Reconstruction

by Brooks D. Simpson

  How much the Democratic party might gain were it, merely with a view to its own strength, to endeavor to lead a new life is a speculation upon which I need not enter. The little effort made in that direction with Mr. Chase is thought to have done the party more harm than good. The party is strongest with those who stand no nonsense of this decent sort. They want no smooth-faced concessions to virtue. They want the genuine pungent article of the Negro, with two “gg’s.” Besides, nobody could well believe in it were the party to declare a change of heart and purpose. With a confessed trickster and falsifier as its standard-bearer (a man who, if the reports of his associates can be relied upon, secured his nomination by a course of cunning, duplicity, lying, treachery, and bribery unparalleled in the history of party politics), people would be slow to accept the professions of such a party.

  But let us not be deceived nor diverted from the real work we have in hand. The contest to which all good and true men are summoned in the present canvass is no new one. It is, in fact but a continuation of the mighty struggle of a great nation to shake off an old and worn-out system of barbarism, with all its natural concomitants of evil. It is a part of our thirty years’ effort to place the country in harmony with the age, and to make her what she ought to be—a leader, and not a mere follower, in the pathway of civilization. Rebellion has been subdued, slavery abolished, and peace proclaimed; and yet our work is not done. The Democratic party has changed the whole face of affairs. The foe is the same, though we are to meet him on a different field and under different leaders. In the ranks of Seymour and Blair is the rebel army, without its arms. Let not the connection of the present with the past be ignored nor forgotten. We are face to face with the same old enemy of liberty and progress that has planted agony at a million hearthstones in our land. There has been no change in the character or in the general purpose of the Democratic party. It is for peace or for war, or against either, precisely as it can be made to serve the great privileged class at the South, to which it belongs. The party that annexed Texas; that began and prosecuted the inglorious war against a neighboring Republic, thus setting the bad example subsequently followed by France and Austria—the strong against the weak; that hunted down the humane Seminoles with bloodhounds, because they gave shelter to slaves running away from Georgia; that avowed its purpose to suppress freedom of speech and of the press in time of peace in the interest of slavery; that repealed the Missouri Compromise, and opened the blackened tide of bondage upon the virgin soil of Kansas; that, from the beginning to the end of the late war against slavery in arms, uniformly sided with the rebels and against the loyal North—is the same party from footsole to crown, unchanged and unchangeable. Its character is not better known to loyal men than to the defeated rebels. It is neither strange nor surprising that the latter flock to it as the last resort of their Lost Cause.

  We have had many issues with the slave power during the past thirty years, but we have never had but one cause; and the same is true of the slave power. Indeed, the same is always true in all countries and in all times. The world has always been in some way divided essentially as parties are now divided in our country. Men change; principles are eternal. Holland—whether pleading her ancient charters; asking the removal of oppressive, dissolute, mercenary Spanish troops from her borders; opposing the establishment of new bishoprics; humbly appealing for the removal of the gifted but cruel and treacherous Cardinal Granville; or boldly resisting that grand aggregation of human horrors, the Inquisition—was all the while serving only one cause. The sacred liberty of conscience; the right of a man to form his own opinions upon all matters of religion—this was the cause of freedom then. While popery, on the other side, whether dealing in fair words or fierce blows, whether entangling its victims in cunningly-devised sophistries or torturing them with cord and steel, rack and fire, had but the same old cause—religious slavery. Think as we command, or die! As in our day men claim the right to dispose of the bodies of men, so they of Mother Church claimed the right to dispose of both soul and body. As stood the sturdy old Hollanders three centuries ago, so we stand to-day. Times change and new issues arise; men appear and disappear; but evermore the same old principles of good and evil, right and wrong, liberty and slavery, summon their respective votaries to the contest. The slaveholding rebels, struck down by Gen. Grant as by a thunderbolt, scarcely recover from the terrific shock before they stagger off to the Democratic party. There they go—stricken generals of the rebel army—Henry A. Wise and Wade Hampton, Toombs and Cobb, Forrest and Beauregard. The evil spirits cast out of the man among the tombs take refuge in the herd of swine. We shall see with what consequences to the poor animals in November, and to themselves.

