Stephens secured an election to the Senate, and was in Washington at the ensuing session of Congress, asking admission to a seat as cooly as if every living man had forgotten that for four years he had been exerting his utmost effort to destroy the Constitution under which he now claimed the full rights of a citizen.
Blaine criticizes the audacity of a former Confederate leader seeking a Senate seat after the Civil War.
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With whatever strength or prestige the President left Washington, he certainly returned to the Capital personally discredited and politically ruined.
It was the insane folly of the South, in drawing the sword against the life of the Nation, that led irresistibly to the abolition of slavery.
In Congressional districts where the colored race constituted one-half of the total population (and in many instances the proportion was even larger), the vote of one white man offset the vote of two in a Northern district where suffrage…
The two schools in short marked the dividing line between the radical and the conservative.
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