New York, August 13, 1868. IMMEDIATELY upon the adjournment of
the Republican Conven- tion at Chicago in May last, I began a letter to the Spectator thus :—" General Grant has been nominated for President, but he will not be elected, unless political changes which I do not now look for take place before next November." Pausing a moment to think in what shape I should put my reasons for that opinion, I remembered how distasteful to some of my readers some of my for- mer opinions as to coming political events had been, none the less so, perhaps, because in the end they did not prove to be incorrect. Reflecting that I was as unable as Salaam to curse those whom I was summoned to curse, and no blinder than his ass to the power that stood before me, I threw aside my task as one that would be regarded certainly as unwelcome, and perhaps as superfluous. But it is because the Spectator is not a prophesier of smooth things that I like to preach in its pulpit ; and now therefore, when that paper itself, in the last number that has reached me, confesses that it is utterly puzzled by the Democratic platform and nominations, I stand up again to bear witness. For that platform and that nomination are of momentous political significance.
Within a year and a half of the surrender of General Lee, Horatio Seymour would have been, next to Mr. Vallandigham or Mr. Pendleton, about the worst nominee that the Democratic party could have found north of the Potomac ; and now he is not the best. Indeed, within that time the Republicans had the power of preventing the election of any Democrat to the Presidency for a generation, simply by adopting a policy which could receive the support of the very founders of the Republican party and of a large proportionate number of the people of the Northern States, without whose hearty aid and support the war could not have been carried on for six months. The policy which they did adopt (I am not regarding it at all in the light of the moral questions involved in the end they sought to attain by it) was such that now Mr. Seymour will receive the votes of tens of thousands to whom his attitude during the war—if that can be called an attitude which was a shifting between armed neutrality, sullen support, and insi- dious opposition—was in the highest degree offensive ; and that now the Democratic party, which at the close of the war was to all intents and purposes dead and ready to decompose into its individual atoms, is alive again, and is looked to by a large pro- portion of those who supported and of those who fought that war as the only political power to be relied upon for the preservation of constitutional government, our only bulwark against the rule of an unchecked, irresponsible majority of the whole people, consoli- dated for all practical political purposes into one undivided Demo- cratic republic. Whether such a government—one in which the minority, however large, would have no rights which the majority would be bound to respect—is a good one or not, it is not the Government under which we have thus far lived, it is not a Govern- ment under which the people of any part of the country—Massa- chusetts and Ohio, no less than Virginia and South Carolina— could now be induced to place themselves upon any con- sideration whatever. They would even rather restore the status quo ante bellum. I am speaking now not specially of the Democrats, not of the War Democrats, or of the moderate Republicans, but of the whole mass of the native people of this country, including the advanced Republicans, with the excep- tion of Wendell Phillips, and a score or so of men like him who, in his own words, "spat upon the Constitution" before the war and through the war, and who seem now ready to spit upon it and everything else that stands between them and the negro. With this insignificant exception—absolutely insignificant, for my word " score " has its real, and not its rhetorical value,—no one here wishes, dreams of, still less openly pretends to a consolidated Democratic nationality in which the will of a majority of all the voters should be superior to the provisions of a written constitu- tion, and the reserved rights of the several States should be at the mercy of an Act of Congress ; the attainment of which seems to be regarded by some Englishmen as one of the two main objects of the war, the second being the elevation of the negro to political power. I do not know the Republican politician who would con- sider for a moment a proposition to bring forward a " platform " embodying the idea of such a Government for this country. Elect General Grant upon such a platform ! You could not elect the Archangel Gabriel, or even that other Archangel fallen, for whom it has been said that the Democratic party would vote to a man, were he to receive a regular nomination. No; the Republican party is, and always has been, a States' Rights party in principle,
and, when put to the proof, in practice. I am considering care- fully what I say, although, indeed, it needs very little considera- tion; for there has never been any dispute as to the existence of States' Rights, inviolable by Congress, as a fundamental, integral, inexpugnable principle in our system of government. The quarrel has been heretofore as to whether those rights could be used to force the support and the propagation of slavery upon the whole people, and to justify secession. It has been decided that they cannot. That is what the war settled, and that only. The struggle was, in fact, on the part of the Free States a struggle for State Rights as well as against State Sovereignty. The Slave States demanded that in virtue of the Constitution the people of the Free States should in good faith support and countenance Slavery, at the risk, if they refused, of a destruction of the Union. The latter said, " No; slavery is a State matter, with which we have nothing to do : take care of your negroes yourselves : our soil is free : you cannot make it a hunting-ground for slave-catchers; nor can you use the power of the common Glivernment to set apart as much as you can grab of the common soil of the country for slavery." This was the position. Slavery is a moral question ; but as far as the Government of the United States is concerned, the moral aspects of a State institution is not a subject for considera- tion, much less of action. The Constitution of the United States does not deal with moral questions, and the Government of the United States in its domestic policy can only take them into consideration incidentally.
