Speech delivered at Washington, Kansas, October 24, 1884.

Ladies and Gentlemen: I must beg the charity alike of your silence and of your patient forbearance. I am not an orator. I make no pretensions as a public speaker. For while I have been talking to my fellow-citizens of Kansas for more than a quarter of a century, it has been through the medium of printed words, and not from the platform or on the stump. Only because I have been nominated by the Republican party of the State for an official position, and am thus, by the customs and usages of partisan politics, expected to attend and address such assemblages as this, do I appear before you. But I know the people of Kansas are as generous as they are intelligent, and hence, although fully conscious of my own deficiencies, I trust implicitly in their kindness, and shall endeavor as best I can to explain to you the reasons why I am a Republican, and why I think every good citizen should give his influence and his vote to secure the triumph to that party.

I am a Republican, first, because I believe the Republican party to be the most intelligent, progressive and beneficent political organization ever known in this or any other country. Its whole existence has been a blessing to the American people. It has enriched our history with a long record of splendid achievements. It preserved the Union. It abolished slavery. It enfranchised a race. It enacted the homestead law; and it has girded the continent with railways. It has given the people a sound currency, and it has protected, elevated and dignified American industries and American labor. It has glorified the history of the age with a long list of imperishable names—the names of Lincoln, and Seward, and Grant, and Sherman, and Sumner, and Garfield, and Blaine, and Logan, and a host of others, which will never fade from the recollections of a grateful people. In twenty-three years it has raised this Nation to the foremost place among the Nations of the earth, and made the American name respected all around the globe. It has elevated, improved and purified the civil service, and systematized all departments of the Government. It has collected the public revenue at a less percentage of cost than ever before, and handled the money of the Government at a far less percentage of loss than ever before. It has generously cared for the disabled soldiers of the Union, and for the widows and orphans of our dead heroes. The true Republican glories in his party’s history. He asks no man to forget a line or word of it.

I am a Republican because I am a Kansan. I came to this State when it was a Territory governed by the Democratic party. I learned something of Democratic methods, policies and principles during those years. I saw a free people denied their dearest political rights. I saw all the power and authority of the National Administration exerted to fasten slavery upon this State, against the will of a large majority of its citizens. I know the history of that period by heart, and there is no record so stained with usurpations, so crowded with wrong, injustice and tyranny, so sullied with crime, as is the record of the years from 1855 to 1861, when the Democratic party controlled the affairs of Kansas. Contrast that period with the Republican administration of the past twenty-three years, and the development, the enterprise, the prosperity, the world-wide fame, that have gone hand in hand with it. I have seen Kansas grow from a half-tilled, forlorn strip along the west bank of the Missouri, into a splendid, imperial State, with nearly a million and a quarter of inhabitants—a State with nearly eighteen million acres occupied as farms, with over four thousand miles of railway, seven thousand school-houses and a thousand churches, and with property aggregating in value nearly five hundred million dollars. All this growth, all this enterprise, all this marvelous prosperity, began with and has continued under Republican rule—clean, healthy, intelligent rule, worthily representing the brain and heart and energy of a Republican constituency.

I am a Republican because I was a Union soldier. I know that there were loyal Democrats, and I shall never fail to do full justice to their patriotism. I have served side by side with them, in camp, and march, and battle, and I honor their courage and their devotion to the flag of the Republic. But I know, also, that while thousands of Democrats proved themselves true patriots during the war, the Democratic party, as a political organization, was persistently and consistently disloyal. At the outbreak of the war, it denied the right of the Government to “coerce a sovereign State,” and from the first flash of the gun at Sumter until the last shot at Bentonville, it never ceased to predict failure for the Union arms, and to strive to make its prophecy a reality. It discouraged enlistments, resisted the draft, and denounced and slandered the patient, suffering, great-souled President, upon whom the sorrows of a stricken Nation hung so heavily. It encouraged foreign countries to interfere in our affairs; it assailed the greenback currency, issued to meet the expenses of the war, as “worthless rags;” and it did all in its power to break down the credit of the Government. And finally, just on the eve of our complete triumph, when Grant was slowly tightening his grasp around the throat of the Rebellion, at Richmond, and Sherman’s invincible army was preparing to enter Atlanta, and the guns of Farragut were thundering victory in Mobile Bay, the Democratic party, assembled in national convention at Chicago, formally resolved that the war was “a failure,” and clamored for a dishonorable peace.

