The lynching of the colored man, Walker Denning, in the town of Riverside, Texas, appears to have been an unusually brutal and unjustifiable act, even for Texas. The girl with whom he eloped admitted to the reporter of a Texas paper that she prompted his course, Denning at first strongly objecting and advising her to stay at home. The spectacle of twenty armed men firing buck-shot into a chained and helpless victim at such close range that his clothing was set on fire, horrifies us with its unnecessary savagery. But the revelation is no new one. We have already had proof upon proof that under "conciliation" there is no law, justice, nor mercy for the unfortunate colored people of the South: and this merely adds another to the long list of butcheries, and worse than Turkish barbarities, of which the blood-thirsty rebel element have been guilty.—Traveller.
Henrietta Wood, a colored woman, of Cincinnati, has recovered two thousand five hundred dollars damages against ex-Sheriff Ward, of Campbell County, Kentucky, for unlawful duress and abduction. In 1853, when living in Cincinnati, she was enticed over the river to Kentucky, and delivered over to Ward, who kept her as a slave seven months, when he disposed of her to a slave-trader. She was sold South, and remained fifteen years in slavery. She returned to Cincinnati after the close of the war, and commenced the action which has just terminated in her favor.
The "Macon (Ga.) Telegraph" demands that the Southern people shall be paid for their emancipated slaves. Next they will probably want pay, at hotel rates, for the entertainment of Union prisoners during the war.—Philadelphia Press.
The colored Republicans in Somerville County, South Carolina, carried the local election recently by a large majority, but the Democrats managed to count them out, on the ground that it wouldn't do for the Republicans to carry the first election of the season.—Journal.
And this right under the much-praised administrative system of Wade Hampton, who, with Gordon, Lamar, Stephens, Hill, and the rest of the treasonable species, constitutes the organic beau-ideal of statesmanship. Turn the other cheek and let them slap it, Mr. Journal.
A Sad, True Story.—A letter from New Orleans to the "Philadelphia Press" thus refers to the native Republicans of Louisiana:—
"The leaders were beset with dangers and difficulties such as have never even been dreamed of in the North. One by one they have given their life's blood in the cause. They have lain down their lives, true to the flag. They have been thinned out by assassination and violence. Their graves—the graves of the victims of Democratic outrage—are scattered throughout the South. There are comparatively few of the living to tell the tale. A large proportion of these, even, have been maimed and crippled in the fight.
"They are to-day, as a rule, none the less true to the Republican faith. The Southern Republican leaders have nothing to offer by way of palliation or excuse. They have fallen one by one in the enemy's front. The Republican masses have been massacred by wholesale; have been murdered and outraged upon every occasion and in every manner. They have been hunted as the beasts of the jungle. Their blood cries to Heaven from every hillside, from every by-way, and from every bridle-path in the South. There has been more of blood—Republican blood—that has dyed the soil of Louisiana alone than all that has been shed in all of the Indian wars of a quarter of a century. It has been shed, alas, in vain. The American people were not a nation. There was not, there is not to-day, to their shame be it said, the power within the American people, to protect the life, or avenge the murder of an American citizen, within the American lines."
We would crucify our extreme modesty and suggest to the above writer the reason why "there is not to-day the power within the American people to protect the life or avenge the murder of an American citizen." Is it not because we, "the people," put their political power into the hands of the commander-in-chief of our army, in trust for four years, who betrayed that trust by the transfer of that power into the hands of a contemptible knot of armed and defiant rebels, thus constituting a solid South with which to rule the nation? And is it not because the said commander-in-chief, at the demand of the said rebels in arms, packed up his traps and withdrew our "federal bayonets" from the South, thus giving them, in addition to their State rule, our national supremacy, by further giving them two States with large Republican majorities?
And furthermore, is it not because the loyal North did not arise as one man and demand the impeachment of the traitor who bartered their liberties for a sham peace, taking rebel promises for pay which have since been repudiated?