Its first and highest obligation is to guarantee to every State a republican form of government, to establish the rebellious States anew on such a basis of enduring justice as will guarantee all safeguards to the people and protection to all men in their inalienable rights." . . .
Blaine emphasizes the importance of guaranteeing a republican form of government to all states, particularly in the context of post-Civil War reconstruction.
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The Northern people shrank from the responsibility of transferring the government of States to the control of men who had already shown themselves capable of desperate deeds.
These divergent practices had been allowed to develop for seventy-seven years of the nation's life, when, admonished by the Stockton case of the latitudinary results to which loose methods might lead, Congress took jurisdiction of the…
It is to the eminent credit of the Republican members of Congress that they stood in a crisis of this magnitude true to principle, firm against all the power and all the patronage of the Administration.
An attempt to guarantee and protect a revived State government constructed in whole or in preponderating part from the very element against whose hostility and violence it is to be protected is simply absurd.
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