Year: 1868




The bill adopted by the House committee
on reconstruction, still further supplementing


the reconstruction law, is another indication


of the desperate lengths to which the radicals
are prepared to 60. An examination of the
teleeraphic synopsis of the bill will discover
that its general purport is to lump the five
separate autocracies, established in the South
by the reconstruction law as it now stands,


into a single military despotism welded by


the general of the army. Both the executive


and the Judiciary are forbid to recognize the


existence of civil governments in any of the


unrepresented States and it is declared
especially to be unlawful for the President to
sustain the existing provisional governments
in the South, through the agency of military


subordinates. These provisions, along with
these which invest the general of the army
with the power of appointing and removing
district commanders and civil officers, signify
nothing less than the deposition of the con-
stitutional commander-in-chief of the army,
and the substitution in his place of an
officer who can have no constitutional exist
ence except in the character of subordinate





Gen. Grant, who owes his position of general
of the army to appointment by President
johnson, agree to assume the supreme mill
taTy functions which this bill proposes to de-
volve upon him, he will prove his readiness
to consummate the subverson of the consti-
tutionsl basis of military discipline, as well
as Of civil order, to which both the theory
and the practical development of radical
politics have all along been pointed Nor
could the President consent to surrender his
right to exact responsibility to himself from
district commanders and all other military
officers, without becoming morally party to
the radical overthrow of constitutional govern
ment.


The declaration in the bill of the non-exis-
tence of civil governments in the ten uurep-
resented States, was no doubt provoked by
the soldierly as well as statesmanlike position
taken by Gen. Hancock, with regard to the
separate and legitimate provinces of the mill
tary authority and the civil authority. And
it is evidently one of the chief purposes of
the bill, outside of its general purpose of
securing the continuance of radical dominion,
to paralyze or get rid of such commanders as
Gen. Hancock by concentrating the whole
architecture, military and civil, of the radical
reconstruction scheme in the hands of Gen.
Grant. This, or some like device, is the only
method, indeed, which the radical politicians
can contrive for removing an unlocked for
military obstruction in the South, and for
assuring the coveted issue of their reconstruc-
ton scheme. They cannot dispense with the
military power to carry this scheme into ex-
ecution and yet there is danger that this
power may fall short OF the unworthy and
anomalous service which they call upon it to
perform, unless the President is virtually ous-
ted from the command-in.c chief of the army.


Hence the supreme military position with
respect to reconstruction in which it is pro-
posed to place Gen. Grant The radical poll
ticians have, in fact, got themselves in a
dilemma from which they see no way of ex-
Treating themselves but by resort to legis-
lation that points plainly to one of two re-
sults-the collapse of civil order as well as of
military discipline, the erection of a mill
t'ry despotism with Gen. Grant at its head.
In short, the alternatives which they would
force upon the country are Grant or anarchy
There is but one way to defeat this desperate
device. That is for the people to rise in their |
might, and to say with irresistible voice that
they will not permit radicalism to impose !
upon the country either alternative.