onal,
revolutionary, and void_." This extreme proposition, deliberately
adopted, was calculated to produce a profound public impression. It
was not a mere challenge of the policy or rightfulness of the
Reconstruction Acts; it was not a mere pledge of opposition to their
progress and completion; but it logically involved their overthrow,
with the subversion of their results, in case the Democratic party
should acquire the power to enforce its principles and to execute its
threats.

The import of this bold declaration received additional light from
the history of its genesis and adoption. Its immediate paternity
belonged to Wade Hampton of South Carolina. In a speech at Charleston,
within two weeks from the adjournment of the Convention, General
Hampton recounted the circumstances which attended its insertion in
the platform, and proudly claimed it as his own plank. He himself
was a member of the Committee on Resolutions, and took an active part
in its deliberations. All the members, he said, agreed that the
control of suffrage belonged to the States; but General Hampton himself
contended that the vital question turned on what were the States. In
order that there might be no room for dispute he proposed that the
platform should specifically say "the States as they were before
1865." To this however some of the members objected as impolitic
and calculated to raise distrust, and it was accordingly dropped.
General Hampton then proposed to insert the declaration that the
"Reconstruction Acts are unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void;"
and the manner in which this suggestion was received is given by
General Hampton himself: "When I presented that proposition every
member, and the warmest were from the North, came forward and pledged
themselves to carry it out." He further reported to his people that
the Democratic leaders declared their "willingness to give us every
thing we could desire; but they begged us to remember that they had
a great fight to make at the North, and they therefore besought us not
to load the platform with a weight that they could not carry against
the prejudices which they had to encounter. _Help them once to regain
the power, and then they would do their utmost to relieve the Southern
States and restore to us the Union and the Constitution as it had
existed before the war_."

This declaration received still further emphasis from at least one of
the nominations to which the Convention w