The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1866-01-17

Progress Of President JOhnsOn's Southern
POlicy-Cheering Signs and Movements.
From ne Herald
II Is remarkable fact that, while Northern
journals of the Copperhesd genus discover from
day TO day In the proceedings of Congress q
fixed purpose on the part of the radicals to
Tylerize the administration, the leading radical
newspaper organs are beginning to recognize
the good results and cheering prospects of
President Johnson's Southern policy. Thus the
Tribune, for example, has at length discovered
that the work of reconstruction in progress At
Washington is but the shadow of the substantial
work going on throughout the South that
whites and blacks landowners aud laborers, are
harmoniously cooperating for profitable crops
of cotton, sugar, rice, tobacco, and corn the
coming season; that negro suffrage need not be
enforced as the first essential to Southern resto.
ration; and that there is every prospect that all
the Southern States will be represented in Con-
gress before the close of the present session.
Such admissions and calculations from
radical journal of the straightest sect very
broadly indicate the reBistless advances and the
final success of the restoration programme Of
President johnson. His work goes prosperously
on, while the two Houses of Congress are dis
cussng constitutional amendments, and imagin-
. ing dangers from the old secession spirit, still
supposed by such narrow-sigbted politicians as
Thad6eus Stevens to be predominant in the
South. But so il is that often, while philoso-
piers, reformers. and political thinkers are per
picked with the disorders resulting from great
revolutions, they are quietly settled by the laws
OF selfpreservation and selt-1nterest operating
upon the people directly concerned. Selfpre-
servation suggests to the Southern whites the
necessity of q good understanding with the
blacks with whom they are intermingled, and
sel-interest teaches the saving policy OF mutual
concessions between the two races When, too,
as in the South, the numbers on each side are
about equal, and the labor of the blacks is
mr. fIN n fhnn1.
selves, but the whites from destitution, we have
the strongest securities for the protection of the
black race.
What means, then, this late letter of General
Grant, in which he says that ''for the present,
and until there is full security for equitably
maintaining the safety and rights of all classes
OF citizens in the States lately IN rebellion,
would not recommend the withdrawal of the
United States troops from them," and that
"while such force is retained in the South
doubt the propriety of putting arms in the hands
of the militia :" This means that, as the late
Rebel States are now governed partly by their
State laws and officers, and partly by superin-
tending Federal military authority, enforced by
Federal troops, the communities thus situated
are necessarily, more or less, in disordered and
unsettled condition. They cannot be otherwise,
and especially when we take into the account
the vicious and ignorant from the Rebel armies
turned loose among an impoverished people.
Hence, until order shall have been fully re-
established, General Grant recommends not only
be retained in the States concerned to maintain
order but that the militia ofsadStates shall not be
brought out because their presence in contact
with the United States troops must inevitably
revive something Of the bitter hostile feelings of
the war among the militia made up from the
late Rebel armies. 1t must be so among hot
headed young men who have been taught
nothing else but the divinity of African slavery,
the baseness of the abolition Yankees, and
Southern wrongs and Southern rights.
But these intractable agents of mischief will
disappear with the restoration of the Southern
States to their proper relations to the Federal
Government. A half dozen reckless rowing
vagabonds in a region just emereing from the
chaos of a great revolution may give the appear
ance of prevailing insubordination to half a
dozen counties. Against such exceptional dis
turbances the evidence is overwhelming that the
responsible and influential men of the South, and
the great body of the intelligent whites, have in
good faith submitted to the issues of the war,
and are honest in their professions of submis-
sion. But however we'll disposed the people of
Alabama, for instance, may be to prove their
loyalty, appearances will occasionally be against
them so long as their local laws and civil officers
are regulated by Federal deerees and Federal
soldiers.
In the face of all these drawbacks, however,
such has been the success of President Johnson's
conciiatory policy of Southern restoration that
the leading organs of the Northern radical
school are beginning to. recognize it, Let the
reconstructors OF the South in Congress try q
Southern submission, and they will soon dis
cover that neither the harmony of the Union
nor the political interests of the party in power
will be endangered from the readmission of the
now excluded States to both Houses, without
any further conditions of security in the Federal
Constitution. There is sufficient security for the
Southern blacks as il now stands.