Democratic Sentinel, Volume 10, Number 22, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 2 July 1886 — Those Confederate Ronds. [ARTICLE]

Those Confederate Ronds.

“The proposition brought forward for tho holders of Confederate bonds by Judge Fullerton, that this Government is bound or ought to pay those bonds,” said Representative Daniel, of Virginia, to a Washington Post reporter, “is as palpable and eccentric an absurdity as the frivolous wit of man can invent. In the first place the amendment to the Federal Constitution forbids it, and that alone disposes of the question. In the second place, the United States Supreme Court has decided that Confederate securities never had a legal constitutional existence; and that settles them. In the third place, the theory of the war was that the Confederate States had no legal existence. The victors in the war would as soon think of reviving the Confederacy as of paying its debts, and the men who were Confederates are as little disposed as their lormer foes to pay them. In the fourth place, there is-no law, no equity, no principle of honor, and no reason of expediency to suggest that the United States or that anybody should pay the Confederate debt.” “Was it generally understood that the validity of the debt depended on the validity of the Government that assumed to contract it?”

“Certainly, everybody knew that. The Confederate bonds—at least, such as I have this on their face, being payable at a specffied time ‘after a treaty of peace between the Confederate States and the United States of America.’ That treaty never took place. The bonds, by their terms, are not yet due, and will never be due. But, apart from all this, the United States has already made England pay the Alabama claims, based on pretensions that negative the idea that the Government will ever pay a debt contracted to fight it. It is an idle waste of time tc discuss this question. and minds to which the proposition made is not an arrant absurdity would never understand the arguments presented. Evidently speculators are trying to make a turn in Confederate bonds; and evidently, also, only the ignorant and unwary will be caught by such chaff as is thrown before them. Judge Fullerton is an able lawyer, and I have no idea that he can entertain the slightest notion of success. He speaks for clients, as he has a right to do, and his clients have a right to be heard if they want to be; but they are on the wildest kind of a. wild-goose chase, and if they expect the United States to pav them anything they are themselves the wildest kind of wild geese.”