Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 August 1885 — The Great Crime. [ARTICLE]

The Great Crime.

If it is the unpardonable sin to have a sectional issue—why, the greatest crime in history was that of the military suppression of the- Southern rebellion. —Commercial Gazette. The military suppression oi the rebellion was all right. The “greatest crime” came afterward. It was the attempt of the Republican party to force the principles of that party upon an unwilling people. To this end State lines were rubbed out and military despotisms established. Under the devilish system the people of the South were plundered, and an army of partisans, carpet-baggers and desperadoes were turned loose with the sort of commissions that Jack Sheppard and Captain Kyd had in their pockets when they roamed and plundered at their own sweet will. Moses, ex-Governor of South Carolina, now in a Massachusetts prison for swindling, was a legitimate outgrowth of the system. He was only a type, however, of a large and powerful class. The Republican party is responsible for the entire system and its hellish products. Is it any wonder that there is a “solid South?” It is solid, however, only against the Republican party, and it ought to be. That paity is essentially a sectional organization. It was conceived, born, and bred with that idea, and it can never be anything else. Sectionalism is in its warp and woof. To be a healthy, patriotic, national party, it must die and be made all over again. It should have died in 1876; but, gathering life anew from a series of well-planned villainies and rascalities, it managed to stagger along until last fall, when, wetrust, it received its death wound. It is an unhealthy, unpatriotic, sectional organization, and it must die. The founders of the republic never contemplated such a monstrosity. — lndianapolie Sentinel.