those whom they please to call the "Republican leaders." If ever a
party existed that had no recognized leaders, it is the Republican
party. Composed for the last five years, at least, of men who,
themselves professing all shades of opinion, were agreed only in a
determination to sustain the honor and preserve the existence of the
nation, it has been rather a majority than a party, employing the
legislative machine to carry out the purposes of public opinion. The
people were the true inspirers of all its measures, and accordingly it
was left without a definite policy the moment the mere politicians in
its ranks became doubtful as to what direction the popular mind would
take. It had no recognized leader either in the House or Senate just at
the time when it first stood in need of such. The majority of its
representatives there tried in vain to cast any political horoscope by
which it would be safe for them individually to be guided. They showed
the same distrust of the sound judgment of the people and their power
to grasp principles that they showed at the beginning of the war, and
at every discouraging moment while it was going on. Now that the signs
of the times show unmistakably to what the popular mind is making
itself up, they have once more a policy, if we may call that so which
is only a calculation of what it would be "safe to go before the people
with," as they call it. It is always safe to go before them with plain
principles of right, and with the conclusions that must be drawn from
them by common sense, though this is what too many of our public men
can never understand. Now joining a Know-Nothing "lodge," now hanging
on the outskirts of a Fenian "circle," they mistake the momentary
eddies of popular whimsy for the great current that sets always
strongly in one direction through the life and history of the nation.
Is it, as foreigners assert, the fatal defect of our system to fill our
highest offices with men whose views in politics are bounded by the
next district election? When we consider how noble the science
is,--nobler even than astronomy, for it deals with the mutual
repulsions and attractions, not of inert masses, but of bodies endowed
with thought and will, calculates moral forces, and reckons the orbits
of God's purposes toward mankind,--we feel sure that it is to find
nobler teachers and students, and to find them even here.
There is another class of men who are honestly drawn toward the policy
of what we are fain, for want of a more definite name, to call the
Presidential Opposition party, by their approval of the lenient
measures which they suppose to be peculiar to it. But our objection to
the measures advocated by the Philadelphia Convention, so far as we can
trace any definite shape amid the dust-cloud of words, is, not they
would treat the Rebel States with moderation, but that they propose to
take them back on trust. We freely admit that we should have been
inclined to see more reasonableness in this course if we had not the
examples of Jamaica and New Orleans before our eyes; if we had not seen
both there and in other instances with which history supplies us, that
it is not safe to leave the settlement of such matters in the hands of
men who would be more than human if they had not the prejudices and the
resentments of caste. Here is just one of those cases of public concern
which call for the arbitrament of a cool and impartial third
party,--the very office expected of a popular government,--which should
as carefully abstain from meddling in matters that may be safely left
to be decided by natural laws as it should be prompt to interfere where
those laws would to the general detriment be inoperative. It should be
remembered that self-interest, though its requirements may seem plain
and imperative to an unprejudiced bystander, is something which men,
and even communities, are often ready to sacrifice at the bidding of
their passions, and of none so readily as their pride. As for the
attachment between master and slave, whose existence is sometimes
asseverated in the face of so many glaring facts to the contrary, and
on which we are asked to depend as something stronger than written law,
we have very little faith in it. The system of clanship in the Scottish
Highlands is the strongest case to which we can appeal in modern times
of a truly patriarchal social order. In that, the pride of the chief
was answered by the willing devotion of the sept, and the two were
bound together as closely as kindred blood, immemorial tradition, and
mutual dependence could link them; and yet, the moment it became for
the interest of the chieftain, in whom alone was the landed title, to
convert the mountain slopes into sheep-walks, farewell to all
considerations of ancestral legend and ideal picturesqueness! The
clansmen were dispossessed of their little holdings, and shipped off to
the colonies like cattle, by the very men for whom they would have
given their lives without question. The relation, just like that of
master and slave, or the proposed one of superior and dependent, in the
South, had become an anachronism, to preserve which would have been a
vain struggle against that power of Necessity which the Greeks revered
