There is a dormant statesmanship in the south that must and will exert itself mightily, “a moral and intellectual intelligence which is not going to be much longer beguiled out of its moral right of way by questions of political punctilio, but will seek that plane of universal justice and equity which it is every people’s duty before God to seek.”
But the question is not a sectional one. The whole American people are deeply concerned in it. Nullification in South Carolina is as great a national menace today as it proved to be half a century ago. Republican institutions and the national welfare can have no guarantee or protection against the evil consequences threatened by defiant trampling upon constitutional authority. Not in its most palmy days did the slave system possess such power as is aimed at by these latter day nullifiers. Having shorn the Negro of his political rights and brought him into industrial subjection, thereby usurping power both in state and national government, they now threaten to dominate the economic and industrial policies of the nation.
This government can not long continue half republican in form and half oligarchic.
John L. Love.
Footnotes:
[1] Greeley’s American Conflict, Vol. I, p. 417.
[2] Blaine, “Twenty Years of Congress,” II., 94.
[3] McPherson, “History of Reconstruction,” p. 40.
[4] Ibid p. 36.