The majority of Republicans seemed to prefer that voters by the thousand should be deprived by violence of the right of suffrage, rather than that their rights should be protected by even the semblance of National authority present in the person of a soldier.
Blaine argues that many Republicans preferred to let voters be disenfranchised rather than allow military protection at polls.
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More from James Blaine
The States are colleagues of one another, and if some of them shall conquer the rest, and hold them as subjugated provinces, it would totally destroy the whole theory upon which they are now connected.
You can use force only to repel an assault on the public property and aid the Courts in the performance of their duty.
If it be true that war cannot be declared, nor a system of general hostilities carried on by the Central Government against a State, then it seems to follow that an attempt to do so would be ipso facto an expulsion of such State from the…
Without the exercise of those functions which belong exclusively to the civil service, the laws cannot be executed in any event, no matter what may be the physical strength which the Government has at its command.
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