as something god-like. In our own case, so far from making it for the
interest of the ruling classes at the South to elevate the condition of
the black man, the policy of Mr. Johnson offers them a bribe to keep
him in a state of hopeless dependency and subjection. It gives them
more members of Congress in proportion as they have more unrepresented
inhabitants. Mr. Beecher asks us (and we see no possible reason for
doubting the honesty of his opinions, whatever may be their soundness)
whether we are afraid of the South, and tells us that, if we allow them
to govern us, we shall richly deserve it. It is not that we are afraid
of, nor are we in the habit of forming our opinions on any such
imaginary grounds; but we confess that we are afraid of committing an
act of national injustice, of national dishonor, of national breach of
faith, and therefore of national unwisdom and weakness. Moderation is
an excellent thing; but taking things for granted is not moderation,
and there may be such a thing as being immoderate in concession and
confidence. Aristotle taught us long ago that true moderation was as
far from the too-much of blind passion on the one hand as from that of
equally blind lukewarmness on the other. We have an example of wise
reconstructive policy in that measure of the Bourbon-restoration
ministry, which compensated the returned emigrants for their
confiscated estates by a grant from the public treasury. And the
measure was wise, for the reason that it enabled the new proprietors
and the ousted ones to live as citizens of the same country together
without mutual hatred and distrust. We do not propose to compensate the
slaveholder for the loss of his chattels, because the cases are not
parallel, and because Mr. Johnson no less than we acknowledges the
justice and validity of their emancipation. But the situation of the
negro is strikingly parallel with that of the new holders of land in
France. As they were entitled to security, so he has a right not only
to be secured in his freedom, but in the consequences which
legitimately flow from it. For it is only so that he can be insured
against that feeling of distrust and uncertainty of the future which
will prevent him from being profitable to himself, his former master,
and the country. If we sought a parallel for Mr. Johnson's "policy," we
should find it in James II., thinking his prerogative strong enough to
overcome the instincts, convictions, and fears of England.
However much fair-minded men may have been wearied with the backing and
filling of Congress, and their uncertainty of action on some of the
most important questions that have come before them,--however the
dignity, and even propriety, of their attitude toward Mr. Johnson may
be in some respects honestly called in question,--no one who has looked
fairly at the matter can pronounce the terms they have imposed on the
South as conditions of restoration harsh ones. The character of
Congress is not before the country, but simply the character of the
plan they propose. For ourselves, we should frankly express our disgust
at the demagogism which courted the Fenians; for, however much we may
sympathize with the real wrongs of Ireland, it was not for an American
Congress to declare itself in favor of a movement which based itself on
the claim of every Irish voter in the country to a double citizenship,
in which the adopted country was made secondary, and which, directed as
it was against a province where Irishmen are put on equal terms with
every other inhabitant, and where their own Church is the privileged
one, was nothing better than burglary and murder. Whatever may be Mr.
Seward's faults, he was certainly right in his dealing with that
matter, unless he is to be blamed for slowness. But as regards the
terms offered by Congress to the South, they are very far from harsh or
unreasonable; they are lamb-like compared to what we had reason to fear
from Mr. Johnson, if we might judge by his speeches and declarations of
a year or two ago. But for the unhappy hallucination which led Mr.
Johnson first to fancy himself the people of the United States, and
then to quarrel with the party which elected him for not granting that
he was so, they would not have found a man in the North to question
their justice and propriety, unless among those who from the outset
would have been willing to accept Mr. Jefferson Davis as the legitimate
President of the whole country. The terms imposed by Congress really
demand nothing more than that the South should put in practice at home
that Monroe Doctrine of which it has always been so clamorous a
supporter when it could be used for party purposes. The system of
privileged classes which the South proposes to establish is a relic of
old Europe which we think it bad policy to introduce again on this
continent, after our so fresh experience in the war of the evil
consequences that may spring from it. Aristocracy can form no more
intimate and hearty union with democracy under one form than under
another; and unless such a union be accomplished, or we can see some
reasonable hope of its future accomplishment, we are as far from our
object as ever.
