The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-10-05

public; slavery had taken the hon snare, De |
cause it was assumed) the whole of the |
Louisiana purchase belonged TO her before |
Jefferson bought it; but now that New |
Mexico, California, and all between them,
had come to us free, she repudiated her own |
rule, and insisted that all these should be
opened to her incursions, and made subject
to her law. Her champions asserted that
territory became SO subject by the naked fact
OF becoming part of our national domain;
and the Supreme Court, by its Dred Scot de-
cision, seemed to concur in this monstrous
dictum. The free North appealed; and Lin
coins first election was popular reversal OF
the Courts atrocious doctrine.
The Republican party has ever applied its
principles to the facts directly under contem-
plation. When slavery clutched at the Terri
tories, it resisted on the sound and just as
sumption that slavery was a creature OF posi-
tive law, and that the law must be produced
(not inferred) to enable one man to hold
another as his chattel. When slavery rebelled
against this, saying in effect to the Union,
''You life or mine !" the Republican party
took up the gage and said, 'It shall be yours
then !" and, after desperate struggle, made
good its resolution. The Union is completely
and firmly restored, simply because slavery IS
destroyed.
--''But what shall be done with the four mil
lions of freedmen ?" became at once the para
mount question. 1t could not be evaded-lt
could not be postponed. Consign those four
millions to political nonentity and the South
was still essentially rebel, and would so make
herself felt in the national councils She
would inevitably regard and treat the national
authority, the national debt, as results of her
overthrow and proofs of her humiliation.
Safety conspired with justice in demanding
that the millions whom the Union had freed
should be clothed by the Union with all the
rights of freemen--of citizens. The Civil
Rights act and the Reconstruction measures,
in so far as they affirmed and secured the
freedmen in all the rights of citizenship, were
as essential to the overthrow and stamping
out of the Rebellion as were Gettysburg, Mis-
sion Ridge, and Appomattox.
Of course, the party at the North which had
ever sympathized with the Rebels opposed
enfranchisement as they had opposed 'coer-
cion" and emancipation. Those who agreed
with Buchanan and Jerry Black in their
premise that the Union could be peacefully
kicked out of a loyal State, and could only
return as trespasser, naturally held that
everything done in defense of the Union,
from Invading" the sacred soil of Vir-
ginia to giving the ballot TO the freedmen,
was usurpatiOn and outrage. Regarding
slavery as the real constitution of our coun-
try, they necessarily deprecated every act
hostile to slavery as aimed at the vitals of the
Constitution.
Who wishes to retrace our weary, rugged
way from 1860 to 1869? Who continues to
regret the coercion" of those who opened
fire on Fort Sumter, and compelled Major
Anderson to strike to them the flag of the
Union that waved over that national fortress?
Who laments the burial of slavery under the
ruins of the Rebellion? Let him take his
stand with Packer, the Copperhead Congress
man, against Geary, the Union soldier. There
he belongs, and thence no logic, no entreaty,
can draw him. SO long as his heart Is in the
common grave of slavery and the Rebellion,
his vote is the natural perquisite of his fell
low mourners, whereof no one can deprive
them.
But the Republican--the man who felt the
defeats of Bull Run, Fredericksburg, and
Charlottesville as personal calamities-whose
heart sank within him as the national flag
went down, and scared in exultation when
Nashville, Memphis, New Orleans, Little
Rock Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston, and
Richmond were successfully recovered by the
armies of the Union-how can he hesitate or
be lukewarm? Does he not believe in ''gov-
ernment Of the people, 6y the people, and for
the people, whether they inhabit the green
hills of Vermont or the rice swamps and sea
islands of Carolina? What right has the
| Union to exist that is not grounded in the in
| alienable rights of man?
Four years ago, the people of Connecticut
were summoned to vote on the question
| ''Shall black men be henceforth voters at our
elections on the same terms with whites?'
! OF course every hater of Republican princi-
| pies and Republican victories was on hand to
vote as his sympathies dictated; while some
thousands of Republicans faltered and hung
! back They guessed we had done enough for
| the ''niggers," without making them voters.
Eighteen months thereafter, the Republicans
| lost the State for the lack of the votes of
those very ''niggers," when they would cer-
| tainly have saved it had not one-tenth of them
proved recreant to principle and the other
| nine-tenths by failing to vote for equal
rights. Had the paltry creatures seen the
| length of their noses-much less their ears
! they would have realized that in voting against
the 'niggers, they were voting their enemies
| into power. And the State, though despe-
rately contested, was not recovered till Gen.
| Grant ran for President.
| The blacks of Pennsylvania are not for
midable body; but they are strong enough to
| have saved four districts to the Republicans
in the last election of Representatives in Con-
| gress, and kept Philadelphia ont of the hands
| of the ruffians who, by fraudulent voting,
stole her chief offices last October They
are said to be ignorant; but the most be-
| nichted among them can tell q sham D2mo-
| crat from a real champion of government by
the whole people, and that is more discern
ment than tens of thousands manifest who
call themselves white. There is not valid
reason for denying them the right of suffrage
which would not exclude large proportion of
the whites also from the ballot-box, and rem
der power no longer the right of the many but
the privilege Of the few.
Republicans of Pennsylvania, men of prin-
| cirle and character if the blacks living peace