... No nation, said Niebuhr, ever died except by suicide; and the suicidal poison is engendered not so much in the unjust statutes of a government as in the immoral practices of a people, which the government is unable to punish and unable to restrain. It is because I fear that the strict and accurate interpretation of the Constitution, applied to the electoral vote of Louisiana, would imperil that vote in the future, and increase the very danger which the Constitution intended to avoid, that I am unable to concur with such an application.
I commend this to the perusal of Senator Edmunds, though it is unlikely to impress a mind which could declare, as Senator Edmunds does declare in the April issue of THE CENTURY MAGAZINE, “that the constitutional amendments and reconstruction and other laws were passed by Congress as the best measures available in the complicated and untoward situation. These measures were not measures of cruelty or tyranny, but of justice and hopefulness. After the lapse of years it is evident to me that nothing better could have been done, and that nothing done by Congress should have been omitted.”
Against the plan of reconstruction, here approved so unreservedly and despite the events that came after, unremembered if not condoned by Judge Edmunds, I set the plan of Abraham Lincoln, laid in a larger conception of human nature and better knowledge of the character of the people of the South. None of the dangers apprehended and foreshadowed by Mr. Edmunds would have come to pass had Lincoln lived to put his plan on foot and conduct it to achievement. The South was in desolation. The leaders of the secession movement had been wholly discredited by the result of the war. All their calculations and promises had been disastrously falsified. They could no more escape the consequences of their failure than could other public men, baffled and defeated by events.
The murder of Lincoln removed the sun from the heavens. The clouds of hate and fear, or both, overspread the sky. The policy of “thorough,” adopted by the Radicals in Congress, was not only cruel, taking no account of the myriads in the South who had perpetrated no wrong, but was obtusely senseless, on one hand breeding an oligarchy of corruption, and, on the other, driving a whole people to desperation. It was thus, and thus alone, that a “solid South” was created.
God was more merciful than Congress. The North came to see that the South was a part of itself. Nothing happened in the South that, in the same circumstances and conditions, would not have happened at the North. We are indeed the most homogeneous people on the face of the globe. Our balanced system of representative government, strong in the hearts of the people, is the best and freest, because the most flexible and adjustable, on earth. We have outlived secession; we have survived reconstruction; we have weathered a disputed succession, complicated and embittered; we are passing through, and shall surely surmount, other and still more insidious approaches of revolution. Tilden is dead. Hayes is dead. They were but atoms in a sum total which sweeps onward unaffected by either of them, then, or since—a few loaves and a few fishes the while involved—toward the goal, the yet more perfect day, that shines before us.
HENRY WATTERSON,
“Courier-Journal” Office,
Louisville, Kentucky.
TO ALFRED NOYES
APOSTLE OF POETRY AND PEACE