Official proceedings of the National Democratic convention, held at New York, July 4-9, 1868.: Reported by George Wakeman, official reporter of the Convention.

NATIONAL DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION.
claimed Bonaparte, when freedom and its defenders expired under the sharp
edge of his sword The peace to which Grant invites us is the peace of despotism and death. Those who seek to restore the Constitution by executing
the will of the people condemning the reconstruction acts, already pronounced
in the elections of last year (and which will, I am convinced, be still more
emphatically expressed by the election of the Democratic candidate as President of the United States), are denounced as revolutionists by the partisans
of this vindictive Congress. Negro Suffrage (which the popular vote of New
York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Connecticut, and other
States has condemned as expressly against the letter of the Constitution)
must stand, because their Senators and Representatives have willed it. If
the people shall again condemn these atrocious measures by the election of
the Democratic candidate for President, they must not be disturbed! Although decided to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, and although
the President is sworn to sustain and support the Constitution, the will of a
fraction of a Congress, reinforced with its partisan emissaries sent to the
South, and supported there by the soldiery, must stand against the will of the
people, and the decision of the Supreme Court, and the solemn oath of the
President, to maintain and support the Constitution! It is revolutionary to
execute the will of the people! It is revolutionary to execute the judgment
of the Supreme Court! It is revolutionary in the President to keep inviolate
his oath to sustain the Constitution! This false construction of the vital
principle of our Government is the last resort of those who would have their
arbitrary reconstruction sway and supersede our time-honored institutions.
The nation will say that the Constitution must be restored, and the will of
the people again prevail. The appeal to the peaceful ballot-to attain this end
is not war, -is not revolution. They-make war and revolution who attempt
to arrest this quiet mode of putting aside military despotism and the usurpations of a fragment of a Congress, asserting absolute power over that benign
system of regulated liberty left us by our fathers. This must be allowed to
take its course. This is the only road to peace. It will come with the election of the Democratic candidate, and not with the election of that mailed
warrior, whose bayonets are now at the throats of eight millions of people in
the South, to compel them to support him as a candidate for the Presidency,
and to submit to the domination of an alien race of semi-barbarous men.
No perversion of truth, or audacity of misrepresentation, can exceed that
which hails this candidate in arms as an angel of peace.
I am, very respectfully, your most obedient servant,
FRANK P. BLAIR.
To Gen. G. W. MORGAN, and others.
181
4