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Updated: June 12, 2025
I met a man the other day as he came out from the polls who asked me who somebody was he had voted for, and he said he went on the general principle when he was up in one of those stalls of ignorance and was being stood up faithfully with nothing in his head to rule the country he went on the general principle that every time he came on the name of a man he knew, he just voted for the other.
When it is remembered that at no period in the country's history has the long political contest which customarily precedes the day of the national election been waged with greater fervor and intensity, it is a subject of general congratulation that after the controversy at the polls was over, and while the slight preponderance by which the issue had been determined was as yet unascertained, the public peace suffered no disturbance, but the people everywhere patiently and quietly awaited the result.
And, although at the end of January the people of that State had decided at the polls that no Secession Convention be held, yet the subservient Legislature did not hesitate, on demand, to call one together which met in May and ordained such Secession.
There were 1,066 volunteer workers in San Francisco, 118 of them men. On election day hundreds reported for duty before 6 o'clock and after standing at the polls twelve hours many went into the booths and kept tally of the count until midnight. In Oakland Pinkerton men were hired to watch it and in San Francisco the vault where the ballots were deposited was watched for two days and nights.
As in the other instance, if the inhabitant of Pennsylvania intended to intimate to our author, that a colored voter would be in personal jeopardy for venturing to appear at the polls to exercise his right, it must be said in truth, that the incident was local and peculiar, and contrary to what is annually seen throughout the states where colored persons are permitted to vote, who exercise that privilege with as full immunity from injury or oppression, as any white citizen.
Nor was it until the Elections of the last Autumn, that abolition action at "the ballot-box" had become so extensive, as to apprise the Nation, that it is a principle with abolitionists to "remember" in one place as well as in another at the polls as well as in the closet "them that are in bonds."
Seward in a speech at Auburn had been absurdly construed by Democratic orators and editors to indicate that Mr. Lincoln, if defeated at the polls, would use the remainder of his term for doing what he could to ruin the government. This vile charge, silly as it was, yet touched a very sensitive spot. On October 19, in a speech to some serenaders, and evidently having this in mind, he said:
In 1869, three states still refused to comply with the Reconstruction Act of 1867 and had no representatives in Congress. Such states as had complied and given the negro the right to vote were under "carpetbag" rule. This rule became so unbearable that the Ku Klux Klan was organized to terrify the negroes and keep them from the polls.
Just picture to yourselves the voting population of this great land, from the sea to the far borders in the mountains, going calmly, man by man, to the polls, expressing its judgment about public affairs: is that your image of "a mob?" What is a mob? A mob is a body of men in hot contact with one another, moved by ungovernable passion to do a hasty thing that they will regret the next day.
E. L. Caulkins, president of the W. C. T. U., devoted its full organization to the amendment, especially to the petitions and at the polls on election day. The most telling feature of the campaign was the petition under the direction of Mrs. Emerson B. Davis of Detroit, signed by more than 202,000 women over twenty-one years old and addressed to voters, urging them to vote "yes" on the referendum.
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