[ Previous Page ] -- [ View PDF ] -- [ View in MS Word ] -- [ Next Page ]

                             2184
can read and write or pays taxes on $800 worth of property is al-lowed to vote. 
There are in the State some fourteen or fifteen thousand colored voters 
registered. Of the balance of the vote, white, 87 per cent is Democratic.
Mr. CLARK of Wyoming.   What is the total vote?
Mr. TILLMAN. The total registered vote is 114,000 or 115,000. I say 97 per cent 
of the white vote is Democratic. Well, now, at our Democratic primaries, 
protected by law for the nomination of the party candidates, held in the 
summer, at least 90 per cent of that vote turns out, and there is great interest 
and excitement, as some of yon have heard in the papers in the campaigns in 
which I have been interested down there for governor and Senator. There is 
no lethargy there in politics, there being as much politics to the square mile as in 
any other State in the Union. But there has been no organized Republican party 
in the State since 1884. The Republicans do not hold any State convention; 
they do not nominate any candidates for governor and other State officers. In 
one Congressional district they did so up to the period when the last 
constitution was inaugurated in 1895, in what is known as the black district, where 
we strung the negroes together for the purpose of giving them one district, and 
then we turned around and took it away from them, having the usual greed of the 
Anglo-Saxon and his unwillingness to allow the colored race to dominate him or 
have any influence in government, just as you gentlemen now propose to do for 
Hawaii.
I said there were no Republican nominations except for Congressmen in the 
black district. The Republican machine is com-posed of those who are appointed 
by the Republican President to the post-offices and the Federal positions-the 
marshal, and so forth, the collector of the port, and the district attorney. They 
control the patronage. They send delegates to the national convention for the 
Republican party. It is as rotten a borough as any other State in the Union so 
far as Republican influence is concerned, because there is no hope, no possibility, 
of any electoral vote for any Republican candidate in South Carolina.
Well, with no candidates opposing our-Democratic nominees at the legal 
elections in November, being merely a ratification of the primary elections or 
nomination in August, what object is there for men to turn out and vote? They 
simply do not do it. Therefore three or four thousand or four or five thousand in a 
Congressional district go to the polls in November and ratify the action of the 
party in August.
The Senator from Colorado [Mr. WOLCOTT] I see is absent from the Chamber. I 
think if he had known all the circumstances of the debate he would not have 
waltzed into it in the way he did. His State in the last election in one 
Congressional district polled fifty-odd thousand and the other polled 80,000. 
Everybody knows why that is. It is simply because women in Colorado vote.
On the question of suppression, as indicated by the paucity of the vote, I will 
quote some figures used by the Senator from Mississippi [Mr. MONEY] in regard to 
Massachusetts and Connecticut to show that it is not always necessary to have any 
statute law or any illegality or any infamous proceedings in elections to cause a 
small vote.
In 1890 the State of Massachusetts, which has an educational qualification the 
same as my State, polled 285,000 votes. What is the total voting population of 
Massachusetts? Six hundred and sixty-five thousand. In Connecticut the same 
year the vote was 125,000, out of a total vote of 224,000. Nobody will contend 
that the vote of Massachusetts was suppressed; that there was interference with 
anybody. I presume that the Republicans had a full swing there, as they have 
almost always had, except when an occasional uprising of the people took place. 
The party felt that the ticket was safe, and enough Republicans went out, 
seeing that the Democrats were not active and were taking no interest, and 
voted to save the ticket and elected it. The Democrats feeling no interest in the
 election, knowing they could not carry it, remained at home. Nearly 400,000 
voters in Massachusetts did not turn out.
Why not allow other people to have the same rights and exercise them when 
you are indifferent in politics? Why accuse us of the South always of 
suppressing and oppressing the colored race? We do enough of it; I do not 
dispute it; but we are not doing in my State half the devilment, never have 
done half the devilment, that is proposed to be done in this Hawaiian law that 
you are now enacting.
Yon said in 1867 and 1868, when yon passed the constitutional amendments, 
that involuntary servitude in the United States and all the Territories thereof 
should cease, or in any territory under its dominion. You know since and you 
knew it when you annexed Hawaii that there were 20,000 contract slaves 
there who were whipped when they refused to work and were driven to their 
work under the lash. What did yon do? Did you put in a provision in the 
resolution of annexation annulling those contracts and protecting those people? 
No.
Now what do yon propose to do, or, rather, what did this committee propose 
to do? The bill has been amended, but we have


