It is barely possible that a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law specially enacted to fit his case.
Blaine critiques the discriminatory application of vagrancy laws against African Americans in the post-Civil War era.
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If this view of the subject be correct, as I think it is, then the Union must utterly perish at the moment when Congress shall arm one part of the people against another for any purpose beyond that of merely protecting the General…
But what if the feeling in any State against the United States should become so universal that the Federal officers themselves (including judges, district attorneys, and marshals) would be reached by the same influences, and resign their…
And if Congress shall break up the present Union by unconstitutionally putting strife and enmity and armed hostility between different sections of the country, instead of the domestic tranquility which the Constitution was meant to insure…
Under such circumstances, to send a military force into any State, with orders to act against the people, would be simply making war upon them.
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