To concede four and a half millions of negroes to the basis of Southern representation, and at the same time to confine the suffrage to the whites, was not merely a harsh injustice to the colored race, but it was an insulting discrimination against Northern white men.
Blaine critiques the unfairness of Southern representation in Congress regarding African American suffrage.
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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.
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.
Observing men in the loyal States regarded such a policy not only as weak and maudlin, but as utterly insufficient and assuredly dangerous to the future safety of the Government.
Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce upon every sea.
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