No better words have dropped from the east portico of the Capitol since the inauguration days of Abraham Lincoln and Gen. Grant. I believe they were sincerely spoken, but whether the President will be able to administer the government in the light of those liberal sentiments is an open question. The one-man power in our government is very great, but the power of party may be greater. The President is not the autocrat, but the executive of the nation. But, happily, the executive is yet a power, and may be able to obtain the support of the co-ordinate branches of the government in so plain a duty as protecting the rights of the colored citizens, with those of all other citizens of the Republic. For one, though Republican I am, and have been, and ever expect to be, though I did what I could to elect James G. Blaine as President of the United States, I am disposed to trust President Cleveland. By his words, as well as by his oath of office, solemnly subscribed to before uncounted thousands of American citizens, he is held and firmly bound to execute the Constitution of the United States in the fullness of its spirit and in the completeness of its letter, and thus far he has shown no disposition to shrink from that duty.
The Southern question is evidently the most difficult question with which President Cleveland will have to deal. Hard as it may be to manage his party on the civil service question, where he has only to deal with hungry and thirsty office-seekers, nineteen out of every twenty of whom he must necessarily offend by failing to find desirable places for them, he will find it incomparably harder to meet that party’s wishes in dealing with the Southern question. There are several methods of disposing of this Southern question open to him, and there are lions in the way, whichever method he may adopt.
First. He may adopt a policy of total indifference. He may shut his eyes to the fact that in all of the Gulf States political rights of colored citizens are literally stamped out; that the Constitution which he has solemnly sworn to support and enforce is under the feet of the mob; that in those States there is no such thing as a fair election and an honest count. He may utterly refuse to interfere by word or deed for the enforcement of the Constitution and for the protection of the ballot, and let the Southern question drift whithersoever it will, to a port of safety or to a rock of disaster. He will probably be counselled to pursue the course of President Hayes, but I hope he will refuse to follow it. The reasons which supported that policy do not exist in the case of a Democratic President. Mr. Hayes made a virtue of necessity. He had fair warning that not a dollar or a dime would be voted by a Democratic Congress if the army were kept in the South. The cry of the country was against what was called bayonet rule.
Secondly. The President may pursue a temporizing policy; keep the word of promise to the ear and break it to the heart, a half-hearted, a neither hot nor cold, a good Lord and good devil policy. He may try to avoid giving offence to any, and thus succeed in pleasing none; a policy which no man or party can pursue without inviting and earning the scorn and contempt of all honest men and of all honest parties.
Thirdly. He may decide to accept the Mississippi plan of conducting elections at the South; encourage violence and crime; elevate to office the men whose hands are reddest with innocent blood; force the negroes out of Southern politics by the shot-gun and the bulldozer’s whip; cheat them out of the elective franchise; suppress the Republican vote; kill off their white Republican leaders, and keep the South solid; and keep its one hundred and fifty-three electoral votes—obtained thus by force, fraud, and red-handed violence—ready to be cast for a Democratic candidate in 1888. This might be acceptable to a certain class of Democrats at the South, but the Democrats of the North would abhor and denounce it as a bloody and hell-black policy. It would hurl the party from power in spite of the solid South, and keep it out of power another four and twenty years.
Fourthly. He may sustain a policy of absolute fidelity to all the requirements of the Constitution as it is, and, as John Adams said of the Declaration of Independence, he may bravely say to the South and to the nation: “Sink or swim, survive or perish, I am for the Constitution in all its parts! I will be true to my oath, and I will, to the best of my ability, and to the fullest extent of my power, defend, protect, and maintain the rights of all citizens, without regard to race or color.”
There can be no doubt as to which of these methods of treating the Southern question is the most honest and safe one. There may be many wrong ways for individuals or nations to pursue, but there is but one right way, and it remains to be seen if this is the one the present administration will adopt and pursue. Left to the promptings of his own heart and his own view of his constitutional duties, and to his own sense of the requirements of consistency, and even expediency, I firmly believe that President Cleveland would do his utmost to protect and defend the constitutional rights of all classes of citizens. But he is not left to himself, and may adopt a different policy.
One thing seems plain, which it is well for all parties to know and consider. It is this: There are 7,000,000 of colored citizens now in this Republic. They stand between the two great parties—the Republican party and the Democratic party—and whichever of these two parties shall be most just and true to these 7,000,000 may safely count upon a long lease of power in this Republic. It is not their votes alone that will tell. There is deep down among the people of this country a love of justice and fair play, and that fact will tell. It is now as it was in the time of war, and it will be so in all time. The party which takes the negro on its side will triumph. The world moves, and the conditions of success and failure have changed.
Formerly, devotion to slavery was the condition upon which the success of the Democratic party was based. But time and events have swept away this abhorred condition. Liberty, not slavery, is now the autocrat of the Republic. Neither politics nor religion can succeed in the future by pandering to the prejudices arising out of slavery. Let the great Democratic party realize this fact, and shape its policy in accordance with it; let it do justice to the negro, and it will certainly succeed itself in power four years hence, and long years after.
On the contrary, if it forgets the nation’s progress, falls back into its old ruts, and seeks success on the old conditions; if it forgets that slavery has now become an anachronism, a superstition of the past, having no proper relation to the age and body of our times, it will be ignominiously driven from place and power four years hence, and no arm can, or ought to, save it.