Jasper Republican, Volume 1, Number 7, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1874 — The South Still for Secession [ARTICLE]

The South Still for Secession

The Southern white people are disloyal to the Union. The pretense that they respect and revere the American flag is a miserable sham. Penn yielded to Federal troops because he dared not oppose force to force. It follows that the sympathy lavished upon Southern White League Democrats by the Northern people, on the theory that they war only upon so-called carpet-bag State governments, is misplaced. The Southern plan is to overthrow the State governments, with a View ultimately to overthrow the Union. To regard the Southern situation from any other standpoint is to be gulled by a fatal delusion. And why did the South wish in 1861 to destroy the Union? Merely because the Union would not extend the institution of slavery into new territory! The cause Of disloyalty at the South is now, as it was in 1861, the desire to establish the doctrine of property in man. Southern White League Democrats hate the Amer-

ican flag because it means equal rights to black and white alike, because it means freedom of speech and politicaaction. Every White League organizal tion at the South is therefore a concerted movement not merely to elevate Democrats to power in a State, but -to haul down the flag of the stars and stripes and to raise in its place the flag of the stars and bars, and that flag means slavery. Slavery was the corner-stone of the rebel Confederacy, and it is to a restoration of the institution of slavery that the efforts of the Southern Democracy are all directed to-day as much as they were directed to its extension during the period from 1850 to 1865. Southern Democratic journals do not hesitate to declare that nothing but the weakness of the South as compared with the strength of the North prevents a new secession movement, witness the following from the New Iberia (La.) Sugarbowl:

It is high time the South should be plain and honest in her language toward toe North, and cease this silly twaddle about Northern sentiment. We mast work out our own salvation, and depend no longer upon the broken reed of Northern friendship. **•* * * - * The South has the same moral right to force her peculiar views upon the North as the latter has to force hers upon us. The only difference is, the North is strong and the South is weak; but that is no reason why we should not think as we please and say what we think. The whole question is purely one of interest; and if we think the South would belter herself by another secession, let us then fearlessly advocate it. There are, however, other objects of higher importance and more easily obtained at present, and for these we should Contend with all our might. We believe, nevertheless, that before another decade the two great sections of the Union will be quietly and contentedly mating history for themselves under separate governments. The “other objects more easily obtained at present” are the possession of State governments; the grand ultimate object is the re-establishment of the Confederacy, based on African slavery.— Chicago Inter-Ocean. t