He was accused of membership in the Knights of the Golden Circle, an organization promoting Southern conquest of much of Central America and the Caribbean as a pro-slavery empire.

His bitter cries against protective tariffs and national banks, his intense race prejudice, his suspicion of the eastern Yankee, his devotion to personal liberty, his defense of the Constitution and state rights faithfully reflected the views of his constituents.

He believed that whites' temporary loss of total political control in places where they were not in the majority made them "as very a slave in the hands of a brutal overseer as any negro ever driven in a cotton-field, and that he had no more power under existing laws to 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.

"[5] 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.

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.

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.

[5] Throughout the 1880s, during the Presidencies of James A. Garfield and Chester Arthur, Voorhees and his fellow Indiana Senator Benjamin Harrison both advocated increasing America's trade and interaction with the United Kingdom.

[10] Republican senator George F. Hoar of Massachusetts, who rarely agreed with his Indiana colleague about anything, declared him "a very kind-hearted man indeed, always willing to do a kindness to any of his associates, or to any person in trouble.

If he could not be relied on to protect the Treasury against claims of doubtful validity, when they were urged by persons in need, or who in any way excited his sympathy, it ought to be said in defence of him, that he would have been quite as willing to relieve them to the extent of his power from his private resources.

He was a member of the powerful Finance Committee throughout his service in the Senate, and his first speech in that body was a defence of the free coinage of silver and a plea for the preservation of the full legal tender value of greenback currency.

"The readers of the News are aware that it has been repeatedly forced, by the variety and brilliance of his misinformation, to compliment Senator Voorhees on the unfailing inaccuracy of his historical statements, whether political, social, or literary," an Indianapolis newspaper remarked.

"[4] In 1893, Voorhees came in for serious controversy when President Grover Cleveland called Congress into extra session to repeal the silver purchase clause of the 1890 Sherman Act.

From members of the Indiana House delegation, Voorhees found an intense desire that he do nothing to risk their own political futures, as any blockage of the repeal bill would be sure to do.

Realizing that he would have to pick his fights, and sweetened with great dollops of patronage by the Administration, Voorhees agreed to carry the repeal bill through, and he kept absolute faith.

In late October, when a compromise was proposed that would delay the silver purchase act's repeal until July 1, 1894, thirty seven of the forty-four Democratic senators signed a letter endorsing it.

[17] Vooorhees delivered his last speech in the Senate in January 1896, a plea on behalf of silver coinage and denouncing the tariff protectionists and centralizers of government power.