New Orleans daily crescent. [volume] ([New Orleans, La.]) 1851-1866, 1866-06-27
WHAT IS LOYALTY.

A recent article in the New York News CON.
tanned the following paragraph:
It is of no avail now to insist that the right of
secession is of the attributes of tile political
/ system under which exist the United States of
| America That question has been submitted to
| the arbitrament of arms and, SO far as the mere
1 influences Of physical force can determine it, it
1 has, for the time being, been determined The
South accepts the result, in respect to its present
| practical application; but that acceptance does
not imply any abandonment in thought of the
principle upon which the secession movement was
4 founded.
Referring to this, the New York Tribune wants
| to know whether an ex-rebel in now swearing
allegiance to the Union swears to be faithful
only till his State shall see fit again to aecede;
and this, the Tribune declares to be an eminentIy
practical queston-one, the decision Of which is
Of raoment9us, vital import
In reply to this " eminantly practical cues
ton we win say that the amnesty oath, or oath of
allegiance, or whatever il may be called, which
has been so generally taken in the South, is
understood to mean precisely what its terms
convey precisely what it would be understood
to mean, under similar circumstances, ii any
other country in the world.
it certainly is not understood to mean that the
people who take it not only confess, but swear
that they were entirely wrong in their recent
struggle for independence, and that their adver
saries were entirely rights that the principles or
political dogmas in which they believed previous
to the war are unsound and untrue, and that the
principles and dogmas asserted by the Republican
party are sound and true; that the South was all
wrong and the North all right; that the States
have, rightfully, no powers, and that the federal
government is, righifully, supreme; and that
everybody in the South from Jefferson Davis
down, was traitor to his country We take it
that oaths of allegiance mean pretty much in this
country what such oaths mean in other countries,
When the English Jacobites sWore allegiance to
the house of Hanover, they did not mean
that Charles Edward was not after all
in their opinion the legitimate king of
England when the Hungarians swore allegiance
to Francis Joseph last year, they did not mean
that they had been traitors in '48, and that the
crown of Hungary had really no independent
rights; when Pole swears allegiance to Russia
he does not mean to swear that the Car has 4
moral right to govern Poland. Such oaths do NOT
involve any expression or any recautation If
opinion. They are simply the formal recognition
Of existing and insuperable facts, which it ia as
useless to deny in words as to contest in arms.
But the Tribune, which belongs to the great
party Of moral IDEAS" and natural rights J,
seems to think that it is the bounden duty of every
Southern man to swear that the ''moral ideas" Of
the Republican party, are established truths, and
that the political principles of Southern
statesmen are false and pernicious hereses.
It thinks likewise, apparently, that there
is, somewhere natural right to impose
this oath Of allegiance on the Southern people.
New the people Of the South, relying on their
natural right to lfe liberty and property, might
have declined to take any oath at ALL and might
have dared the radicals to carry to its conclusions
their doctrine that the so-caled rebels were trait
oTs and criminals. Here would have been a conflict
q opinion on the question Of natural rights .
Would the Tribune have settled It by advising 8
summary deeapiatap Of all the "rebelsn be |
tween the Potomac aud the Rio Graude3 gut az |