The plan proposed disfranchises no one, does not even interfere with
the right of the States to settle the conditions of the franchise. It
merely asks that the privilege shall be alike within reach of all,
attainable on the same terms by those who have shown themselves our
friends as by those whose hands were so lately red with the blood of
our nearest and dearest. We have nothing to do with the number of
actual loyalists at the South, but with the number of possible ones.
The question is not how many now exist there, and what are their
rights, but how many may be made to exist there, and by what means. The
duty of the country to itself transcends all private claims or class
interests. And when people speak of "the South," do they very clearly
define to themselves what they mean by the words? Do they not really
mean, without knowing it, the small body of dangerous men who have
misguided that part of the country to its own ruin, and almost to that
of the Republic? In the mind of our government the South should have no
such narrow meaning. It should see behind the conspirators of yesterday
an innumerable throng of dusky faces, with their dumb appeal, not to
its mercy, its generosity, or even its gratitude, but to its plighted
faith, to the solemn engagement of its chief magistrate and their
martyr. Any theory of the South which leaves out the negro is a scandal
and reproach to our honesty; any attempt at another of those fatal
compromises which ignore his claims upon us, but cannot ignore his
claims upon nature and God and that inevitable future which we may hope
to put far from us, but which is even now at our door, would be an
imputation on our judgment, and an acknowledgment that we were unworthy
to measure our strength with a great occasion when it met us face to
face.
We are very far from joining in the unfeeling outcry which is sometimes
raised by thoughtless persons against the Southern people, because they
decorate with flowers the graves of their dead soldiers, and cherish
the memory of those who fell in the defence of a cause which they could
not see to be already fallen before they entered its service. They have
won our respect, the people of Virginia especially, by their devotion
and endurance in sustaining what they believed to be their righteous
quarrel. They would rather deserve our reprobation, if they were
wanting in these tributes to natural and human feeling. They are as
harmless as the monument to the memory of those who fell for the
Pretender, which McDonald of Glenaladale raised after the last of the
Stuarts was in his grave. Let us sympathize with and respect all such
exhibitions of natural feeling. But at the same time let us take care
that it shall not be at the risk of his life that the poor black shall
fling his tribute on the turf of those who died, with equal sacrifice
of self, in a better cause. Let us see to it that the Union men of the
South shall be safe in declaring and advocating the reasons of their
faith in a cause which we believe to be sacred. Let us secure such
opportunities of education to the masses of the Southern people,
whether white or black, as shall make any future rebellion
impracticable, and render it possible for the dead of both sides to
sleep peaceably together under the safeguard of a common humanity,
while the living dwell under the protection of a nationality which both
shall value alike. Let us put it out of the power of a few ambitious
madmen to shake, though they could not endanger, the foundations of a
structure which enshrines the better hope of mankind. When Congress
shall again come together, strong in the sympathy of a united people,
let them show a dignity equal to the importance of the crisis. Let them
give the President a proof of their patriotism, not only by allowing
him the opportunity, but by making it easy for him, to return to the
national position he once occupied. Let them not lower their own
dignity and that of the nation by any bandying of reproaches with the
Executive. The cause which we all have at heart is vulgarized by any
littleness or show of personal resentment in its representatives, and
is of too serious import to admit of any childishness or trifling. Let
there be no more foolish talk of impeachment for what is at best a poor
infirmity of nature, and could only be raised into a harmful importance
by being invested with the dignity of a crime against the state.
Nothing could be more unwise than to entangle in legal quibbles a cause
so strong in its moral grounds, so transparent in its equity, and so
plain to the humblest apprehension in its political justice and
necessity. We have already one criminal half turned martyr at Fortress
Monroe; we should be in no hurry to make another out of even more
vulgar material,--for unhappily martyrs are not Mercuries. We have only
to be unswervingly faithful to what is the true America of our hope and
belief, and whatever is American will rise from one end of the country
to the other instinctively to our side, with more than ample means of
present succor and of final triumph. It is only by being loyal and
helpful to Truth that men learn at last how loyal and helpful she can
be to them.
THE RIVERSIDE PRESS
Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co.
Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.