This is the record, briefly told, of the Democratic party during the civil war, when the fate of the Republic, and of human liberty the world over, were trembling in the balance. I am a Republican, as I have said, because of these facts. And while I honor the Democrat who, severing all party ties, cast his lot with the Union during the war, I shall never forgive, and never cease to execrate, the man who, during that dark period, was, in his sympathies and his actions, that meanest of all created beings, a “Copperhead.”

A generation has grown up since the close of the Rebellion, and there are those in this audience, I have no doubt, who do not understand the full meaning of this detested name. For their instruction, I want to add a few words concerning it. The underlying cause of the civil war was the affirmation of the right of secession. The Southern idea—and it was one that had been taught for generations—was that the States were sovereign; that a citizen’s first allegiance was due to his State; that the Union was a mere compact of agreeing States, from which any one or more had a right to withdraw whenever longer association was not desirable to it or them. The Northern idea was that the Union of the States constituted a Nation; that the Republic could not be broken up by one or more of the States; that a citizen’s first allegiance was due to the Nation; and that the interests of all the States were so indissolubly associated that the Republic had a sovereign right to protect them against attack by one or more of the States.

Educated for generations to believe in the right of secession, it is not strange that Southern men who did not believe any real cause for a dissolution of the Union existed, went with their States when they determined to secede. Taught, from infancy, that their first allegiance was due to the State, it was not singular that they rallied to its standard when it called on them, and that, during four years of desperate war, they fought, with a courage and steadfastness that challenges the admiration of all men, for the idea, the principle, they had been educated to believe was right.

But the men of the Northern States who sympathized with the Rebellion, and did everything in their power to promote its success, had no such excuse. Their conduct cannot be palliated or defended on any possible ground. If they believed in the Northern idea, that a citizen’s allegiance was due to the Nation, it was their plain duty to support the Union cause. If they believed in the Southern idea, that a citizen’s allegiance was due to his State, it was equally their plain duty to stand by and defend their own State and the cause it maintained.

The most loyal man can, therefore, respect the motives of the men of Southern birth who followed their States. But what man, Northern or Southern, Union or Confederate, can respect the motives and actions of those malignant, crawling, venomous human reptiles known as “Copperheads”—the men of Northern birth and education who kept up a constant “fire in the rear” upon the soldiers from their own States, and whose conduct prolonged the war for years, made thousands of graves in the Southern valleys, and filled thousands of Northern homes—the homes of their neighbors and townsmen—with a grief whose shadow has never been lifted, even to this day.

I am a Republican because I am in favor of an honest ballot and a fair count. No right-thinking, rightly-educated American citizen will ever grumble at the adverse decision of an honest majority. But if our form of government is to endure, the right of every legal voter to cast one vote for which party he pleases to cast it, and to have that vote counted as it was cast, must be placed beyond doubt or dispute. For nearly ten years past, in no less than eight States of this Union, popular elections have been a cheat and a farce. The shot-gun or tissue-ballots have made the decisions recorded at the polls. In at least five States, Mississippi, Louisiana, South and North Carolina and Florida, there has not been even the pretense of a fair, free vote for ten years past. Each one of these States is Republican by as large and as reliable a majority as is Iowa, Nebraska, or Kansas. But the voice of their legal voters is systematically and regularly stifled, either by force or fraud. There is no issue in politics, no question before the American people, so momentous in the consequences of its decision as is this one of a fair, free, honest ballot-box. Because its settlement involves all other questions that the ballot-box should settle. If I am prevented from voting by terrorism; or if my vote, when cast, is not counted, or is swamped by two other ballots fraudulently put into the ballot-box, I am absolutely deprived of the highest privilege of American citizenship—the constitutional right of aiding to choose the men who make laws for my government and expend the money I pay in the form of taxes. I shall never cease voting the Republican ticket until there is a final end put to terrorism, and tissue-ballots, and false counting, in the States lately in rebellion. All other questions, in my judgment, are dwarfed in the presence of this all-embracing, all-controlling question of a free, pure ballot-box. For that is the very foundation-stone, not only of popular government, but of human rights. On its proper settlement depends the intelligent, rightful decision of all other questions, social, moral, economic, or political—more than that, the very existence of the Government itself. If elections are a cheat, the rule of the minority is substituted for that of the majority. Majorities do not cheat at the polls. Ballot-box frauds are always the work of minorities. And if they are successful and long continued, what results follow? First, and inevitably, contempt for the decision of elections; then a refusal to acquiesce in the results so obtained; then social turmoil, rebellion, and civil war.

