The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-03-01
The Downfall of Mighty Power.

country. during that period they carried
every Presidential election but two and in
regard to those two they reaped the substantial
fruits of victory through the deaths of Presi-
dents Harrison and Taylor and the detection of
their successors. o..
It was during this period that the slave
power became first an active and then a domi-
nant element in the politics of the country.
The great statesmen of the Revolutionary era
had passed away. The principles of civil
liberty which they had inculcated had appa-
rently lost their hold upon the people. The
institution of African slavery, which had been
' merely tolerated by the fathers as an effete
and decaying evil, soon to pass away, had
now, through the great increase in the produC-
ton and value of the cotton crop, become a
vast and powerful interest, fortified both by
the love of gain and the lust of dominion.
The slave power began to loom up in our
politics. 1t was sectional in its character,
aristooratic in its form, thoroughly consoli-
dated, utterly unscrupulous, and ambitious of
the complete control of the Government. It
took possession of the organization of the
Democratic party, and used it as an instrument
for obtaining and perpetuating power. The pro-
blemwas comparatively asimple one. The slave
power was practically united South upon all
political issues. 1t was only necessary, there
fore, to carry one or two Northern States in
any Presidential or other important election,
to secure the triumph of the Democratic
ticket. The Northern members of the party
were satisfied with their share of the offices,
while they left the political power of the
party to be welded by its Southern leaders.
The slave interest was satisfied with power;
its Northern allies with plunder. Upon this
basis, and by this plan of action, the Demo
cratic party held almost uninterrupted posses
sion of the Government from 1929 to 1851.
During all this time the Northern Democrats
were the supple tools of the slave power. 1t
multiplied its exactions from them with most
merciless avarice, but they yielded everything,
that they might hold on to the Federal patron
age. Politically the combination, while a
very simple and obvious one, was most power
full. 1t was a united South, held together and
consolidated by great pecuniary and social
interest, and ruling the nation at the cheap
price of giving to the Northern Democracy a
share of the public plunder.
This combination at last failed, owing to two
causes-frst, the rapid growth of the North
necessitating a constantly increasing element
of that section to cooperate with the South to
secure the triumph of the Democratic party ;
and, second, the increasing demands of the
slave power itself, in the line of its logical
development, which tended constantly to pro-
duoe greater union of feeling at the North.
The break came in 1860, when the Democratic
party split, and the power of the nation passed
from its hands.
This old alliance between the Democratic
party and the slave power furnishes the true
key to the position of that party during and
since the war. The constant hope of its
leaders has been to get back to the old order
of things, where consolidated South acting
with a few States of the North should be able
to rule the country. This explains why all
through the war the Democratic leaders were
so anxious that the institution of slavery
should be preserved. They knew that it had
been an element of political power, and they
wished to make it again available when the
war should be over. This explains McClel-
lan's tactics. He was fighting great political
battle. His object was so to conduct military
operations as to leave the way open at any
time for a renewal of the old political union
between the slave power and the Democratic
party. But the great forces which lay at the
bottom of the mighty struggle could not be
controlled by the strategy of scheming pOliti-
clans, whether in the army or out of it.
This explains, too, the tactics of the Demo
cratic party on the question of reconstruction.
They have had one, and but one, guiding
principle, and that has been to restore the
Rebel States to power in the Union in just that
shape which would make them most subser-
lent to the ends of the party. Hence their
endorsement of President Johnson's State
Governments, organized on the old aristo-
cratic basis of class interests and minority
rule. Such organizations would make new
sectional interest around which to consolidate
the South. Hence their anxiety to secure thu
unconditional admission of these Presiden
TALLY reconstructed States into the Union
The old tactics of a united Southern vote TO
the Democratic party could be repeated will
the promise of the ancient success. Ant
hence, finally, their rage and gnashing q
teeth over the Congressional plan of recon
struction, which, by doing away with class
rule in the South, and by providing for the reol
ganization of the Rebel States upon the basi
of democratic equality, at once and forever de
d s4ro,ys that sectional bond of interest thf