States from betraying a trust so exalted and so sacred as their offices imply.

Mr. President, it does not escape my attention, as it must occur to those around me, that in ordinary times obvious aphorisms, I might say truisms like these would be needless, if not out of place in the Senate. They are pertinent now because of an occasion without example in American history. I know of no similar instance in British history. Could one be found, it would only mark the difference between an hereditary monarchy without a written constitution, and a free republic with a written charter plainly defining from the beginning the powers, the rights, and the duties of every department of the Government. 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 pretension 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, nobles, and gentry, and the rude and violent resorts which, with varying and only partial success, had been matched against them, that wise and far-seeing men of many nationalities came to these shores and founded “a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.” Such boisterous conflicts as the Old World had witnessed between subjects and rulers-between privilege and right, were the warnings which our fathers heeded, the 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 wishes to seem and is determined to seem arraigned, merely for insisting that provisions appropriating money to keep the Government alive, and provisions not in themselves improper relating to other matters, may be united in the same bill. With somewhat of monotonous and ostentatious iteration we have been asked whether incorporating general legislation in að propriation bills is revolution, or revolutionary? No one in my hearing has ever .0 contended.

Each House is empowered by the Constitution to make rules governing the modes of its own procedure. The rules permitting, I know of nothing except convenience, common sense, and the danger of log-rolling combinations, which foids putting all the appropriations into one bill, and in the same bill, all the renue

laws, a provision admitting a State into the Union, another paying a pension to a widow, and another changing the name of a steamboat. The votes and the executive approval which would make one of these provisions a law, would make them all a law. The proceeding would be outlandish, but it would .not violate the Constitution.

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.

The assault which has been made on the executive branch of the Government, and on the Constitution itself, would not be less flagrant if separate bills had been resorted to as the weapons of attack. Suppose in a separate bill, the majority had, in advance of appropriations, repealed the national-bank act and the resumption act, and had declared that unless the Executive surrendered his convictions and yielded up his approval of the repealing act, no appropriations should be made; 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 artful 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 suggestion now made. But when it is declared, or intended, 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 ballot-box 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 ballotbox, 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 tɔ 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 money to reach the use for which the people paid it, unless certain long-standing laws were repealed. When the Senate voted against the 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 constitutionnal 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 applausein the galleries.]

The PRESIDING OFFICER, (Mr. WALLACE in the chair.) Order.

Mr. CONKLING. 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 ancient 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.

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 $5,000 and imprisoned for five years. This is the law we are required to set up. Yes, not only to leave murderous ruffianism untouched, but to invite it into action by assurances of safety in advance.

In the city of New York, all the thugs and shoulder-hitters and repeaters, all the carriers of slung-shot, dirks, and bludgeons, all the fraternity of the bucketshops, the rat-pits, the hells and the slums, all the graduates of the nurseries of modern so-called democracy, [laughter;] all those who employ and incite them, from King's Bridge to the Battery, are to be told in advance that on the day when the million people around them choose their members of the National Legislature, no matter what God-daring or man-hurting enormities they may commit, no matter what they do, nothing that they can do will meet with the slightest resistance from any national soldier or armed man clothed with national authority.

Another bill, already on our tables, strikes down even police officers armed, or unarmed, of the United States.

In South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and in the other States where colored citizens are counted to swell the representation in Congress, and then robbed of their ballots and dismissed from the political sun-in all such States, every rifle club, and white league, and murderous band, and every tissue bal.ot box stuffer, night-rider, and law-breaker is to be told that they may turn national elections into a bloody farce, that they may choke the whole proceeding with force and fraud and State blood, and that the nation shall not confront them with one armed man. troops, whether under the name of rifle clubs or white leagues, or any other, armed with the muskets of the United States, may constitute the mob, may incite the mob, but the national arm is to be tied and palsied.

If there ever was a I repeat such an act of Congress has never yet existed. 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.'

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.'

"The actual service of the United States" some man may say means war merely, service in time of war. Let me read again, "Congress shall have power to provide for calling forth the militia.' For what? First of all, "to execute the laws of the

Union."

Yes, Congress shall have power "to provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union." Speaking to lawyers, I venture to emphasize the word "execute." It is a term of art; it has a long-defined meaning. The act of 1795, re-enacted since, emphasized these constitutional provisions.

A

Here it is-section 5298 of the Revised Statutes :

Whenever, by reason of unlawful obstruction, combinations, or assemblages of persons' or rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States, it shall become impracticable, in the judgment of the President, to enforce, by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings, the laws of the United States within any State or Territory, it shall be lawful for the President to call forth the militia of any or all the States, and to employ suck parts of the land and naval forces of the United States as he may deem necessary to enforcethe faithful execution of the laws of the United States, or to suppress such rebellion, in whatever State or Territory thereof the laws of the United States may be forcibly opposed, or the execution thereof forcibly obstructed.

That section, enacted in substance during the administration of Washington, drawn and voted for by the men who framed the Constitution, only supplemented the provisions I have read. It has stood for eighty-four years unchallenged.

These constitutional provisions, enforced by the act to which the Senate has listened, were, and to-day are, the only authority under which the soldiers of the nation can go on election day or any other day to the polls or elsewhere within the jurisdiction of a State to quell violence and enforce law. If under these provisions armed men cannot be employed to subdue violence at the polls on the day of a national election, they cannot be employed at all; for there is, as I shall argue, and as I think I shall demonstrate, no other authority for it; certainly none in the act which we are invited to strike down. If there was during eighty years of acquiescence too much latitude given to the President or the Army by the Constitu-. tion and by the act of 1795, that latitude was curtailed on the 18th of June, 1878. On that recent date, this provision became a law :

SEC. 15. From and after the passage of this act it shall not be lawful to employ an part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws, except in such cases and under such circumstances as such employ ment of said force may be expressly authorized by the Constitution or by act of Congress; and no money appropriated by this act shall be used to pay any of the expenses incurred in the employment of any troops in violation of this section, and any person willfully violating the provisions of this section shall be deemed guilty of a misdemeanor, and on conviction thereof shall be punished by fine not exceeding $10,000, or imprisonment not exceeding two years, or by both such fine and imprisonment.

Mark the language, a penal statute visiting with penalty the President and everybody else who attempts to employ troops in any case unless the Constitution or an act of Congress "expressly, not alone by implication, not alone by the spirit, which makes alive, but by the very letter, which sometimes kills, authorizes such employment. So thoroughly is the Constitution hedged about already. I have said and I repeat that the act of 1865, against which this repeal is leveled, contains no authority, none whatever, under which any one soldier or any one armed man may go for the purpose of keeping the peace, or for any other purpose, to the polls on a national election day. Let me read the section aimed at by the amendment, and the section which immediately follows it, both of which were enacted as part of the statute of 1865 :

SEC. 2002. No military or naval officer, or other person engaged in the civil, miltary, or naval service of the United States, shall order, bring, keep, or have under his authority or control, any troops or armed men at the place where any general or special election is held in any State, unless it be necessary to repel the armed enemies of the United States, or to keep the peace at the polls.

Mark the following section:

SEO. 2003. No officer of the Army or Navy of the United States shall prescribe or fix, or attempt to prescribe or fix, by proclamation, order, or otherwise, the qualifications of voters in any State, or in any manner interfere with the freedom of any election in any State, or with the exercise of the free right of suffrage in any State. (Šee sections 55305532.)