consideration the bill to enforce the 14th Amendment, Robert C. De
Large made eloquent remarks replying to Cox of New York, who had
denounced the "ignorant" rulers of South Carolina for their
"rapacity," which in his opinion justified the activities of the Ku
Klux Klan.[69] It was in the defense of the bill for the protection
of life and property in the South[70] that Robert B. Elliott had
occasion to speak. He showed that the argument upon the pending bill
had proceeded upon a question of constitutional law, the opponents
denying that its provisions were warranted by the Constitution of the
United States, and questioning the data upon which the proposed bill
was founded. The probable efficacy of the bill, as a measure of relief
and protection for the loyal men of the South from the extraordinary
system of oppression to which they were subjected, had not been
assailed. Elliott, therefore, undertook to prove that the proposed
bill was not obnoxious to the spirit of the Constitution, that it was
founded on reason, and that in view of the state of affairs then
existing in the South, it was, as a measure of protection, not only
warranted, but imperatively demanded.

For his first task, Elliott was compelled to sustain the position that
the government of the United States has the right, under the
Constitution, to protect a citizen of the United States in the
exercise of his vested rights as an American citizen, by the exercise
of direct force, or the assertion of immediate jurisdiction through
its courts, without the appeal of the State in which the citizen is
domiciled. Asserting the legal maxim that where power is given the
means of its execution are implied, he sought to establish that the
power had been given by Article IV of the Constitution, which imposes
upon the Federal Government the duty to protect the States against
domestic violence. He attempted, moreover, to establish by the
authority of the preamble to the Constitution the violence of the
"presumption that the majority of the people of a State may be
oppressively subordinated to the minority." To support his own
constructions of the Constitution, Elliott quoted Justice Story on
this same issue, pointed out the inconsistencies in the argument of
his chief opponent, defined within the meaning of the Constitution a
republican form of government and thereafter affirmed that the bill
in hand came within the limits of the Constitution.

Elliott had next to establ