Speech Of Hon William Windom Of Minn

Author : William Windom
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331305590
Total Pages : 28 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (55 download)

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Download or read book The Exodus written by William Windom and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-13 with total page 28 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from The Exodus: Speech of Hon. William Windom, of Minnesota, in the United States Senate, Monday, June 14, 1880 The Senate having under consideration the report of the committee appointed to investigate the causes of the migration of the colored people from the Southern to the Northern States- Mr. Windom said: Mr. President: In the month of December last a few hundred colored men, women, and children, discontented with their condition in North Carolina and hoping to improve it were emigrating to Indiana. They attracted the attention of the vigilant Senator from the latter State, who imagined he saw in that movement an "infamous conspiracy" against the Democratic party. Hoping to avert the threatened doom of the Democracy in Indiana, he promptly presented a resolution directing the appointment of a committee to inquire why American citizens were thus presuming to remove to his State from North Carolina. At that time twenty-five thousand refugees from Democratic injustice and oppression had gone from the South to Kansas, while only a few hundred had migrated to Indiana; but the former had me no impression on the honorable Senator, while the latter filled him with unutterable dismay. His original resolution ignored the mighty movement toward Kansas and southern only to know why the few had dared to enter the State of Indiana. It was intended by its author to have confined this inquiry to that one point, but on its passage through the Senate the resolution was amended and enlarged at the instance of the honorable Senator from Iowa [Mr. Allison] so as to embrace the exodus from all the Southern to the Northern States. The theory of the Senator from Indiana was that this movement toward his- State was the result of a "secret and wicked conspiracy by partisan leaders at the North" to overthrow the Democracy of Indiana by the importation of negro voters from North Carolina. The utter absurdity of this theory was apparent to everybody except the honorable Senator himself. If the Republican party or its leaders proposed to import negroes into Indiana for political purposes, why take them from North Carolina? Why import them from a State where the Republicans hope and expect to carry the election, when there were thousands upon thousands ready and anxious to come from States certainly Democratic? Why transport them by rail at heavy expense half way across the continent when they could have taken them from Kentucky without any expense or brought them up the Mississippi River by steamers at merely nominal cost? Why send twenty-five thousand to Kansas to swell her forty thousand Republican majority, and only seven or eight hundred to Indiana? These considerations brand with falsehood and folly the charge that the exodus was a political movement induced by northern partisan leaders, but they in no wise deterred the honorable Senator from his purpose. He was determined to make political capital for his party, and in order to sustain his preposterous theory, the committee of which he was chairman devoted six months of hard and fruitless labor, during which they examined one hundred and fifty-nine witnesses selected from all parts of the country, mainly with reference to their supposed readiness to prove said theory, expended over $30,000, and filled three large volumes of testimony. The results of that stupendous effort and prodigal expenditure of money are all condensed in the speech of the Senator from Indiana. No distorted circumstance that could tend to create a suspicion, no word of any witness which, disconnected from its context, could be perverted into a seeming confirmation of this theory, has been omitted by him in his skillful argument. Hence the reader of that speech will find all that the committee could discover, and all that the vivid imagination of the Senator could in- vent to prove that the exodus had its inception, inspiration, and encouragement from northern Republican leaders.