If of the Constitution and Union, it will of course be earnestly supported by their true and tried friends. The reply is, unfortunately, unavoidable. The Conservative party, or the supporters of the policy we have described, is composed of the late rebels and of those who justified and palliated rebellion, with a few Republicans. The great multitude of those who believed in the war and supported it, whose children and brothers and friends lie buried in the battle-field in every rebel State, whose sentiments are now as they have been for five years expressed by the Union press of the country, and whose voice speaks in the vote of Union Legislatures and in the result of the spring elections. It is useless for Conservatism to claim that conciliation is essential to reorganization.
Nobody denies it.
But the cardinal question is, not what will please the late insurgents, but what will secure the Government. If it be said that the Government can not be secured by alienating its late enemies, the reply is, that it certainly can not be secured by alienating its unwavering friends. If conciliation contemplates the filling of national offices in the South by know rebels to the disregard and exclusion of Union men, thereby rewarding rebellion and discrediting loyalty if it proposes to leave free-men of the United States to the Black Codes of Mississippi and Carolina, and to recognize the fatal spirit of caste which has been our curse then conciliation is simply a name for ignominy, and Conservatism may see its fate in that of Secession. Radicalism has not a single vindictive feeling toward the late rebel States, but it does not propose to forget that there has been a rebellion. It has the sincerest wish, as it had the most undoubting expectation, of working with the President to secure for the country what the country has fairly won by the war, and that is, the equal right of every citizen before the law and the full resumption by the late insurgent States of their functions in the Union only upon such honorable and reasonable conditions as Congress might require.