  The policy, but not the purpose, of the rebels is changed. Names are nothing. It matters little to them by what name the thing for which they strive is called; and equally indifferent are they as to the means they employ. Success is the main consideration.

  Secession and rebellion were undertaken for one purpose, and one purpose alone—and that was to secure to the slaveholding class permanent control over the black laborers of the South. It was to give to white capital a firmer hold and a tighter grip upon the throat of the Negro. They believed in the Divine appointment of slavery. What they believed then they believe now; what they meant then they mean now. Here and there in the rebel states there may be found a man who has honestly renounced his ancient faith, and accepted the true doctrine of liberty and the great principle of Equal Rights ; but the mass of Southern white men and women are in heart and purpose the same as when they confronted the free North on the battle-field. You may send General Lee a million of dollars for his rebel college; but, while Arlington Heights is the resting-place of our loyal dead, you will get no sign of a hearty renunciation of the malign purpose for which he drew his rebel sword.

  The South to-day is a field of blood. Murder runs riot in Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Assassination has taken the place of insurrection. Armed bands of rebels stalk abroad at midnight with blackened faces, and thus disguised go forth to shoot, stab, and murder their loyal neighbors.

  It is impossible to exaggerate the solemn character of the crisis. While Andrew Johnson remains in the presidential chair, and the Democratic party, with Seymour and Blair, are in the field, feeding the rebel imagination with a prospect of regaining through politics what they lost by the sword, the South must continue the scene of war she is. The work to which every loyal man and woman in the country is now called is to employ every possible honorable means, between now and November, to defeat and scatter the Democratic party. Our one work now is to elect Grant and Colfax—and that by a vote so pronounced and overwhelming as to extinguish every ray of hope to the rebel cause.

  The Independent, August 27, 1868

  “UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE”:

  NEW YORK, JANUARY 1869

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

  Gerrit Smith on Petitions

  PETERBORO, Dec. 30th, 1868.

  MY DEAR SUSAN B. ANTHONY: I this evening receive your earnest letter. It pains me to be obliged to disappoint you. But I cannot sign the Petition you send me. Cheerfully, gladly can I sign a Petition for the enfranchisement of women. But I cannot sign a paper against the enfranchisement of the negro man, unless at the same time woman shall be enfranchised. The removal of the political disabilities of race is my first desire,—of sex, my second. If put on the same level and urged in the same connection neither will be soon accomplished. The former will very soon be, if untrammelled by the other, and its success will prepare the way for the accomplishment of the other.

  With great regard your friend,

  GERRIT SMITH.

  To the Senate and House of Representatives, in Congress ­As­sembled:

  The undersigned, citizens of the State of —— earnestly but respectfully request, that, in any change or amendment of the Constitution you may propose to extend or regulate Suffrage, there shall be no distinctions made between men and women.
r />   The above is the petition to which our friend Gerrit Smith, as an abolitionist, cannot conscientiously put his name, while republicans and democrats are signing it all over the country. He does not clearly read the signs of the times, or he would see that there is to be no reconstruction of this nation, except on the basis of Universal Suffrage, as the natural, inalienable right of every citizen to its exercise is the only logical ground on which to base an argument. The uprising of the women on both continents, in France, England, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States all show that advancing civilization demands a new element in the government of nations.

  As the aristocracy in this country is the “male sex,” and as Mr. Smith belongs to the privileged order, he naturally considers it important, for the best interests of the nation, that every type and shade of degraded, ignorant manhood should be enfranchised, before even the higher classes of womanhood should be admitted to the polls.

  This does not surprise us! Men always judge more wisely of objective wrongs and oppressions, than of those in which they are themselves involved. Tyranny on a southern plantation is far more easily seen by white men at the north than the wrongs of the women of their own households.

