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Updated: August 14, 2024
The returning-board of Louisiana, which had before been so useful, was in full working order; Florida was similarly equiped; South Carolina was in much the same case. The boards had authority to throw out the entire vote of districts where there was proof that intimidation had tainted the election.
That the returning-board of Louisiana will find no imitators in our future history is more than I dare hope. The pernicious doctrine that fraud and perjury are to be recognized auxiliaries in popular elections is one that may return to plague its inventors. The worst effect of this decision will be its lesson to the young men of our country.
At the 1874 election the Conservatives were successful at the polls; but the State returning-board at once began to juggle with the returns so palpably that the Conservative member protested and resigned. That body met, organized in a hasty and irregular fashion, and awarded the five seats to the Democratic claimants.
How well the members of this tribunal have discharged the sacred trust committed to them, let them answer to history. "The record will stand that this tribunal shut its eyes to the light of truth; refused to hear the undisputed proof that a majority of seven thousand legal votes in the State of Louisiana for Tilden was by a fraudulent returning-board changed to eight thousand majority for Hayes.
Can it be possible that the American people are prepared to accept the doctrine that fraud, which vitiates all contracts and agreements, which taints the judgments and decrees of courts, which will even annul the solemn covenant of marriage fraud, which poisons wherever it enters can be inquired into in all the relations of human life save only where a returning-board is its instrument, and the dearest rights of a sovereign people are at stake?
It was never dreamed that a tribunal, consisting in part of five judges of the highest court on earth, was to be constituted, whose sole duty was to report a fact known to every man in the land, that the returning-board of Louisiana had given the votes of that State to the Hayes electors.
Warmouth, who had been governor for a four years' term, had quarreled with his confederates over the division of plunder, and gone over to the Conservatives. He controlled the State returning-board, to which the laws intrusted a very elastic and dangerous power of throwing out returns from districts where intimidation was proved, and undertook to declare McEnery elected.
A committee of the House, including such Republicans as George F. Hoar, William A. Wheeler, Charles Foster, William W. Phelps and William P. Frye, with Clarkson N. Potter and Samuel S. Marshall for the Democrats, visited New Orleans, and after full inquiry agreed that the returning-board had "wrongfully applied an erroneous rule of law"; that the five Democrats had been defrauded of their seats; and that the Louisiana House should be advised the national House having no compulsory power to "repair this great injustice."
Ratcliffe's offer must have been seen by half Washington, and her reply was awaited by an immense audience, as though she were a political returning-board. Her disgust was intense, and her first answer to Sybil was a quick inquiry: "Why do you ask such a question? have you heard anything, has anyone talked about it to you?"
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