I am a Republican because I am opposed to the domination of the “solid South.” For fifty years the Southern States dominated this country. They were feebler in numbers, in wealth, in enterprise, in commerce, in all the elements that make a nation strong and great, than were the Northern States. Yet until the outbreak of the war, they governed the country absolutely. They made a frantic appeal to arms when their domination was at last challenged, and were crushed by arms. They have for the past eight years been kept “solid” by the most atrocious crimes that ever disgraced a civilized nation—by terrorism, by the Ku-Klux Klans, by midnight murder, by tissue ballots, by wholesale cheating and false counting. A South made “solid” by such methods is a standing menace to free government, and should be confronted by a North made “solid” by love of justice, peace, fair play, and a free and unintimidated ballot. The Republican party should remain in power until a Republican is as safe and as free in Mississippi as a Democrat is in Kansas; until every citizen, white or black, can cast his vote without fear, and have it honestly counted; and until the South consents to accept the idea of political toleration, and gives up the idea that it can ever again be the master of this Government.

I am a Republican because the Republican party is not ashamed of its past. No Republican is afraid or ashamed to have his children read the history of the past quarter of a century. The Democratic party, when anything is said of its past history, pleads for the mercy of oblivion and forgetfulness. If the false disciple was to come back to earth, he would probably say: “What, are you fellows still harping about those thirty pieces of silver?” In very much the same mournful, injured tone, the Democrats say to the Republicans: “What, are you still flaunting the bloody shirt?” The faithful Republican has a right to be proud of his party’s history. It has never abandoned a position it has once taken, and it has never taken a position not in harmony with the greatest good of the greatest number. No Republican ever tore down his country’s flag, and spat upon it. No Republican ever called the soldiers of the Union “Lincoln hirelings” and “lop-eared Dutch.” No Republican ever mounted guard around the prison hell at Andersonville. No Republican ever rejoiced when the armies of the Union suffered a defeat, or grieved when the hosts of the Rebellion were driven from fields of battle. No Republican was ever a member of those traitorous, sneaking, cowardly Copperhead organizations, the “Knights of the Golden Circle” and the “Sons of Liberty.” No Republican belonged to Quantrill’s brutal gang of ruffians and assassins, who burned defenseless Lawrence, and murdered her unarmed citizens. No Republican ever rode at night with the bloody Ku-Klux. No Republican ever took part in such brutal massacres as those at Hamburg and New Orleans. No Republican ever attempted to win a National election by forging a letter, or blackguarding a good wife and mother, or defacing the tombstone of a little child. No Republican ever voted to disfranchise the soldiers of the Union while they were absent fighting the battles of the country. No Republican ever called Abraham Lincoln a “baboon and an ape,” or denounced Ulysses S. Grant as a “drunken tanner” and a “brutal butcher,” or was caught, at midnight, scrawling “329” on his neighbor’s doorstep. There is a splendid anthem which, during the war, was sung in every camp, and to whose majestic music a million soldiers marched—the Song of Old John Brown. There is another, no less thrilling in its glorious chorus, which warms and stirs the hearts of patriotic Americans whenever they hear its splendid music—the song which tells the story of the great March to the Sea. No Democratic Convention ever sang, no Democratic Convention can sing or dares to sing, either of these songs.

Twenty-one years ago this fall a regiment of Kansas soldiers was engaged, for two days, in a desperate conflict with the armed hosts of treason, in the tangled underbrush at Chicamagua. Two years before, they had marched away from the State, proud, happy, hopeful, each with the glad picture of a country saved imprinted upon his heart and lighting up the future of his imagination. Life was as dear and love as sweet to those Kansas boys as to any of you assembled here to-day. But when the sun went down on the second day of that fierce battle, over sixty per cent. of those Kansas boys—sixty out of every hundred—were lying, dead or wounded, on the blood-stained field. They had been, for more than two years, my comrades, my friends, my “boys,” and I loved them, one and all. Not a shot fired at them, not a bullet that laid one of them low, was fired by a Republican.

