The Columbian. [volume] (Bloomsburg, Pa.) 1866-1910, 1872-08-02

people, they tender you their |
confident that peace and |
good government will be inaugurated
and maintained under your admins.
tration. Respectfully, your obedient
j. II. DOOLITTLE,
Chairman of Convention.
To the Hon. Horace Greeley, Neio York.
MR.. GREELEY's ACCEPTANCE.
NEW YORK, July IS, 1872.
Upon mature deliber-
alton, it seems fit that should give to
your letter of the 10th inst. some further
and fuller response than the hasty, un-
premedittaed words inwhich acknowl-
edged and accepted your nomination at
our meeting on the 18th.
That your Convention saw fit to ac-
cord its highest honor to one who had
been prominently and pointedly OPP
posed to your party in the earnest and
sometimes angry controversies of the
last forty years, is essentially note.
worthy. That many of you originally
preferred that the Liberal Republicans
should present another candidate for
President, and would more readily have
united with us in the support of Adams
or Trumbull, Davis or Brown, is we'll
known. 1 owe my adoption at Balti'
more wholly to the fact that had al
ready been nominated at Cincinnati,
and that concentration Of forces upon
any new ticket had been proved inn
practicable. Gratified as am at your
concurrence in the Cincinnati nomina-
tions, certain as 1 am that you would
not have concurred had you not deemed
me upright and capable, find nothing
in the circumstance calculated to in
flame vanity or nourish selfconceit.
But that your Convention saw fit, in
adopting the Cincinnati ticket, to re.
affirm the Cincinnati platform, is TO me
source of the profOundest satisfaction.
That body was constrained to take this
important step by no party necessity,
real or supposed. 1t might have ac-
cepted the candidates of the Liberal
Republicans upon grounds entirely its
own, or it might have presented them
las the first Whig National Convention
did Harrison and Tyler without adopt.
ing any platform whatever. That 1t
chose to plant itself deliberately, by
vote nearly unanimous, upon the fullest
and clearest enunciation of principles
which are at once incontQstably Repub-
lican and emphatically Democratic,
gives trustworthy assurance that new
and more auspicious era is dawning
upon our long distracted country.
Some of the best years and best efforts
of my life were devoted to struggle
against chattle slavery-a struggle none
the less earnest or arduous because re-
spect for constitutional obligation con.
strained me to act for the most part on
the defensive-in resistance to the diff.
fusion rather than in direct efforts for
the extinction of human bondage
Throughout most of those years, my
vision was uncheered, my eXertions
were rarely animated, by even so much
as hope that should live to see my
country peopled by freemen alone. The
affirmanee by your Convention of the
Cincinnati platform is most conclu-
sive proof that not merely slavery is
abolished, but that its spirit is extinct
that, despite the protests Of respecta-
BILE but isolated few, there remains
among us no party and no formidable
interests which regrets the o. gthrow
or desires the re establishment If hui
man bondage, whether in Letter or in
spirit. 1 am thereby justified in my
hope and trust that the first century oi
American independence will not close
before the grand elemental truths on
which its rightfulness was based by
Jefferson and the Continental Congress
of 1776 will no longer be regarded as
"glittering generalities," but will have
become the universally accepted and
honored foundations of our political
fabric.
/ demand the prompt application o.
those principles to our existing condi
tion. Having done what l could fol
the complete emancipation of blacks,
now insist on the full enfranchisement
of all my white countrymen. Let none
say that the ban has just been removed
from all but few hundred elderly gen
tlemen, to whom eligibility to Office
can be of little consequence. My view
contemplates not the hundreds pro
scribed but the millions who are denied
the right to be ruled and represented
by the men of their unfettered choice.
Prescription were absurd if these die
not wish TO elect the very men whom
they are forbidden to choose.
1 have profound regard for the peo
pie Of that New England wherein wai
born, in whose common schools l was
taught. / rank no other people above
them in intelligence, capacity, and
moral worth. But, while they do many
things well, and some admirably, there
is one thing which am sure they can
not wisely or safely undertake, and thai
is the selection, for States remote from
and unlike their own, of the persons by
whom those States shall be represented
in Congress. If they could do this Il
good purpose then Republican institu
tions were unfit, and aristocracy the
only true political system.
Yet what have we recently witness
ed? Zebulen B. Vance, the unques
toned choice of large majority of thu