protect his personal freedom than an African bondsman on the auction-block before the war...the liberation of one race had been followed by the enslavement of another." Voorhees complained repeatedly about what he perceived as the North's unjust treatment of the vanquished South, claiming it would be a challenge to find a group in history treated worse than white Southerners during Reconstruction. In his "Plunder of the Eleven States" speech made to the U.S. House of Representatives on March 23, 1872, Voorhees outlined the crimes he perceived to be committed upon the South by the North: From turret to foundation you tore down the government of eleven States. You left not one stone upon another. You not only destroyed their local laws, but you trampled upon their ruins. You called Conventions to frame new Constitutions for these old States. You not only said who should be elected to rule over these States, but you said who should elect them. You fixed the quality... of the voters. You purged the ballot box of intelligence and virtue, and in their stead you placed the most ignorant and unqualified...in the world to rule over these people....You clung to her throat; you battered her features out of shape and recognition, determined that your party should have undisputed possession and enjoyment of her offices, her honors, and her substance. Then bound hand and foot you handed her over to the rapacity of robbers.... There is no form of ruin to which she has not fallen a prey, no curse with which she has not been baptized, no cup of humiliation and suffering her people have not drained to the dregs. There she stands the result of your handiwork bankrupt in money, ruined in credit... her prosperity blighted at home and abroad, without peace, happiness, or hope. There she stands with her skeleton frame admonishing all the world of the loathsome consequences of a government fashioned in hate and fanaticism, and founded upon the ignorant and vicious... Her sins may have been many and deep, and the color of scarlet, yet they will become as white as snow in comparison with those you have committed against her in the hour of her helplessness and distress. I challenge the darkest annals of the human race for a parallel to the robberies which have been perpetrated on these eleven American States. Had you sown seeds of kindness and good