For the conclusion of the Spectator (Jujy 25), that if the Demo- cratic platform is sustained by the people, any State "may make suffrage laws, or labour laws, or laws about personal right opposed to the whole spirit of the rest of the community, yet must not be so much as officially censured," is not only quite correct in the case supposed, but is absolutely and exactly true in any case possible or supposable, whether the next President be Grant or Seymour. Indeed, this is so simply and plainly the normal condition of our political existence, that the mention of: it as worthy of special remark at the present time appears to any one of us as being in itself very remarkable. If the State of New York were to declare that hereafter no person should vote who was not thirty years of age and had not a yearly income of 3,000 dollars, and the State of New Jersey (separated from the former only by an imaginary line) should declare that every one of its inhabitants, male and female, fifteen years old and upwards, should vote, there is no power on earth, certainly none in this country, by which either State could be officially censured. As to labour laws; in New York eight hours are a legal days' labour, but in the bordering States ten. If there is one subject which more than all others is both a moral one and peculiarly within the province of municipal law, it is mar- riage. And yet a woman may be a married woman in Indiana, and in New York have none of the legal rights of a wife; and if Massachu- setts chose to permit polygamy, the Government of the United States .would have no power to prevent it, no right to censure it. No power exercised by Government is more arbitrary or more irritat- ing, although none is more necessary, than that of detaining the citizens of other nations in quarantine, often to their great injury ; none would seem to a European more exclusively the function of a central national Government, and yet that matter in this country is wholly in the hands of the several States. When a British mail steamer, entering the port of New -York, " slows " to take on board a Custom-House officer, she submits to national authority ; but when, within five minutes after, she stops, and, perhaps, comes to anchor off the quarantine ground, she yields to State authority, represented by a physician over whom the United States has no control, but without whose permit she cannot go to her wharf. The reason why the Customs' officer is a United States' officer and the health officer is a mere physician appointed by the State of New York, is merely that the Constitution of the United States provides that "the Congress shall have power to collect taxes, duties," bcc., and that no State shall lay any duties on imports or exports ; and that the same Constitution does not provide that Congress shall have power to establish quarantine, which power therefore remains as abso- lutely and exclusively with the several States as if each one of them were a sovereign, independent power. And so tenacious are they of this reserved right that it has thus far been found impos- sible to establish the quarantine for New York at the best place, which seems to have been made by nature for that purpose, Sandy Hook, because that soil, although at the entrance to New York Harbour, belongs, not to the State of New York, but to New Jersey. Now it is impossible to execute the quarantine laws of New York upon the soil of New Jersey, and the latter will not alienate to the former one foot of her territory. Yet more, one of
the "reserved" rights of the States is the commissioning the officers of the Militia, even when it is in the service of the United States ; so that during the war, outside the little knot of soldiers called the Regular Army, the officers for those millions of men that the United States sent into the field were all counniaioned by the Governors of the several States. Nor were they or the men under their command at all under the control of the United Stated until, their organization having been first completed, they were mustered into the Union Service. This made trouble, confusion, delay, and vexation all through the war. But this reserved State right the States insisted upon and contended for to the most minute point, and none were more tenacious of it than the strong Republican States, Massachusetts, New York, and Ohio.
This condition of things, however, by no means justifies the con- clusion that the Government of the Republic, being unable to do any- thing which interferes with the reserved rights of the States, can do "practically nothing at all." IV hoover will take the trouble of read- ing the 8th, 9th, and 10th sections of the 1st article of the Constitu- tion will find that Congress is endowed by them with ample and ex- clusive powers in all mattersof national or general moment, especially those which refer to the external relations of the common govern- ment. This is what was chiefly sought. The aim of our political institutions is the preservation of as much local independence as comports with national strength. And whoever will talk with intelligent Republicans, no matter how "advanced," will find that the Republican party as well as the Democratic "believes indi- vidual States to have rights the nation may not touch." So con- spicuous a Republican leader as Chief Justice Chase believes and avows, and always has believed and avowed this no leas distinctly than Governor Seymour himself. He had no chance of a nomina- tion by the Democratic Convention, in which he received but two votes, but his unfitness for that nomination was not a disbelief or a doubt on his part of the inviolability of the reserved rights of the several States.
What, then, is the issue between the two parties, which is to be decided at the next general election? Simply this. The Republican party, as represented by the men who now control it, claims that while all State rights, including that of regulating the suffrage, must be preserved inviolate in those States the majority of whose people did not take part in the rebellion, in the others the control of suffrage and citizenship may and should be assumed by Congress, and that these States should be " reconstructed " for the purpose of giving the suffrage to negroes. In other words, that where negro suffrage is a matter of tremendous moment, it may be imposed upon the people by force, but that in another part of the country, where the question of negro suffrage is of no practical consequence, it should be left to the people who have already decided against it., even Kansas, bleeding Kansas, having refused the negro the suffrage, and Ohio, radical Ohio, having denied political rights to all persons having even "a visible admixture of negro blood." This position, which the Democrats deny, is dis- tinctly taken in the second article of the Republican platform.
The Republicans also rest upon the position that "the negro must be a chattel or a citizen." This the Democrats also deny ; and point to the negro in the North, where, for half a century, he has been neither chattel nor citizen, and where yet all his personal rights arc as secure as those of any white man, and he is as comfortable as any man in his con- dition of life, and generally somewhat happier than a white man of similar position. Upon these issues the Republicans would surely be defeated, and by the votes of men who fought and laboured for the Union from the beginning to the end of the war with all their hearts and all their strength, were it not for the well deserved popularity of their candidate, whom they took—a large proportion of them very reluctantly—solely on account of that popularity. That they will save thecoselvcs by this move is far from being certain, or even tolerably well assured. Should the Republicans succeed, it will be because of their candidate, and in spite of their platfonn. Should the Democrats return to power, it will be because of their platform, and in spite of their candidate.
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