Litchfield enquirer., 1868-01-02

the Aristo- Democratic party, Jefferson Da-
 wis, emerges from confinement as an arch
 traitor and chief rebel. and acc epts his lib
 erty upon bail, offered by two Abolition
 ists whom he then chiefly despised- d-Ger-
 Tit Smith and MT. Greeley. Yancey and
 Wendell Phillips, of the South, and How
 ell Cobb, Mason, Toombs, Slidell, Floyd,
 Hunter, Wigfall, Foote and Rust, whose
 imperious demands, thundered forth ill the
 Senate, were obeyed in every department
 of the government, have sought refuge
 from the utter overthrow of their power, in
 exile, or in the grave. .-~ ... :,
 Of the great American people, who, it
 was thought, could not be stirred to action
 either against the Union or for the aboli-
 tion of slavery, half million of men
 have sprung to arms ill the former cause,
 and more than thrice that number in the
 latter. The four millions of slaves, for
 whom not even the most sanguine hoped
 to see emancipation dnring the present
 century, are not only free, but hold in
 their hands by the refusals of the late reb-
 els to cooperate with them in the work of
 reconstruction, the political power of the
 South. Virginia, the great mother of
 Presidents, and market of slaves, reorgan-
 izes her State government on the basis of
 that rightful political equality between
 slave and master, which Jefferson, her most
 distinguished statesman, was one of the first and foremost to assert. A political
 party, not then in existence, has prevailed
 in every Northern State, ruled the destin-
 ies of the Union for six years, overthrown
 opposing institutions by decrees as revolu-
 honary of antecedent conditions. as were ever issued by Czar or Emperor, and en- forced their changes by armies as powerful as were swayed by an Alexander, Cesar, or
 NapoleonI. sand is now reconstructing the Union on basis of universal suffrage which secures the ascendency of the same party, and of its ideas, ultimately, not merely in the transient politics, but in the constitution and laws of the lately slaveholding and rebellious States Never before in the worlds history has there been so sublime vindication of the power of an idea to mould parties,r volution ize governments, raise and mass armies over- throw institutions, and change the social destinies of races. In the fullest sense our great struggle was on both sides, awar of ideas. Though it took the form, at least in our minds. of struggle between government and rebellion, yet the rebel
 lion was itself government, as thorough ly representative, and as skillfully organ ized, as the national government It rep resented the powerful ideas of the superi- ority of the. white race over the black; of the greater fitness of an aristocratic class than working class to govern; of the ma terial aggrandizement and pecuniary profit of slavery; of the sovereignty of each State of the dreaded and supposed danger of set ting free four millions of untutored slaves and giving them rights approxinating those of their late masters, if not, fully equal; and of Christianity and code of morals and ethics in which the above ideas were assumed to be sound, and in. the light of which the freeing slave wasson par with stealing a horse, and general was deemed to be wholesale These ideas inspired the pro- slavery party, prevailed throughout the Democracy, were endorsed in the elections of Pierce and Buchanan, and were r4pre- sented in various degrees in 1860, in the not only of Breckenridge and Lane, but also of Douglas and John son, and of Bell and Everett. In the ag- gregate. they boiled larger popular vote than that cast by MT. Lincoln. But on the question, how these ideas could best be made to prevail, their upholders were divided. The Breckenridge-Lane wing said ''Out of the Union!' The other two factions replied, ''No; in the Union!' But otherwise the ideas that underlay the three parties were the same.
 The measures of the Republican party were confined to preventing the extension tories. But their ideas were deeper, viz. /: tkok tho fp ., ,1o1 are incidental and secondary, compared which they are equal; that slavery is wrong unchristian, unproftable, quarrelsome, ty- ranical, anti-republican, and barbarous; that 1t quenches freedom of speech and of the press, suppresses education, perpe- trates ignorance, and promotes brutality; that it wastes land, expresses labor, de bauches .statesmanship, and undermines republican government; that 1t IS insatia- ble in it's requirements, deceptive in it's supposed profits, improbable and inhu- man. That while, for the sake of the other interests involved in the Union, and peace it might be tolerated, it was only as we would tolerate the serpent coiled around our child, fearing to strike it dead, not for the sake of the serpent, but of the life it endangered. Abolitionists and Republi- cans differed only in the intensity with which they held these ideas. These were the ideas which obtained the ascendency Tn the election of Lincoln. It was in vain therefore that Republicans pointed to the of their platform. The South looked behind their platform, and grasped correctly their fundamental idea, that slavery was wrong. '.With this idea in the ascendency," said they, platforms will advance from the limitation to the ab- olition of the wrong" Doubtless they saw truly. MT. Seward had said, at Cleve- land, many years before, Slavery must be abolished, and you and must doit." MT. Lincoln endorsed the doctrine of the ire pressible conflict. It may be claimed that the anti-slavery idea barely suffced to elect Lincoln, and that the idea which mustered into the field the armies of the Union, was the love of the Union, and not hostility to slavery. This is true But as the anti slavery idea had first to obtain ascendency in the government before slavery would seek to destroy the union, it was, after all, the prior triumph of the anti-slavery idea that arrayed the Union sentiment on the side of freedom. Until this triumph the whole force of the mere Union sentiment in the Northern States. had been devoted to securing concessions to the demands of slavery. The first political crisis of the North, known as the "Great Northern Up-