He felt, as the responsible author of the Compromise, that he was himself on trial, and it would be a peculiar mortification if the party which he had led so long should fail to sustain him in this final crisis of his public life.
Blaine emphasizes the personal stakes and pressures faced by a political leader during a pivotal moment in their career.
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Many Northern Democrats had indeed given the assurance that if any attempt at coercion should be made by the Republican National Administration, they would themselves meet it with force, and that, if war should come, it would be in the…
Such an opportunity would have been a menace to the public credit, and would have proved a constant source of corruption.
Their convention did more to popularize the Fourteenth Amendment as a political issue than any other instrumentality of the year.
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…
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