The Sun.
London, England, 1865-06-08 00:00:00

THE UNITED STATES.

(From Me Times Correspondent.)
NEW YORK, May 26.

East of the Mississippi to the Ohio and the Poto-
mac the war is at an end. The people are subju-
gated, and yield sullen or patient obedience to a
power they are unable to resist. No armed force
except that of the Federal armies of occupation re-
mains. The guerilla chiefs and their little bands of
" farmers by day and soldiers by night," whose
prolonged hostility was threatened by the South and
feared by the North, have imitated the wise example
set by Generals Lee, Johnston, and Taylor, laid
down their arms, and recommenced the cultivation
of their long-neglected fields. Many landed proprie-
tors, hopeless of the future and of the results of an
enforced political and social partnership with a
people against whom they exhaust the vocabulary
of their hatred when they employ with bitter em-
phasis the one word, " Yankees," have emigrated
across the " Father of Waters" to struggle in Texas
as long as they can for the independence of which
they see no chances in Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia, Florida, or the Carolinas ; while others,
still more despondent, have betaken themselves to
Mexico to escape the pains and penalties of their
implication in a treason which President Johnson
threatens to punish. A vast horde of Northern
traders and speculators have rushed southwards to
Richmond, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and
other cities of the long-blockaded interior, to push
a traffic in dry goods among a people who have
had no new clothes for four years, and have worn
out nearly all their old ones, thinking to draw
out the hoarded gold and silver, which is known
to exist ; or to receive payment in cotton for the
luxuries and necessaries which the Southern people
so desperately need. As yet but small success
has attended their operations. The country
is more exhausted than they imagined. Large
districts have reverted into aboriginal wilder-
nesses. Once populous and flourishing towns are
deserted, farmhouses and comfortable country resi-
dences have disappeared, leaving no trace behind
them except the chimney-stack, threatening to fall
at every blast of wind, and the charred rafters that
proclaim the nature of the ruin that overtook them.
The people are sad at heart, and gentlemen who once
counted their cotton by thousands of bales are glad
if they can earn a daily pittance by light labour in
the fields which were formerly their own, or by the
odd jobs which a town or city with any life in it
can always afford to all who are not too proud to
labour with their hands. The negroes, who during
the war were for the most part faithful to their
masters, have suddenly become restive, insolent, and
unmanageable. The negro admires power. He
loved his master because the master was, in his eyes,
the visible incarnation of wealth and authority ; and,
if there was anything he hated, it was a " mean
white," "poor white trash," or a " white buckra,"
not because they were white, but because they had
no power and no wealth. And now that their for-
mer masters are reduced to destitution and misery,
the negroes transfer to them the contempt they
had for white labourers, take possession of patches
of abandoned plantations, turn out the white women
and children who have been left behind, and mani-
fest a disposition which no one can study without
serious misgiving of future trouble.

It is under these circumstances that the question
of negro slavery having been disposed of, the ques-
tion of negro suffrage in the South is forced upon
attention. Though the war may be ended, the
revolution seems only to be at its commencement.
The leaders of the Republican and Union, or, as it
may now be called with better reason, the anti-
Southern party, not contented with the subjugation
of the white people of the Gulf States, seem to be
afraid that hereafter when it becomes necessary to
proceed in the usual course to the election of a new
President, the votes of the Southern Democracy,
combined with those of the Democracy of the North
and West, may secure the election of a pro-Southern
President, such as Messrs. Buchanan, Pierce, Polk,
Tyler, Fillmore, and others within the last 30 years,
and so relegate the now triumphant Republicans to
the cold shade of opposition. To prevent such a
catastrophe, it is proposed to enfranchise the eman-
cipated negroes and give every man of them a vote,
without reference to property, to intellect, or to
character. It is calculated that the whole negro vote
of the South would thus be cast in favour of the
party by whose successful exertions they had re-
ceived the gift of freedom ; and that the Democracy
would be permanently, or at least for several presi-
dential terms, excluded from office. No less a per-
sonage than Chief Justice Chase, virtually a more
dignified and powerful public functionary than the
President himself, has made a tour of the South, and
publicly recommended this portentous revolution.
He has addressed audiences of white men, and still
more numerous audiences of black men, to both of
whom he has insisted that herein alone lies the future
safety of the Republic. To the whites he has recom-
mended negro suffrage as a measure of policy; to the
blacks he has eulogised it as their indefeasible right.
Whatever may be thought in other countries of the
wisdom of giving votes to millions of newly-eman-
cipated slaves who have almost as little notion of po-
litical duties as the cattle upon the plantations, with
which they have up to this time been co-labourers,
the scheme of Chief Justice Chase is utterly at vari-
ance with the Constitution of the United States ; a
document that must be supposed to be still valid, in-
asmuch as Mr. Jefferson Davis is to be solemnly
tried for a breach of it. Each State of the Union,
acting by its own Legislature, has the exclusive right
to regulate the suffrage among its citizens. In some
of the States universal suffrage exists. In other States
there is, as in England, a property qualification ; in
others a property combined with an educational test;
in others negroes, though as free as Mr. Lincoln made
them, are absolutely disqualified from voting; and
in others again, as in the great State of New York,
negroes are only allowed to vote on proof of their
possession of a certain annual income or amount of
property— a limitation which does not apply to the
white people, nor prevent the poorest and most illi-
terate Irish day labourer from depositing his ballot.
The Constitution prohibits the Federal Government
from interfering with this and other matters in the
States ; but Mr. Chase coolly sets aside this provi-
sion. The President, however, does not appear dis-
posed to follow where Mr. Chase would lead him.
He is for the present a friend of State rights, and
yesterday stated, in reply to a delegation which
visited him on the subject, that in his opinion " the
question of negro suffrage ought to be left to the
decision of the loyal white population of the States
interested." Although this modification of Mr.
Chase's views admits the theoretical right of the
States to have exclusive cognisance of this important
matter, it is but little less of a revolution than Mr.
Chase would inaugurate, if by loyal men is meant
the very small and almost infinitesimal minority of
Southern citizens who had courage enough during
the existence of the Confederacy to set themselves
in opposition to the public opinion of the majority,
and, through evil repute, through danger, imprison-
ment, and the fear of death, to swear by the old
flag, and yield neither allegiance nor obedience to
the de facto Government of Mr. Jefferson Davis.
The South was punished and warred against by the
North because, being a minority, it refused to obey
the voice of the majority and accept Mr. Lincoln
as President, legally and duly elected. If Mr. John-
son, on the plea of disloyalty, to be explained and
measured by him, disfranchises by his mere will and
pleasure the majority of tht,Southern people, what
becomes of the fundamental principle which the
North affects to hold so sacred, and by which alone
it seeks to justify all the severities and `horrors of
the war? If the majority are to rule in the States of
the North, and the minority in the States of the
South, the question of negro suffrage is as likely to
breed future wars and dissension as the question of

negro slavery.
The evidence for the prosecution against Harrold,
Payne, Mrs. Surratt, Dr. Mudd, and the other real
or alleged accomplices and confidants of Wilkes
Booth in the assassination of Mr. Lincoln, has been
brought to a close, and that for the defence entered
upon. Although it is asserted that some of the evi-
dence has been temporarily suppressed, there does
not appear in the voluminous depositions of the va-
rious -witnesses examined, so far aspublished, a single
statement sufficient to fix upon Mr. Jefferson Davis,
Mr. Clement C. Clay, Mr. Beverley Tucker, and