got to take it as the committee sent it here, as showing the latter-day Republican 
policy. Here is the way they brought it in. Here is the provision for which the 
committee stands sponsor and is responsible as far as its action goes. Any 
amendment or assistance or benefit to those people that will come from legislation 
will come from the Senate itself as proposed by the amendment of the Senator 
from Massachusetts. Here is the provision of the bill:
Sec. 10. That all obligations, contracts, rights of action, suite at law and in 
equity, prosecutions, and judgments existing prior to the taking effect of this 
act shall continue to be as effectual as if this act had not been passed.
In another section we repeal the provision of the Hawaiian constitution and all 
the Hawaiian enactments or statutes which allow punishment of those contract 
laborers by imprisonment and whipping, and then turn around and say that all 
existing con-tracts must be fulfilled, and that the law, so far as they are con-
cerned, must continue in effect. It is to give three or five more years of slave 
labor to the sugar corporations which are behind this bill, which were behind the 
annexation resolution, and which have sent their sugar in here until we have 
remitted duties to the amount of $80,000,000.
And then you get up and attack South Carolina because her vote is small! What 
kind of a vote do you propose to give those people? The proposition here is to 
limit the vote to those who can read and write. I have no objection to that; we 
are doing it ourselves; but yon go forward and say that Senators shall not be 
voted for by any man who does not own a thousand dollars' worth of property, 
whereas our provision is that if you own $300 worth and do not read and write 
you have the right to vote.
I sympathize with the little oligarchy in Hawaii, in a way, the 4,000 white 
men or white women, with young men and children, Americans, 7,000 all told. I 
do not want them massacred. I do not want them put under the domination of 
the Kanakas. They are not going to be. If you were to let them loose, they would 
hire enough or control enough of votes, buy enough of votes, if necessary, as is 
being done in some of the Southern States, to elect their government; or they 
would cheat them, as we used to do. What I object to, gentlemen, is the 
hypocrisy of those in this Chamber who stand up here and contend and contend 
and contend that the South must be treated differently from those people; that the 
colored race must be differently treated in the Philippine Islands, Hawaii, and 
Puerto Rico from what they are treated in our States of Mississippi, Louisiana, 
Texas, Alabama, and South Carolina.
If it is good to have white supremacy in the Hawaiian Islands, why is it not in 
my State? We are Americans, gentlemen. The white people in that State are 
almost wholly descendants of men who fought in the Revolution. There are but 
9,000 foreign-born citizens in it; and if we are backward and old-fogyish in 
some things, we love liberty as well as you do. We know the inherent superiority 
of the Anglo-Saxon, and when we were forced by the Federal Government to 
submit to the oppressions of a majority of colored people, ex-slaves, from 1868 to 
1876, when life had become not worth living on the terms you were giving it to us, 
we all rose in our manhood and, in spite of Grant and his army, we took the 
government away; from those people. We have held it ever since, and we will hold 
it for all time.
I do not object to those white men in Hawaii being protected, but do not 
protect them with hypocrisy and cant. Be men! Stand up! Come out and say 
why you do this thing.
This provision in the bill providing for contract laborers-that is, for the 
contracts with contract laborers being carried and-has been amended. The 
Senate has endeavored, I believe, to keep that provision from being enacted by 
the amendment of the Senator from Massachusetts; but you still have all these 
judges appointed by the governor, with the governor recommended by the sugar 
planters to the President, with no means of communication between that country 
and this, with the large number of Americans over there who are not worth a 
thousand dollars and therefore can not vote for a senator, with the provisions 
of this bill looking to the perpetuation of the rule of wealth without regard to 
the old slogan of the Republican party, manhood suffrage, God. and morality, and 
brotherhood of man, and all of that old stuff which you believed in once aid 
fought for, but which yon now repudiate.
Why do you not come out like men and say so if you have changed your 
position, if yon no longer regard the colored races with the affection you once 
had for them if you make no move looking to the protection of them in 
Hawaii or in Puerto Rico? Poor Puerto Rico is not provided for in this bill. We 
will come to that when the bill comes over from the House, if it ever gets 
over; therefore I will not expatiate on that. But what I am contending for here is 
that you ought not, as decent men, as Christian men, as self-respecting men, to 
lend your assistance and your votes to any scheme of government which in its 
essence is a military despotism supported by the Army of the United States 
and the maintenance of an oligarchy of a few thousand or a few hundred rich 
men manipulating and controlling the rest.
Here is a letter which the Senator from Idaho [Mr. HEITFELD]

Return to Top