Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/49

Rh rejected citizens, and the rest of the one thousand who had not been heard were simply disfranchised. On what ground was this done? On the ground that the registration of those individuals had been objected to by somebody. By whom they were objected to, they were never informed. They simply learned that affidavits had been filed against them. Neither was their demand to have the affidavits produced complied with. They obtained only a general intimation of the charges against them, and were required to prove their loyalty; and the board of review not sitting long enough to hear even one-third of them, they were simply disfranchised, for the registering officers were sufficiently satisfied that they ought not to vote.

Time has shed a little more light upon those proceedings also. It turns out that over five hundred of those secret affidavits, on the ground of which so many citizens were deprived of their right to vote, had been manufactured by and under the direction of one man, one James Beach, living at St. Joseph, Missouri, an employee of insurance companies, who was at different times prosecuted for embezzlement. The hundreds of affidavits of this individual were for a long time kept a profound secret among the official records of the registering officers. But some of them have found their way to other people's eyes, and it will edify you to know, sir, that hundreds of men were deprived of their suffrage for no other reason but that such a disreputable individual, of whom the most respectable Republicans of St. Joseph assured me that they would not believe him under oath, objected to them simply on the ground, as the affidavits read, “that the person mentioned in the affidavit has the reputation of being disloyal or of being a rebel sympathizer.” It is also instructive to know that the same man importuned the Representative in Congress of that district to