  Then again, when men have devoted their lives to one reform, there is a natural feeling of pride, as well as an earnest principle, in seeing that one thing accomplished. Hence in criticising such good and noble men as Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips for their apathy on Woman’s enfranchisement at this hour, it is not because we think their course at all remarkable, nor that we have the least hope of influencing them, but simply to rouse the women of the country to the fact that they must not look to these men for their champions at this hour. But what does surprise us in this cry of “manhood suffrage” is, that every woman does not see in it national suicide, and her own destruction. In view of the present demoralization of our government, bribery and corruption alike in the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches, drunkenness in the White House, Congress, and every state legislature; votes and officers bought and sold like cattle in the market, what thinking mind can look for any improvement, in extending suffrage still further to the very class that have produced this state of things.

  While philosophy and science alike point to woman, as the new power destined to redeem the world, how can Mr. Smith fail to see that it is just this we need to restore honor and virtue in the government. When society in California and Oregon was chiefly male and rapidly tending to savageism, ship loads of women went out, and restored order and decency to life. Would black men have availed anything among those white savages? There is sex in the spiritual as well as the physical, and what we need to-day in government, in the world of morals and thought, is the recognition of the feminine element, as it is this alone that can hold the masculine in check.

  Again: Mr. Smith refuses to sign the petition, because he thinks to press the broader question of “Universal Suffrage” would defeat the partial one of “Manhood Suffrage;” in other words, to demand protection for woman against her oppressors, would jeopardize the black man’s chance, of securing protection against his oppressors. If it is a question of precedence merely, on what principle of justice or courtesy should woman yield her right of enfranchisement to the negro? If men cannot be trusted to legislate for their own sex, how can they legislate for the opposite sex, of whose wants and needs they know nothing! It has always been considered good philosophy in pressing any measure to claim the uttermost in order to get something. Being in Ireland at the time of the Repeal excitement, we asked Daniel O’Connell one day if he expected to secure a Repeal of the Union. “Oh! no,” said he, “but I claim everything that I may be sure of getting something.” Henry Ward Beecher advised abolitionists, right after the war, to demand “Universal Suffrage” if they wished to secure the ballot for the new made freedmen. “Bait your hooks,” said he, “with a woman and perhaps you will catch a negro.” But their intense interest in the negro blinded them, and they forsook principle for policy, and in giving woman the cold shoulder, they raised a more deadly opposition to the negro than any we had yet encountered, creating an antagonism between him, and the very element most needed, especially at the south, to be propitiated in his behalf. It was this feeling that defeated “negro suffrage” in Kansas.

  The natural pride and jealousy of woman against all assumed power and superiority, heightened by the fact that black men stumped the state against “Woman’s Suffrage,” steadily infused into the minds of the men at every hearthstone a determined opposition to the measure, hence although that state always gives large republican majorities and “negro suffrage” was a party measure, politicians, party, press, were alike powerless, before the deep-settled indignation of the women at the propo­sition to place the negro above their heads.

  Such was their feeling in the matter, that the mass of the men everywhere pledged them that if the women were not enfranchised neither should the negro be. The result was, that the vote for woman’s suffrage, without party, press, or thorough canvass of the state, lacked but a few hundred of the vote of the great republican party for negro suffrage. Had republicans and abolitionists advocated both propositions, they would have been triumphantly carried. What is true in Kansas will prove equally true in every state in this Union; there can be no reconstruction of this government on any basis but universal suffrage. There is no other ground on which to debate the question. Every argument for the negro is an argument for woman and no logician can escape it.

  But Mr. Smith abandons the principle clearly involved, and entrenches himself on policy. He would undoubtedly plead the necessity of the ballot for the negro at the south for his protection, and point us to innumerable acts of cruelty he suffers to-day. But all these things fall as heavily on the women of the black race, yea far more so, for no man can ever know the deep, the damning degradation to which woman is subject in her youth, helplessness and poverty. The enfranchisement of the men of her race, Mr. Smith would say, is her protection.

