The dollar weekly bulletin. [volume] (Maysville, Ky.) 1862-1864, 1863-08-06

War Power EXamin ed..-The PIea OF
Necessity Exploded-Lettero OF George
Il. Curtis. ~
The following was addressed to the great
Democratic meeting at Concord, N. H.. July
4th: 49,
RoCKAwAY, Long Island, July 2, 1863.
GENTLEMEN: The necessity for repose,
after the professional labors of the past few
months. will proven my attendance at your
meeting at Concord on the 4th; but my
warmest sympathies will be with Ex- Presi-
dent Pierce, yourselves, and your fellow
citizens, who propose on that occasion "to
renew the expression of your unwavering
devotion to the Constitution and the Union'
You and can have but one meaning for
that comprehensive sentiment. 1t is among
the strange phenomena of our times, that a
civil war, which ought to have been defen-
sive in its characteristics its sole legiti-
mate purpose was to defend the Constitu-
ton of the United States from an attempt
to overthrow it-should have resulted in
arraying the administrators of the Govern
ment against the fundamental principles
which that Constitution was framed to secure
and perpetuate. No one has tried more
faithfully than have to Judge the Admin
istration with candor, to be patient under its
acts, and to hope, even when all grounds for
hope seemed vanishing away, that it would
at length heed the remonstrance of those
who can have nothing at heart but the well
fare of our country and the success of its
Government.
But we are brought to state of things in
which reason would cease to perform its
Office, if it were to take counsel of charity
alone. When power is claimed and exer-
cised of seizing men by the military arm, for
the expression of political opinions, of try
ing them by court-martial, and banshing
them into a country which is treated in
every branch of the observation-disclosures
tive, Legislative and Judicial-as the coun-
try of a public enemy-when this is done
in State where every civil tribunal is in
the full exercise of distinctions, and for al
legged offenses that are entirely unknown to
the laws of the land, it would be mere folly
to affect to believe that the dearest princi-
pies of civil liberty, the rights without
which all other rights are valueless, are not
in imminent peril, if not altogether and ir-
recoverably lost.
Nothing, in all the sad records of the two
past years, mas given me more pain and as
constituent than the PRONUNCIATION, from the
highest official station in our country. OF the
idea that these things Can be done without
the ultimate ruin of our free institutions,a and
indeed without permanent detriment to the
principles of civil liberty, because they are
done in a state of war. Can those who hold
or utter that opinion tell me what is to save
those institutions, or to reinstate those prin-
ciples, when it is once admitted that they
are not eternal, omnipresent, sacred against
all expediences, yielding to no mans judg-
ment of necessity, or convenience, or utility?
Can they show me reasonable ground for
the conjecture that, when one political party
has broken the fundamental law Of those in
situations, or violated those principles, an
other political party will charge itself with
the severe virtue of RETAINING from retalia-
ton, and that such virtue is safe reliance
for free people? Can they teach me, by
any rational evidence. founded in history or
in the nature of man, that civil liberty ,once
lost, can be recovered by people who have
surrendered it for purpose, and have once
tasted of the fatal doctrine that it may be
put aside for purpose? Can they recon-
struct mankind, and make the principle of
regulated liberty, which depends on reason
and on conscience, stronger than the love
for arbitrary power, which is passion and
lust of our nature?
And that other act to which we have re-
ferrsd in the call of your meeting-the ex-
puision of your fellow-citzen, Lieutenant
Edgerly, from the army, for having given
vote in the State election displeasing to the
Administration-can any man show me how
that act can be defend ed, unless it be upon
purpose to make the army an iustrum ent
for the perpetuation of certain political
opinions and organizations? 1t is inexpli-
cable upon any other supposition. For il
we are to assume that the Administration,
and not the people, are to determine what
political parties and organizations can be
allowed with safety to the country-if the
doctrine is to prevail that to vote for one
party encourages the public enemy, and to
vote for the other discourages him, and that
the Administration, and not the voter, is to
judge of this-we may as we'll cease to hold
free elections, and con6De ourselves to
registering the DEGREES of those who are in
power.
1 confess that the glow of hope which
have tried to keep alive within my own
breast, is
"Flickeriug faint and low;"
but what little of it rem ins turns for reani-
nation toward the Democracy of the Union. |
In all your efforts to bring back the Admin
to the path of the Constitution, 1
am with you to the end. In all your exer-
tons to save that Constitution, and to restore
the union on its only practical basis, my
sympathy will be ever active until those
exertions are plainly useless. Keep your
selves, | entreat you, free from the tempta-
ton, now and hereafter, OF initiating the
bad examples which you condemn, and let
the world see your consistent and undying
devotion to the liberties which our fathers
won, and which they engraved upon the
tablets of a free Constitution.
Begging you to present my warm regards
% all whom it is my privilege to call my
friends, in whatever quarter of the old
Granite State, ! remain, &c,
GEO. Il. CURTIS.