d without any attempt at punishment by the
authorities of the State. Not to punish was in effect to approve.

As a mere question of figures, it is impossible that Mr. Seymour could
have received the 80,225 votes with which he was credited. 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.
In the Presidential election of 1860, when circumstances tended to call
every Democrat in the South to the polls, the united vote of
Breckinridge and Douglas in Louisiana was but 30,306, while the total
vote, including that given for John Bell, was but 50,510. In 1867 the
entire registered white vote of Louisiana was but 45,199. The white
voting population of the State, therefore, was certainly no larger in
1868 than in 1860--if as large. It was not denied that since the
close of the war a considerable number of white men had joined the
Republican party; white it was not even claimed that a single negro
voted the Democratic ticket in 1868, except as he was led to the polls
under the cover of Ku-Klux weapons, terrorized by the violence of that
association of lawless men.

It amounts therefore to a mathematical demonstration, that nearly
one-half of Mr. Seymour's vote was fraudulent; and of that fact
concealment is no longer attempted from any respectable source. It has
been matter of surprise to the cotemporaries of Mr. Seymour, that
sensitive as he has shown himself on many occasions in regard to the
record of his political life, he would consent, after investigation and
exposure of the atrocities had been made, to remain in history without
protest as the beneficiary of a vote that was demonstrably fraudulent in
its character,--a vote that was tainted with crime and stained with the
blood of innocent men. It is assuredly not to be presumed that violent
acts and murderous deeds are less repulsive to Mr. Seymour than to any
other refined Christian gentleman. But his silence in respect to the
wicked transactions of his supporters in Louisiana, when he was a
candidate for the Presidency, has persuaded many honest-minded
Democrats that the whole narrative of crime was a slander, concocted
in the interest of the Republican party. It has served also a far more
deplorable purpose, for it has in large measure aided in screening from
public reprobation, and possibly from exemplary punishment, the guilty
principals and the scarcely less