Some partial and imperfect attempts were made to put in force laws intended to accomplish this result.
They never went farther than enactments designed to maintain order at the polls, to secure the voter from actual violence, and to provide for such scrutiny as to make it clear that the vote was duly counted and properly returned, with a right of appeal to the Courts of the United States in case of a contest, the decision of the Court to be subject to the final authority of the House of Representatives.

These laws, although they had the support of eminent and zealous Democrats and although they were as much needed and had as much application to the Northern cities as to the Southern States, were the object of bitter denunciation from the beginning.

Good men in the North listened with incredulity to the narrative of well established facts of cruelty and murder and fraud.

These stories were indignantly denied at the time, although they are not only confessed, but vauntingly and triumphantly affirmed now.

The whole country seems to be made uneasy when the old practice to which it had been accustomed everywhere of having offences tried by a jury taken by lot from the people of the neighborhood, and the result of election ascertained by officers selected from the bystanders at the polls, is departed from.
Besides, no strictness of laws which provide only for the proceedings at the elections will secure their freedom if it be possible to intimidate the voters, especially men like the colored voters at the South, from attending the elections, by threats, outrages and actual violence at their homes.