from it. At all events, both by laws and presidential acts,
the Republicans for many years kept a keen eye upon the maintenance of
their dominion in the South. Their declaration that neither the law nor
its administration should admit any discrimination in respect of
citizens by reason of race, color, or previous condition of servitude
appealed to idealists and brought results in elections. Even South
Carolina, where reposed the ashes of John C. Calhoun, went Republican in
1872 by a vote of three to one!

Republican control was made easy by the force bills described in a
previous chapter--measures which vested the supervision of elections in
federal officers appointed by Republican Presidents. These drastic
measures, departing from American tradition, the Republican authors
urged, were necessary to safeguard the purity of the ballot, not merely
in the South where the timid freedman might readily be frightened from
using it; but also in the North, particularly in New York City, where it
was claimed that fraud was regularly practiced by Democratic leaders.

The Democrats, on their side, indignantly denied the charges, replying
that the force bills were nothing but devices created by the Republicans
for the purpose of securing their continued rule through systematic
interference with elections. Even the measures of reconstruction were
deemed by Democratic leaders as thinly veiled schemes to establish
Republican power throughout the country. "Nor is there the slightest
doubt," exclaimed Samuel J. Tilden, spokesman of the Democrats in New
York and candidate for President in 1876, "that the paramount object and
motive of the Republican party is by these means to secure itself
against a reaction of opinion adverse to it in our great populous
Northern commonwealths.... When the Republican party resolved to
establish negro supremacy in the ten states in order to gain to itself
the representation of those states in Congress, it had to begin by
governing the people of those states by the sword.... The next was the
creation of new electoral bodies for those ten states, in which, by
exclusions, by disfranchisements and proscriptions, by control over
registration, by applying test oaths ... by intimidation and by every
form of influence, three million negroes are made to predominate over
four and a half million whites."

=The War as a Campaign Issue.=--Even the repeal of force bills could not
allay the sectional feelings engendere