These are things which, for one, I never intend to forget. I don’t want to forget them. I take pride, as a Republican, in remembering that no Republican has to apologize for any such wrongs, or crimes, or outrages as these.

The Democrats sneer at this kind of talk as “waving the bloody shirt.” But this insulting sneer only illustrates the character of that party. The “bloody shirt” that is thus derided is the old gray army shirt that covered the breasts of patriot soldiers, and was torn and stained by bullets aimed at the life of the Republic. That old gray army shirt went over the Rebel works at Donelson, through the cedars at Stone River, into the tangled forest at Chicamauga, and up the blazing heights of Mission Ridge. That old gray army shirt was torn and stained at Corinth and Antietam, and sanctified at Prairie Grove, Gettysburg, and Atlanta. That old gray army shirt is as full of glory, and as beautiful, in every true patriot’s eyes, as are the stars and stripes of our splendid flag, because it typifies the loyalty, the heroism, and the sacrifices of the glorious men who wore it, and with whose patriotic blood it was reddened. This is “the bloody shirt” that is made, in every campaign, the stale joke of every Democratic orator and the cheap catch-word of every Democratic journal.

I am a Republican because I am opposed to a “change” merely for the sake of change. This restless, senseless clamor is the very essence of stupidity. A demand for a change should have back of it some substantial reasons. There are absolutely none in the present condition of the National Government. The country is substantially prosperous. Labor is in demand, and commands good prices; capital is busy and secure. The party in power has justified the confidence of the people. Money is as plenty now as it has ever been, and it has a steady value. The man who has a dollar in his pocket knows that speculators and gold-gamblers cannot, by some juggle, take five cents or ten cents from its value, in twenty-four hours, as they could a few years ago. The public burdens have been largely reduced. Our exports far exceed our imports, and our balance-sheet with the world shows an immense sum in our favor. The boom of business is heard in the land. The preachers of calamity are out of date. Commerce, industry, enterprise, capital, labor, all feel the impulse of substantial prosperity running through every artery of public and private activities. These are the evidences, on every hand, of the wisdom of Republican administration. And what are we offered as an inducement for “a change”? Absolutely nothing save the cheap protestations of cheap and hungry Democratic orators and newspapers that, should their party be returned to power, it does not intend, as it threatened a few years ago, to destroy the public credit, cripple manufacturing industries, debase the currency, and destroy our banking system. Only this, and nothing more.

I am a Republican because I am in favor of protecting American industries and American labor. The population of the United States is increasing at the rate of a million a year; the wealth of our country is augmenting at the rate of two hundred millions annually; its coal area is more than six times as great as that of all Europe; its iron mines are capable of supporting a prodigious manufacturing population; its railways aggregate nearly a hundred thousand miles; its agricultural and mineral resources are incalculable; and it can produce, within its own territorial limits, almost everything produced in any other country of the habitable globe. Such a country as this, with such vast and varied productions and resources, must legislate, not for the world, but for itself. During the twenty-four years of Republican rule it has had an unexampled growth. Its population has increased over sixty per cent.; its agricultural exports over six hundred per cent.; and its foreign trade from seven hundred millions to nearly twelve hundred millions of dollars annually. Under Republican administration opportunities for employment have enormously multiplied, and consumers and producers have constantly been brought nearer to one another, through the vast increase of manufacturing industries. At the same time nearly every manufactured article is cheaper, to-day, in the United States than it was thirty years ago, when ninety per cent. of our manufactured goods were made abroad, instead of only ten per cent., as now. The Republican policy of protection to home industries is making this a self-sustaining, self-relying country. It is giving muscle an equal chance with money. It is developing and enlarging all the sources of National prosperity. It has made all the people happier, healthier, and more contented than they ever were before, or could be under any other policy. Millions of men, who win their bread by the labor of their hands or brain, know this, and they are swelling the ranks of the great party that has always been the advocate and protector of American labor. The black banners of industry that float in the morning air from countless factories all over the land; the clangor of a hundred thousand trailing trains; the whirling clatter of a million wheels and spindles—these are the sign-manuals which the Republican policy of protection has written, in indelible letters, on the face of the busy land.

