The Ashland union. [volume] (Ashland, Ashland County, Ohio) 1854-1868, 1859-08-31
THE REPUBLICANS FACTIONS IN OHIO

against the Roman Republic, to strike for
large liberty. And the spirits who conspired
with him were the unprincipled and dissolute,
whose lives proved hem incapable of a genu-
inc aspiration for regulated freedom. So in
Ohio; the fanatics of the Reserve, maddened
by a wild and disappointed mind like Giddings,
are used by Gov. Chase, to secure his ambi-
tious aims under color of securing the freedom
of the black race in Ohio, and by resistance
to, and aiming at the destruction of the power
and authority of the Federal Union in Ohio;
and he uses their recklesness of law to accom-
plish his object. Cataline aimed at supreme
power in the State by public convulsion, Chase
seeks to embitter the northern States against
the Southern to compass his aspirations for
the Presidency, and for this purpose seizes the
pretcxt of the execution of an unpopular law
to force collision with the General Govern
ment; and the feeling and principle of assaults
upon the ancient and modern Republics are
alike in spirit and design.
Our Republican Governor, foiled in procur-
ing a decent pretext for his meditated wrong,
through the infexible consciousness of
Chief Justice Swan-and the majority of the
Ohio Judiciary-the obstacle to his traitorous
project, the judge whose conscience refused to
allow him to bend to a maddened clamor
against the laws he is sworn to support, is de-
MED a place on the bench, is defeated by his
party for nomination for hat place, because
he had honestly and manfully discharged his
duty, and refused to initiate civil war; He has
thwarted the schemes which a dangerous and
reckless ambition had planned, and his political
sacrifice is the penalty. Truly the destructive
elements in a Republic are not so much from
the defects in the freedom of its institutions as
the excess and abuses of the liberty possessed.
Giddings, secure of protection from the Repub-
lie whose laws he seeks to destroy, counsels
murder and violence against those laws-and
asks its courts to do violence to its spirit and
institutions to consummate his insane will and
aims. The judges of his own party refuse to
do his bidding, and strike low the edifce of
law, though Chase as Governor and Executive
of law had invited to the wrong. This how
ever only widens the attack upon our %institu-
lions. The state Judiciary is to be trampled
and made subservient to the spirit of the mob
law the only sovereignty which the people
respect, is to be made a mockery and adjudi-
Gated by the jewellers who caucus together to
divide the spoil of the State. Law, which
has hitherto won a respect, not accorded to
the noblest intellect and highest official posi-
ton in the land, is to depend upon the tricks
and cabals of party conventions. The judge
who fails to administer the law, not as it is,
but as madness and faction demand it, is to be
driven from power, position and public life
The Roman cospirator could ask no mere than
this. Had Rome accorded this, Catalina had
been content.
Able and INSCRIPTIONS men like Gholson
will readily be found to rise on the ruin of the
dignity and independence of the judicial office
to power, and SO rising to hold their power by
the dishonest and degrading means that won
it. Marked by no degrading vice, wanting in
no legal ability, deficient only in the high sense
~covets, and a true sense of lat public liberty
demands; they easily become the plausible
instruments of its plotting executioners.
In the defeat of Judge Swan, beyond a
question accomplished because of his firm
refusal unconstitutionally to interfere and
trample federal law, under color of his judicial
position, a deadlier blow and wound is given
to true American freedom than could be ac-
complished by the return to bondage of all the
fugitive slaves who have ever escaped through
Ohio. And when Chase speaks of such as
''citizens of Ohio" as he did at Cleveland, he
shows that did even the fugitive slave clause
i'm the U. S. Constitution, depend on the faith
of States and not on the laws of Congress as he
and others have claimed, that he would, as
Governor, violate his duty as Chief Magistrate
of the State, in his pursuit of personal power
by a denial of the execution of the laws that
in all and every sense he prejudges. When
such men counsel the course that can and
ought only to result in the dissolution of the
bonds of the federal Union, when they invoke
vengeance on the honest executors of the law,
as in case of Swan, and second such as Gid
dings, are they not deserving to be classed with
the Catalines of all ages, who have lured the
fevered, maddened enthusiast, and the class
who fatten on CONFUSION, to destroy liberty in
the pursuit of license, when the effort they
made could allow, aid and sustain a selfish
unhallowed ambition.
But it may be said that the present abortive
.To~A Io1 - 1,nl Ia-.-1 @LoE Ill 4lak mos
designed was peaceful agitation against an i'm
proper law. What palllation may be offered we
care not. The fact remains, that the author
ity of the federal Courts was sought illegiti-
mately to be struck down. That this effort,
had Swan yielded his convictions, NUT have
been sustained by force; that in any event the
degradation of the power of the Stase or FEEDER
al Courts was aimed to be accomplished; and
either result was fatal to good government,
and a stab at our Republican Institutions.
They are afraid to deny it or even to