f money. He feared
that the money would not be fairly expended, as between the
two races, and that it would be made a large corruption fund
for political purposes.

So this most essential part of the reconstruction policy
of Sumner and Grant never took effect. Mr. Sumner deemed
this matter vital to success. He told me about a week before
his death that when the resolution declaring the provision
for public education at the National charge an essential part
of the reconstruction policy, was defeated in the Senate by
a tie vote, he was so overcome by his feelings that he burst
into tears and left the Senate Chamber.

Another part of the Republican plan for reconstruction was
never accomplished. That was the securing of a fair vote
and a fair ascertainment of the result in National elections
by National power. Some partial and imperfect attempts were
made to put in force laws intended to accomplish this result.
They never went farther than enactments designed to maintain
order at the polls, to secure the voter from actual violence,
and to provide for such scrutiny as to make it clear that
the vote was duly counted and properly returned, with a right
of appeal to the Courts of the United States in case of a
contest, the decision of the Court to be subject to the final
authority of the House of Representatives. These laws, although
they had the support of eminent and zealous Democrats and
although they were as much needed and had as much application
to the Northern cities as to the Southern States, were the
object of bitter denunciation from the beginning. Good men
in the North listened with incredulity to the narrative of
well established facts of cruelty and murder and fraud. These
stories were indignantly denied at the time, although they
are not only confessed, but vauntingly and triumphantly affirmed
now. The whole country seems to be made uneasy when the old
practice to which it had been accustomed everywhere of having
offences tried by a jury taken by lot from the people of the
neighborhood, and the result of election ascertained by officers
selected from the bystanders at the polls, is departed from.
Besides, no strictness of laws which provide only for the
proceedings at the elections will secure their freedom if
it be possible to intimidate the voters, especially men like
the colored voters at the South, from attending the elections,
by threats, outrages and actual violence at their homes. Against