Staunton spectator. [volume] (Staunton, Va.) 1849-1896, 1892-07-20
"Only q ScarecrOW."

The Republican press are trying very
hard to make it appear that the Force
bill is ''only a scarecrow' to frighten
away voters from the Republican party
in the North as we'll as in the South
Such papers as the New York Tribune,
the special organ of Whitelaw Reid,
declares that it is simply a bogy. while
Judge, the leading pictorial organ Of
the Radicals, has a cartoon this week
representing it as mere fiimsy dis
guise behind which is concealed the
issue of Free Trade.
This attempt to deny the reality of a
Force bill sentiment in the Republican
party is the very sublimity of Radical
| impudence. 1t is a matter of history
that the Republicans have never since
| the organization of their party in 1856,
omitted any opportunity to attack the
| South or manifest their spirit of malig-
nifty against this section. AS soon as
the party came into power in 1860 by
the election of Abraham Lincoln, it
sought to &C cree and subdue the South
and institute a bloody war for that
purpose. Then, when the war was
| over, it sent down here an army of vile
carpet baggers, who formed union
with their scalawag friends to rob, i'm
poverish and strip the South of the
little that the desperate conflict had
| left her, while both they and their
negro allies were kept in power by Re
publican bayonets. Then when recon
| struction, so-called, was finished, and
the Southern States were received back
| into the Union, after they had been
compelled to ratify the constitutional
amendments lin other words after they
had been required to perform the
highest and most sovereign act of a
State, before they would be recognized
as States at alD, Ben Butler, in 1876,
introduced the first Force bill, which
provided for the destruction of civil
liberty in the South, and but for the
mastery filibustering of Hon. Samuel
j. Randall until the 4th of March
interviewed, it would have been passed
Then the Republicans lost the House
and never received credit of it until
1888; but at the very first session of
Congress thereafter, just so soon as
they found themselves in power once
more, after twelve years, the first thing
thsy did was to pass in the House
another most infamous Force bill and
even tried to revolutionize the rules of
the Senate to railroad it through that
body also. And, be it remembered, no
AAie"AA IA oI-O POI WeID illOlO f1hAIN no w
see that infamy a law than Benjamin
Harrison.
Here then we have the Force bill,
anti-Southern record of the Republican
party from its very birth to it's last con-
troll of Congress, and surely it is enough
to forever shut the mouths of the most
impudent of the Radical writer's and
speakers who now seek to deny Repub-
lican sympathy with such measure
But, as if to allow no pretext for the
charge that they had grown lukewarm
on this subject, the party, in national
convention recently gathered in Min
neapolis, demanded that every citizen
of every color be guaranteed the right
to vote, and in the same connection
declares that 1--WE denounce the con-
tinued inhuman outrages perpetrated
upon American citizens for political
reasons in certain States.''
Now, in the face of all this, the Re-
publican press dare characterize the
Force bill as bogy and scarecrow-|
If any Southern man can believe them
or be lulled into a feeling of security by
any such absurd and foolish assertion,
and be thereby induced to vote for Re-
publican success, either directly or
pnder the disguise of Third partyism
or anything else, he is blind indeed,
and is madly rushing ON to his own de-
observation-disclosures Times.