Democratic Sentinel, Volume 1, Number 38, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 November 1877 — The Southern Policy. [ARTICLE]

The Southern Policy.

There was a meeting at Holyoke, Mass., on Friday night, says the New York World, to approve the policy of the administration, and President Seelye, of Amherst, delivered an address on the occasion, which is remarkable for the fact that it justifies the Southern policy of President Hayes on the simple logical ground that this policy is just in itself and should have been pursued from the beginning. This position involves the acknowledgment that the reconstruction policy originally chosen by the Republican party, and maintained so long at such cost was essentially wrong and unwise. We think that President Seelye, in taking this stand, shows his usual honesty and strong common sense. It is useless for the supporters of the administration to attempt to show that its Southern policy would have been wrong a year ago, while it is altogether good and wise to-day. It is absurd to maintain that a sound system put in operation six months beyond a certain limit becomes unsound. Therefore, all who are heartily in ascord with President Hayes should fling aside the pretense that his course is a mere matter of expediency or a piece of political experiment, and adopt the manly and honest reasoning of President Seelye, even though they are in consequence obliged to concede that the Republican party has been wrong in the past and the Demoocratic party right. The theory of Stevens, Sumner and their compeers, that the Southern States had forfeited all their rights by rebellion, was a narrow and a bigoted one. Its consequences—the establishment of military governments, the attempts at reconstruction by means of the negro vote, the erection of the color-line and the strife and corruption incident to carpet-bag government—were political evils that threatened the whole country with ruin. Let this be conceded, since the supreme test of all policies, time, has proven the weakness of the Republican reconstruction policy. Let it be conceded that those who maintained that the war was waged to restore the authority of the constitution in all parts of the Union, and not to deprive any portion of its due representation—for the life of States and not for their death—were right from the first in acknowledging that they are right now. As coming from an opponent of the Democracy, we quote with a satisfaction free from any mixture of malicious triumph this plain statement by President Seelye: “If we were right in resisting the Southern rebellion and in treating it as a rebellion to its close, then when those rebels were conquered the States in which the rebellion had been waged had just as much right to a representation in the National Congress and just as much right to partake in all the privileges of the National Government as they ever had. And this I not only now believe to be true, but I believed it at the time, and publicly declared it then, and, had it then been taken as the public policy of the nation, I still believe we should have escaped both the blunders and the crimes which have made our reconstruction of the Union so painful and so perilous. But we did not take it. Had Mr. Lincoln lived it might have been otherwise, but, when the lines of administration dropped from his hands, there was no one to take them up and hold them wisely. We said these States were no longer States in the Union. We remanded them to a quasi territorial condition. We sent them military governors from Washington. We contradicted all our doctrine in the war. We thus took a false position in the eyes of the world, and a position which the South itself felt to be bitterly and keenly unjust. Instead of proceeding in the course fitted to allay the prejudice which had been engendered and the passions which had been excited in the war, and which might have shown us that ‘ peace has her victories as well as war,’ we co aid hardly have devised a better way than the one adopted to keep up the hatred and increase the hostility which had already brought such lamentable results to both sections of the nation. ”