And now, having given you the reasons for “the faith that is in me”—having told you why I am a Republican, and why, in my judgment, every good citizen ought to be a Republican—I want to add a few words of personal import. I am the candidate of this great party for the highest executive office in the gift of the people of Kansas. I was nominated by the unanimous vote of the largest delegate convention ever held in the State; by a Convention representing every county, city and township in the State; by a Convention whose proceedings were distinguished for fairness, decorum, intelligence, and sobriety; by a Convention whose delegates were chosen with almost unprecedented unanimity, and who fairly, I think I have good reason for saying, voiced the preference of a vast majority of the Republicans of Kansas. I was nominated by this great Convention, not only with entire unanimity, but without pledges or promises from me, and without trades, combinations, or any manner of political trickery. I was nominated on a platform which any honest, self-respecting, law-respecting, law-obeying Republican can indorse, and ought to indorse. Yet I am told that there are men, claiming to be Republicans, who say they are going to vote against me, and vote for my opponent, because they don’t like the platform.

To this class of men, and to all others, I want to say a few words. All State officers are required to make solemn oath that they will support the Constitution of the State, and the Constitution specifically sets forth that the Governor “shall see that the laws are faithfully executed.” The Republican party, in its platform, simply affirms this plain Constitutional duty. The people of the State, in their sovereign capacity, and without distinction of party, have adopted a Constitutional provision known as the prohibitory amendment. It was voted for by nearly one hundred thousand citizens; it received a majority of nearly eight thousand of the votes cast on the question; and it received the support of nearly nine thousand more voters than cast their ballots for the present Governor, whose election has never been challenged. The Supreme Court of the State has affirmed the validity of this amendment, and of all the forms by which it was adopted. Yet it is asserted that because the Republican party recognizes, in its platform, these unchallenged, unquestionable facts, and demands that State officers shall faithfully and honestly discharge the duties imposed upon them by the Constitution and by their oath of office, I am to be opposed by men calling themselves Republicans.

If this be true, I shall make no complaint. I want to be fairly, explicitly understood. If I am elected Governor, when, in the presence of Almighty God and the sovereign people of Kansas, I raise my hand to take the oath of office, I shall not do so with falsehood on my lips and perjury in my heart. I will not equivocate. I will do my duty, under the Constitution and laws I have sworn to see faithfully executed. I make no apology to any person under the shining stars for holding this faith. I am grateful—sincerely grateful—to the Republicans of Kansas for the distinguished honor they have conferred upon me. I appreciate their confidence, their esteem, their friendship, and I shall try, earnestly try, to deserve it. But I should feel that I had dishonored the great party to secure whose triumph I have devoted all the years of my manhood; that I had brought deserved reproach upon myself, and the wife and little children who bear my name, if, having been honored by an election as the Chief Executive of this splendid, prosperous, intelligent Commonwealth, I should, by any act, or word, or deed, prove false to my oath of office, or to the duties I voluntarily assumed.

I did not vote for the prohibitory amendment. But I accept, as a law-respecting citizen, the decision of the majority on this question. Ours is a people’s government, a Republican government, in which the majority rule and ought to rule. And he is neither a good Republican nor a true American who refuses to subordinate his own opinions, his own preferences or prejudices, to the decision of the majority. This is the very foundation-stone on which the whole fabric of our government rests. Destroy it, remove it, and lawlessness, anarchy, civil war, are the natural and inevitable consequences. I believe in the right of the people to rule. I am for peace, for order, for liberty regulated by law, and for the conservators of all of them—popular education, intelligence, sobriety, and a Constitutional government which the chosen officers of the people administer in accordance with the expressed will of the people, for the people, and to promote the people’s interests.

If there is a Republican, here or anywhere in the State—a Republican who glories in his party’s glorious record, as I do; who is proud of the splendid achievements with which it has illuminated the brightest pages of the world’s progress, as I am; who believes it is the party of intelligence, of social order, of law, as I do—if there is a man here who is, or ever has been, a Republican of this order, and who is going to vote against this great, intelligent, beneficent, law-respecting party, in the present contest in Kansas, because it sustains the Constitution of the State, and demands that sworn officers shall faithfully and honestly execute the laws of the State, I should like to see him. If there is such a man here, I should like to see him stand up and be counted.

