Rensselaer Union, Volume 11, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 January 1879 — Bragg’s New Departure. [ARTICLE]

Bragg’s New Departure.

During a recent session of the National House of Representatives, the matter under consideration being . a proposition to pay a citizen of Louisville—who passed through the lines during the earlier period of the war and remained in, the Confederacy for some years, engaged in the loyal occupation of buying cotton —something over SIOO,OOO for such portions as were sent North, sold, and the proceeds thereof turned into the National Treasury, Gen. Bragg, a Wisconsin Democratic Congressman, took occasion to notify the Southern Brigadiers that the Northern wing of the Democracy would not lend themselves to such projects, and administered a scathing reproof. Concerning thjs new departure of Gen. Bragg, the Chicago Times says: To Gen. Bragg, of Wisconsin, belongs the honor of precipitating the inevitable conflict between the Confederate Brigadiers and their discontented Northern allies. The Brigadiers came back to Congress, not only with all their sins of rebellion in full bloom upon them, but bringing with them their old pro-slavery ideas, a good deal of their old plantation manners and all their old habits of expecting, as a matter of Course, to use their Northern allies in the old way for their conveniences. They constitute two-thirds of that which goes by the name of Democratic party. They are its controlling, directing, bossing part. By every time-honored rule of party usage, why should the Northern minority not do their bidding as they did in the old days when tne slaveholding party moguls proposed to call the roll of their niggers at the base of Bunker Hill Monument? Why Should they not vote to compensate their Southern party bosses for the losses they incurred by rebellion, with money wrung from the earnings of that Northern industry which their rebellion has loaded with public burdens almost too heavy for endurance? Is’ it not according to the party’s most sacred traditions and bestestablished usages? Shall the Northern one-third deny to the Southern twothirds the right of the majority to be master? “The. Democracy went into the rebellion bn account of Democracy,” said the Louisiana mam, Ellis. It was a plain, frank acknowledgment of a truth which challenges contradiction. Democracy was a theory of the

Constitution formetj and asserted for the accommodation' of slaveholders—the Btttto-Bovereignty theory., Occasionally one finds > candid, outspoken Confederate Brigadier who confesses this with singular frankness— Atkins, of Tennessee, for instance. Ho was not one of tho cotton State nabobs, and seems to have had little admiration for their peculiar sentinlentalism in politics. “Those fellows will all tell you they went with their States on account of their duty of allegianco,” he said. •“ It is all gammon. I went with my State, too, but not on account of any sentiment of allegiance. I ownod niggers, sir. Most of my property was in slaves. That property existed and was protected by my State Government, and I knew well enough when ths contest came that it would not bo protected by any other Government except a new one which we slaveholders might set up, for slavery was at tho bottom of the whole thing; and whoever thinks it was not is a Fool. It was a State institution. Its maintenance depended on State sovereignty. Hence, eyery slaveholder asserted that Democratic theory with all his might, and went into the war for it to save his property in niggers. It wasn’t tho doctrine; it was the niggers we cared for. Why, sir, if slavery had depended on carrying out the most extreme doctrine of Federalism, every slaveholder would have been a rcd-liot Federalist, and there would have been none more red hot than those twenty-bale nabobs that had so much to say about allegiance to their States.” Ellis was not so candid, but he admitted that the war was a contest for a construction and application of tho Constitution. “Wo were defeated,” he said, “ and our theory, which wo sought to vindicate by force of arms, was swept away. We now recognize, as the result of the jvar, a great and radical change in the spirit of our Constitution.” The doctrine that opposed appropriations from the General Treasury for local and private benefits was, in the -Southern understanding of it, a corollary of tho theory of State Sovereignity. The decision of the war that the Democracy shall not use powers of local government to rob tho nigger Of liberty and the fruits of liberty is construed by the Southern politicians to be a decision that they may use the power of the National Government to rob the Northern people to compensate thorn for their losses during the war. If the Nation and not the State be sovereign, they can sec no obstacle in the way of transferring tho contents of the General Treasury to their own particular benefit, excepting the recalcitrant behavior of such questioned and inadequately disciplined Democrats as Gen. Bragg in denying the right of tho big end of the party to rule the little end. In reality between this new attitude of the Solid-South party and its old attitude there is only a difference of agency. The aim is the same now as then. It is to employ the Government power for the aggrandizement of a part of society at the expense of tho rest. It is to practice paternalistic Government. Before the change effected by the war, Democracy was held to bo a theory oNhe Constitution, enabling the Southern politicians to practice paternalistic Government by tho local organization. Now it is held by the same politicians to be an opposite theory of the Constitution enabling them to practice paternalistic Government by tho general organization. This change in the Southern idea of Democracy exhibits the very natural transmutation of the slaveholding paternalism which the State Sovereignty theory accommodated into the nonslaveholding paternalism which the contrary theory accommodates. The principle it is sought to carry out is unchanged. It is still the same principle of paternalistic despotism on which the slavery barbarism rested. But the Southern politicians commit an egregious error m iinagimngthat tho Northern people are worrying themselves with empty theories of the Constitution. They are not. They care nothing for the fictions and not much for the forms of the enactment of 1783. but they care a great deal for tho realities of what they believe to be justice and right. The paternalistic Southern Democracy may maintain the forms of a party organization in the North, but they cannot give it numbers, and they can rest assured that no such organization in the North, acting as an auxSbutnefh'Dnifltfefdiar. JUI™ 0 "® 8 of th ® bers. The plain Bi*%®lr."xn»gg is not the only warning of this truth that they will receive.