Year: 1879




There are some excellent Southern
gentlemen, in Congress and out of it,
who are very much shocked at mani
festations of Southern lawlessness,
like the shooting of postmaster in
Blackville, the expulsion of a post
mistress from Grenada, the murder of
| Dixon, and the murder of the CHS
EOlns; but are still more indignant at
the Northern newspapers which make
the facts public. Why" they ask,
will the Radical press persist in SOW
ing discord between the sections by
harpiug on these unfortunate occur
rences? There are bad and violent
men in the South, as there are every
where else, but they are not the rep
resentatives of Southern character.
We have a right to demand that we
shall be judged by our best people and
not by our worst"


This would be a reasonable remon-
STRANGE but for the inconvenient cir
cumstance that the bullieS and men of
blood have taken the management of
Southern politics into their hands and
are not only running the administra-
ton home rule after their peculiar
fashion, but are applying the same
violent methods to the government of
the whole country. The manner in
which they see fit to elect Congress-
men and Legislators and to treat Fed
eral officers concerns not themselves
alone, but us too. The bulldozer ap-
plies the shotgun not merely to the
correction of the political opinions of
the local ''niggers," but also to the
subiugation of the free North. Every
political outrage in South Carolina
and Mississippi is in effect an attack
upon Northern ballot-boxes. Every
Southern gentleman who is sent to
Congress by terrorized constituency,
to make laws for the whole Nation, is
practically repeating the bludgeon
work which Preston Brooks applied
to his controversy with Charles Sum-
ner. 1t is the height of insolence to
ask us to submit to it in silence.


Southern gentlemen, so long as
they take office by the help of such
outrages, have no right to hold them
selves above the perpetrators. There
is more than one Southern Senator
whose credentials are dyed in blood.
There is one who is known to have
been in league with gangs of desper-
ate men to establish by lawless vio-
lence the State Government which af-
forwards sent him to Washington.
Yet no Southern Democrat thinks the
worse of these gentlemen because they
have stopped to take advantage of
fraud and murder. They do not think
the worse of themselves. In truth,
there is no vigorous public condemna-
ton of political outrages in the South
ern States. Violence is sometimes
lamented, because it has bad look
abroad, or because it disturbs the COM
munity, or from some such feeling as
moved the engine-driver when he said
he hated to run over a man-it mussed
up the track so. But Of genuine in =.
dignation at political mob-violence
there is hardly trace. A Mississippi
jury would not convict the Chisolm
murderers. Republicans in South
Carolina beg their friends here to say
nothing about the murder Of Brice,
lest the local courts and juries refuse
to punish the assassins IF the politi-
cal features Of their crime "are forced
into prominence"


The South cannot ask to be judged
by her best men until she herself ac-
cepts these best men for guides. At
present they have no perceptible inhu-
ence upon the behavior of their
townsmen. They are models of de-
pertinent whom nobody initiates.
The real leaders are the men with the
shotguns.