Martinsburg herald. [volume] (Martinsburg, W. Va.) 1881-1920, 1899-01-14
HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF.
Are We to Witness Another Era of
Good Feeling?
Golfers Week ".

it of President Mckinley to the South
ern states, and, especially, by his
declaration that the graves Of the
Confederate dead ought to be cared
for at the cost OF the reconstructed
nation. The effect Of that utterance
upon the Southern press was pro-
found, and seems likely to be perma-
nent; there are even those who be-
| lieve that it II ay materially influence
Mr.. McKinley's pros oects at the next
Presidential election. 1t is asserted
in several quarters that, If Mr.. Nc
Kinley, whose denomination is taken
for granted, would accept an Exon
tederate soldier as the candidate for
Vice President, the Republican ticket
would have a fair chance of carrying
not only Delaware, Maryland, West
Virginia. and Kentucky, but also Vir-
GINA, North Carolina, Florida, Ala.
bama, Tennessee. Louisiana, and Mis-
souri,, for, in other words. almost all
of the former slaveholding states.
That is to say, if such ticket as
Mckinley and Wheeler" or NC
Kinley and Lee" were offered to the
voters, we should hear no more of the
"Solid South" considered as the
Gibraltar of Democracy.
There is a memorable precedent for
the placement OF party lines and the
substitution OF an era of good feeling
tor sectional animosities. 1t will be
remembered that scarcely had the
government established under the
Constitution been put in operation,
than two political parties were organ
lied, the one headed by Hamilton and
the other by Jefferson. Inasmuch as
the latter party advocated a strict con-
struction, and the former lax inter
probation of our Federal organic law,
their aims and views seemed irrecon-
cilable, and, as early as Washington S
second term, they exhibited toward
one another in their speeches and
writings great deal of virulence and
rancor. The antagonism, which had
not spared even Washington himself,
waxed fiercer after March d, 1897,
when John Adams became President,
having beaten Thomas Jefferson by
a small majority in the electoral COL
leges. Many leading Federalists hon.
estly believed, when Thomas Jefferson
was chosen President by the House of
Representatives in the winter of 1900
1901, that the country was ruined,
and they were not in the least com.
forted or propitiated by the magnani-
nous words in Jefferson's inaugural
address, 1--WE are all Federalists, we
are all Republicans. Thenceforth,
the Federalists lost ground rapidly in
the Middle and Southern states, but
turned at bay in New England where,
having shrunk to the dimensions of a
sectional faction, they did not hesitate
to say, through the mouth of Josiah
Quincy, in 1871, that the erection of
the Orleans territory into state
would make it the right of all the
original states, and the duty of some,
to secede from the Union. Three
yeats later, during our war with Eng
land, the Federal governors of Massa-
chusetts and Connecticut went to the
verge of secession by refusing to obey
the Presidents call for troops. Yet,
only six years thereafter, namely, in
1920, every New England state, as
we'll as every other state n the Union,
voted for James Monroe, the Demo
cratic Republican candidate, who re-
ceived every electoral vote but one,
which was withheld from him in or
der that it might never be said that
any Oln6l lldd tnC
unanimous suffrage given to Wash
iugton. By the election of Monroe to
a second term, the assertion prema-
turely made by Jefferson nineteen
years before, 1--WE are all Federalists,
we are all Republicans, was literally
verified The old party lines were OBJ
liberated, and the new sectional dis
tiuctions we're not yet we'll defined,
although they were about to emerge
with good deal of sharpness in the
debates on the Missouri Compromise.
In Monroe's Cabinet, John Quincy
Adams, who was the son of FEEDER
alist President, and who. himself was
to be the protagonist of the Free soil
ers in the House of Representatives