The Democratic party thus determined, through its platform and partially through its candidates, to fight its battle on the two issues of paying the debt in depreciated paper currency and overthrowing Reconstruction.

The prestige of Grant's great fame and the momentum given to the Republican party by his achievements during and immediately after the war, would have defeated any opposition, however skillful.

As it was, the rash action of the Democratic Convention made it reasonably clear from the beginning that the ticket was doomed to defeat.

The progress of the canvass strengthened this impression; the Democracy was placed everywhere on the defensive; its own declarations shotted every gun that was aimed against it; and its orators and organs could neither make effective reply…

No man was more seductive in appeal, or more impressive in sedate and stately eloquence.

With his art of persuasion he combined rare skill in evading difficult questions while preserving an appearance of candor.

His speeches were as elusive and illusive as they were smooth and graceful.

In his present series of arguments he labored to convince the country that if the Democrats elected the President they would still be practically powerless, and that apprehension of disturbance and upheaval from their success was unfounded.

He sought also to draw the public thought away from this subject and give it a new direction by dwelling on the cost of government, the oppression of taxes, the losses from the disordered currency and the various evils that had followed…

The popular judgment had been fixed by events and by a long course of concurrent evidences, and no single plea or pledge could shake it.

General Grant was the embodiment of the war feeling, and presented in his own person the spirit of the contest for the Union and the evidence of its triumph.

Considering the time of the election, considering the record and the achievements of the rival candidates, the Presidential election of 1868 must be regarded as the most remarkable and the most unaccountable in our political annals.

The result was not comforting to the thoughtful men who interpreted its true significance and comprehended the possibilities to which it pointed.

The change was simply the result of fraud, and the fraud was based on violence.

One of the most alarming features connected with this series of outrages was the promptness with which Louisiana resorted to violence after her re-admission to the right of representation in Congress.

Within less than five months after her formal reconstruction, outrages which would be exceptional in the governments of Algiers or Egypt were committed in utter defiance of law, and without any attempt at punishment by the authorities of…

Indeed, his alleged majority of 47,000 over General Grant was greater than the total vote which the Democratic party could honestly cast in Louisiana.

Seymour's vote was fraudulent; and of that fact concealment is no longer attempted from any respectable source.

By the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, we have declared that all the black men in Maryland and other States shall be citizens of the United States.

Certain State governments have for the present denied those people the right to vote, and yet one of them is eligible to the Presidency of the United States and another to the Vice-Presidency.

The gradual progress of public opinion in the United States on questions relating to slavery and to the personal and political rights of the negro race, may be clearly traced in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the…

Under that section a State could exclude the negro from the right of suffrage, if willing to accept the penalty of the proportional loss of representation in Congress, which the exclusion of the colored population from the basis of…

Its prime object was to correct the wrongs which might be enacted in the South, and the correction proposed was direct and unmistakable; viz., that the Nation would exclude the negro from the basis of apportionment wherever the State…

When therefore the nation by subsequent change in its Constitution declared that the State shall not exclude the negro from the right of suffrage, it neutralized and surrendered the contingent right before held, to exclude him from the…

The wonder excited by the raising of the vast army which saved the Union from destruction was even surpassed by the wonder excited by its prompt and peaceful dissolution.