Such a man—if there is one—is not, and never was, a true Republican. He may have voted the Republican ticket now and then, and called himself a Republican; but he has never had, he has not now, the real grace of true Republicanism in his heart. More than this, he is not even a true American. The genuine American respects the decisions of majorities, and bows in humble submission to the majesty of law. He loves the flag of his country, not because it is red, white, and blue, but because it is the symbol of the people’s government, of social order, of the Constitution and laws of the land. When the soldier saw it, among the tangled underbrush at Chicamauga, or moving up the embattled heights of Mission Ridge, or half enshrouded in the sulphurous smoke at Gettysburg, or planted amid the dead and dying on the ramparts of Vicksburg, it was not a piece of striped cloth he saw, but his country’s body and blood—her education, her progress, her moral, social, commercial, and political systems, her Constitution and her laws—and this was why he was ready to follow the flag, and fight for it, and die for it if need be, that all it symbolized might be preserved, a priceless heritage for all the generations of men.

Alike as a citizen or as a public officer I shall at all times maintain and uphold these ideas of private and public duty, because the whole fabric of our American system of government rests upon them.

Now, my friends, I shall not detain you longer. In telling you why I am a Republican, I have stated the reasons why, in my judgment, every man who loves his country, every citizen who values good government, every citizen who appreciates the blessings of liberty regulated by law, should be a Republican. And a Republican, my friends, is a man who votes the Republican ticket. This little fact ought to be understood. The man who says he is a Republican, and in the same breath declares that he is going to vote the Democratic ticket, or for Democratic candidates, is—well, he need not be surprised if everybody mistakes him for a Democrat. As the old colored woman said: “It’s ’stonishin’ how dem pickanninies look like one anoder—’speshully Pomp!” If you are a Republican, stand by your party and its candidates. “Kicking” is the characteristic of a mule, but I never heard that it added either to the value of the animal or to the esteem in which he is held. The horse that has a habit of “bolting” when the race is on, may be a good-enough horse, but he never wins either confidence, cheers, or purses. The brood of “kickers” and “bolters” is not one that should be emulated. Stand up for your party, wholly, completely, or not at all. Keep in its ranks, or go over to the enemy. A beautiful spectacle—a spectacle for gods and men—is the Republican who says he is going to march through this campaign that is just opening, shouting for Blaine and Logan, but will march with a crowd that regards no slander too vile, no abuse too low, no denunciation too vulgar or too bitter to apply to Blaine and Logan! Just think of a Democratic procession with these “kickers” in its ranks—before them an old-fashioned Democratic banner, inscribed: “Do you want your daughter to marry a nigger?” And behind them other banners, bearing such inscriptions as: “Jim Blaine, the Tattooed Man—Read the Mulligan Letters;” or, “Jack Logan Enlisting Men for the Rebel Army;” or, “The Republican Party Must Go that Free Whisky May Come!” Don’t you think it would stir the heart and warm the blood of a true Republican to march with such a crowd? Could any genuine Republican do it?

With such a record as it can point to, the Republican party has a right to expect the continued devotion of the best minds and hearts of the country. It has a right to more than this. It has a right to expect of its members and friends that unity, concord and tolerance so essential to its success. It has a right to demand of its members that they shall not indulge in useless quarrels over differences which only the lapse of time can finally adjust and reconcile. Every soldier who followed the old flag will, I think, call to mind occasions when he firmly believed that the war was not conducted as it should be, and when the gravest differences of opinion concerning the methods and policy of his commanders were widely prevalent. But if he was a true soldier, he remembers also, and with justifiable pride, that while he occasionally indulged a soldier’s privilege, and did a little wholesome private growling, he never for an instant forgot his duty to his country, and abated no jot of his enthusiastic devotion to her cause. During the war there was only one Fitz John Porter. The Republican who thinks Porter was justly punished, should not, in politics, emulate his example. The true soldier was for his country, no matter how his commanders conducted the war; the true Republican, animated by the same spirit, aims his guns at the common enemy, and never at the soldiers of the Republican ranks.