  Our Saxon men have held the ballot in this country for a century, and what honest man can claim that it has been used for woman’s protection? Alas! we have given the very hey day of our life to undoing the cruel and unjust laws that the men of New York had made for their own mothers, wives and daughters. Have Saxon women no wrongs to right, and will they be better protected when negroes are their rulers? Remember that all woman needs protection against to-day, is man, read the following:

  SUPPOSED INFANTICIDE.

  A young girl named Abson, who has for the past three months been an inmate of the Hudson County Almshouse, at Snake Hill, gave birth, four days ago, to a child of negro parentage, which was found dead in a bed yesterday morning, supposed to have been smothered by its mother. The circumstances of the case are somewhat singular. About eight years ago one Abson and his wife were living on a small farm in the lower part of Bergen, N. J. Suddenly the wife died by poison. The husband was arrested for the murder, and while lying in the Hudson County Jail, awaiting trial, committed suicide by cutting his throat. One child, a little girl six years of age, was left an orphan by the double tragedy. About a year ago, at which time she was fourteen years of age, the girl was sent to work on a farm at Rockaway, N. J. During the absence of her employer’s family, a negro on the farm effected her ruin, which, being discovered, and she being enceinte, she was sent back to Bergen, and thence to the Almshouse, where the child was born, and killed as stated. Coroner Warren will hold an inquest.

  With judges and jurors of negroes: remembering the generations of wrong and injustice their daughters have suffered at the white man’s hands: how will Saxon girls fare in their courts for crimes like this?

  How do they fare in our own courts to-day, tried by Saxon fathers, husbands, brothers, sons? Hester Vaughan, a young English girl, under sentence of death for the alleged crime of Infanticide, which could not be proved against her, has dragged the weary days of a whole year away in the solitude and gloom of a Pennsylvania prison, while he who
betrayed her walks this green earth in freedom, enjoying alike the sunshine and the dews of Heaven. And this girl sits alone in her cell to-day, weeping for friends and native land, while such men as Generals Cole and Sickles, who shot their wives’ paramours dead before many witnesses in broad day-light, are feasted and toasted by the press and the people.

  Such is “manhood suffrage.” Shall we prolong and perpetuate injustice like this, and increase its power by adding more ignorance and brutality, and thus risk worse oppressions for ourselves and daughters? Society, as organized to-day under the man power, is one grand rape on womanhood, on the highways, in our jails, prisons, asylums, in our homes, alike in the world of fashion and of work; hence, discord, war, violence, crime, the blind, the deaf, the dumb, the idiot, the lunatic, the drunkard, all things inverted and must be so, until the mother of the race is made dictator in the social realm. To this end we need every power to lift her up, and teach mankind that in all God’s universe there is nothing so holy and sacred as womanhood. Do such men as Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips teach this lesson to the lower orders of men who learn truth and justice from their lips, when they tell the most noble, virtuous, educated matrons of this republic, to stand back, until all the sons of Adam are crowned with citizenship? Do they teach woman self-respect, when they tell her to hold her claims to virtue, honor and dignity, in abeyance to those of manhood ?

  They who do aught to lessen woman’s self-respect, or to lower her in the estimation of ignorant men, are responsible for the long train of evils, that must forever flow, in the subordination of moral power, to brute force. All this talk about woman’s waiting for the negro is most invidious, and dangerous too, for while it paralyzes woman it infuses a conceit into the negro that makes him most offensive at the very time he needs wisdom and policy. As to the “rights of races,” on which so much stress is laid just now, we have listened to debates in anti-slavery conventions, for twenty years or more, and we never heard Gerrit Smith plead the negroes cause on any lower ground than his manhood; his individual, inalienable right to freedom and equality; and thus, we conjure every thoughtful man to plead woman’s cause to-day. Politicians will find, when they come to test this question of “negro supremacy” in the several states, that there is a far stronger feeling among the women of the nation than they supposed. We doubt whether a constitutional amendment securing “Manhood Suffrage” alone could be fairly passed in a single state in this Union. Women everywhere are waking up to their own God-given rights, to their true dignity as citizens of a republic, as mothers of the race.