Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 November 1880 — WHAT HAS THE COUNTRY GAINED ? [ARTICLE]

WHAT HAS THE COUNTRY GAINED ?

[From the New York World.] The country will have time enough, and we fear reason enough, to reflect on the causes of the defeat of Gen. Hancock. It is sufficient. to-day to point out some of the more obvious and general of these causes. The tariff issue which the Republican orators and journalists, without knowing or caring what it meant, imagined would be useful to them as a means of frightening business men, equally ignorant, to a great extent superseded the tection•l issue in the manufacturing districts' of the Eastern States. But, taking the = ountry through, it is evident that “the solid South ” was still the bugbear upon which the Republicans most successTheir appeal was to sectionnl hateiind hatred of a section which had been fairly beaten in battle, and to fear of a section which Senator Conkling, the most conspicuous advocate of the Republican cause, devoted his speeches to showing is too weak to be in any way formidible. That Americans should have been moved to vote for a candidate like Garfield by appeals of this kind does not speak well either for their magnanimity or for their intelligence. The cry of “ the solid South ” is the more curious since, practically, the sectional * ‘ issue ” is not an issue at all in a political sense. A political issue is raised when one party proposes a policy or a system of laws which the other party opposes, or when one party proposes the repeal of legislation by which the other party stands. What issue of that kind was raised by the Republican campaign orators ? The laws providing for the Federal control of elections will undoubtedly be repealed by the Democrats if the Democrats ever have power to repeal them, but these laws are not sectional. They are simply devices to enable the party in control of the ad ministration to swindle the opposition in communities in which the opposition has a majority of voters. This is perfectly well understood, and, except publicly, is not denied. These laws are simply part of the party machine and have nothing to do with the purposes which parties are organized to promote. They will be used against the East or the West, just as they have been used against the South, whenever the occasion arises. One would have imagined, to hear the Republican speakers talk, that they seriously proposed to do something about the South, but they do not. The logical consequence of their position is that the reconstruction laws should be revived, and the South remanded to a condition of tutelage and of government by Major Generals, such as it was subjected to in 1867. But in point of fact no measure looking to that end has been advocated or so much as introduced by any Republican in Congress or elsewhere. The collapse of the reconstruction laws in 1877 was final and complete. Mr. Hayes withdrew the troops from the South with the acquiescence of the whole of his own par ty, the leaders of winch were alienated, not by that action, as to which he plainly had no alternative, but by the spasmodic and somewhat ridiculous attacks he made upon their own power. Gen. Grant would equally have been compelled to withdraw the troops. The failure of Republican reconstruction was confessed in 1877. If Grant means through Garfield to try the experiment again in 1881 he has kept his intention a secret, and his secret has been as well guarded as the conspiracy of the South and the Democrats of the North to pay the “ rebel claims.” If it was really proposed to revive the reconstruction acts the proposition would of course be infamous—as infamous as Mr. Conkling’s plea that the North ought to side with the Republican party by reason of the poverty to which the Republican party had reduced the South. Nobody disputes that the South has been more prosperous, more orderly and more valuable to the Union since the failure of the Republican reconstruction was confessed and the attempt at reconstruction abandoned than it was when every Southern white man was compelled to be a politician in order to protect himself from being plundered by the negroes and carpet-baggers whom the Republican party had set over him, and when negroes and carpet-baggers represented the Southern States in Washington. The attempt to disturb this order and to check this prosperity by a revival of the reconstruction laws would be an outrage which the whole country would resent. But was it any the less outrageous, was it not rather more outrageous. to make a sectional campaign without an object ? Yet no Republican orator and no Republican journal between June and November proposed a single object to be attained as the result of an agitation in itself mischievous. Ask the first Republican you meet why he voted for Garfield, and the chances are nine in ten that he -will tell you he meant to rebuke the spirit of the South. He will admit, if he is an intelligent and honest man, that the candidate of his party is tainted and that it went against bis grain to vote for him. But if you ask him what Gen. Garfield can do to rebuke the assumed spirit of the solid South, such a Republican will own that Garfield can do nothing. It is not even the acts of the Southern people ,to which the stalwarts have objected, for the freshest “ political murder” charged by the stalwarts upon the South is at least three years old—but to the supposed “sentiment” of the South. “Woe be to us,” as Gen. Hancock wrote to Pease, “ whenever it shall come to pass that the power of the magistrate, civil or military, is permitted to deal with the mere opinions or feelings of the people.” Now that Gen. Garfield is elected he cannot interfere to undo again what Hayes has done with the virtual consent of all parties. There is in fact no way in which the General Government can now do anything whatever toward the practical settlement, or rather the practical rmsettlement, of the Southern question, and the sectional agitation has, therefore, been carried on for its own sake and for the sake of the Republican placemen who have succeeded in keeping their places by means of it. For their sake the country has been invited to divide against itself and to blow into fresh flame the embers of the war, which would long ago have died out if left alone. For their sake the shame of seating in the chair at Washington a politician whom the leaders of his own party despise has been incurred by the greatest republic in the world.