Democratic Sentinel, Volume 6, Number 4, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 February 1882 — Who the Bourbons Are. [ARTICLE]

Who the Bourbons Are.

It has long been the Republican habit to apply the term “ Bourbon ” to everybody who is a Democrat in politics and opposed to the principles, policy and methods of the Republican party. It will probably interest those, to whom the term imports either reproach or contempt, to know who the Bourbons are. This interest is gratified by a writer in the Atlantic, which, it is hardly necessary to say, is a magazine the partisan sympathies of which have always been with the Republicans. The writer says: As used in the North, this word “ Bourbon ” designates a class of white men composed chiefly of the leading citizens of the Seuthern States. The Bourbons are the principal business men, lawyers, physicians, teachers, clergymen, merchants and farmers of the South. They are everywhere the leaders of society in the best sense of the word. Aside from political matters, they are much like other people, or like the best people in our Northern communities. They do not appear to love what is wrong for its own sake, nor to prefer falsehood, baseness, cruelty or rnjustice to the virtues and good qualities which are elsewhere revered by good men. They are amiable, truthful, conscientious, kind, public-spir-ited and religious, resembling very closely the foremost men in our New England towns in all the important elements of personal character; differing only, in general, in being more communicative and having less reserve than is usual among New Englanders. As to their political action, it seems to me to have been largely it evitable; the necessary product and result of the peculiar conditions of life and society in the South since the civil war. It does not appear to have been owing to sheer depravity on their part, nor to any choice or agency of theirs, that there was for some years a disturbed afid unsettled state of things in the Southern States. Collisions between different classes followed unavoidably upon the elevation of the emancipated slaves into political superiority over the disfranchised white citizens of the country. There has never been any such completeness of organization among the people of the South since the war as many persons believe to have existed there. That part of our country is distinguished by much greater feebleness of community and a less organic life than belongs to Northern society ; and the Bourbons are not really responsible for everything that has been done south of Mason and Dixon’s line. The men thus designated are, as a class, eminently social, hospitable, honest and upright men, if we ieave their politics out of view. They have, in large measure, built up and maintained such moral, social, industrial and religious organizations and activity as the South now possess, and much of what is best and most encouraging in the present: state of things in the principal Southern States is due to them and to their efforts for the practical reconstruction in a time of extreme difficulty and uncertainty, when their resources were most discouragingly slender, and when they had no precedents to guide them except such as were furnished by the experience of mankind in the long contest between civilization and barbarism in the past. I think they have made mistakes and have done wrong things since the war. I am not certain th>t we or anybody else would have done better than they. In conversation with these gentlemen I everywhere expressed my conviction that illegal interference with negro suffrage could not be continued without the most serious injury to all Southern interests, and it would be better that Southern men, Democrats, should make the ballot entirely free to all who are legally entitled to its possession and then endure whatever ills might, result. They always replied that disturbance, violence and fraud Were each year diminishing, and that negro political supremacy would be utterly ruinous for the State and for society, and insisted that if, the Republican party in the South possessed the character and employed the methods of the same party in the North they would gladly co-operate with' it; that they were ready to discard and abandon their present political organjzfftion whenever any other party would take up the real problems of the South and seriously address itself to their solution. In studying the Bourbons I hawe been forced to conolude that nothing has yet been attained anywhere much better than the domestic life of this class of the Southern people in its intelligence, refinement, beauty and general elevation and wholesomeness.

Dr. Hammond says when you stick your finger in your ear the roaring sound you hear is the circulation in your finger. Probably when you stick in a lead-pencil the same roaring which you then hear is the circulation of Rap in the penoil.