The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-08-27
The Situation,

FrOna The NJ T. Tribune.
The developments of the last fortnight at
Washington and New Orleans demand graver
and more thoughtful consideration than they
seem to have generally received. Let us con-
dense their most salient features into few
lines, VIII
l. The President informs Secretary Stanton
that his resignation of the War Department
would be acceptable.
2. Mr.. Stanton replies that he considers it
his duty to hold on.
3. General Grant advises Mr.. Stanton that
the President has requested him (Grant) to
take charge of the War Department pro tenn,
and that he has consented to do so.
4. Mr.. Stanton responds that, such being
the case, he gives way.
s. General Grant being installed at the
War Office, he receives and publishes an order
from the President that General Sheridan be
deprived of the command at New Orleans,
and that General Thomas be sent there
instead.
g. General Thomas telegraphs that he is
sick, and cannot go to New Orleans.
T. 1t is intimated that General Hancock is
to be sent instead.
s. General Sckes, it is confidently stated
is to be mustered out of command in the Caro-
linas, and General Meade or General Candy
sent down to replace him.
8. General Pope, commanding in Georgia
and Alabama, has warning to set his house in
order, as he is to be superseded as soon as
may be.
10. General Howard, chief of the Freedmen's
Bureau, is to be supplanted directly by Gene
raj Gordon Granger, who is only a Colonel in
the regular service, who got up the Johnson
Soldiers Convention at Cleveland last year,
and who has ever since been revolving about
the White House, and attending to politics,
though ordered to join his regiment, which is
on duty in the West.
IL. The National Inteligencer, whose editor
is the Presidents confidential organist, calls
for the resignation of the residue of the Cabi-
net, indicating Governor Seward as the mem
Der whose place is most urgently wanted.
II. The Rebel and pro-Rebel element, North
and South, is electrified by these movements
into preternatural activity and confidence,
and is stimulating the President to go ahead
in the course on which he seems to have
entered, claiming General Grant as in full
sympathy with this reactionary career.
Such are the leading facts. We need only
add that no one has ever yet called Hancock,
Candy, and Gordon Granger radicals; and no
one pretends that Sheridan, Sickles, and Pope
have offended otherwise than in giving an
active, hearty support to the Reconstruction
policy of Congress. What, then, do these
facts portend
We can understand them no otherwise than
as the opening of new and desperate struggle
to arrest the reconstruction policy decreed by
Congress, and, if possible, defeat and subvert
it. To this end we infer that it is deemed
necessary to hurl from Office every radical
whom the President or his Cabinet can reach,
but especially those welding military power
over the South. We judge that this final
struggle is to be far more bitter more violent,
more proscriptive, than that of 1866.
Especially are the extraordinary powers
conferred by Congress on the military COM
manders at the South to be transferred to the
/ hands of ''conservatives'' of caste and negro
hate to the very utmost All the still vast
! patronage of the Executive is to be welded in
aid of resistance to any such reconstruction as
Congress purposed, and as Sheridan, Thomas,
Sickles, Pope, and Howard were laboring to
| effect.
The end hoped for is political revolution
in the North, and rejection of the conditions
of restoration prescribed by Congress in the
South. Mr.. JOhnson's backstairs counsellors
doubtless assure him that, if the whole patron
age of the Government is transferred to
Democratic hands, they will thereby be en-
abled to overbear last years moderate Repub-
lcan majorities in New York. New Jersey,
Pennsylvania, etc. and thus secure a Repub.
lican defeat in the Presidential contest next
year. Meantime, reconstruction is to be post.
pOned or defeated at the South with intent Ia
take advantage of the expected Democratic
triumph next year, and so, while enfran.
chising the Rebels, remand the blacks to per.
petual serfdOm, if not virtual slavery.
Such appears to be the programme of the
new struggle which Mr.. Johnson has opened
with the supersedure of Stanton by Grant a
the War Office. That it will be fierce an6
vehement, few will doubt; but let us firmly
. resolve that it shall be marked with no blood
, shed, but that all shall implicitly abide tn,
deliberate judgment of the people.