Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[747] political controversies which figured in the newspapers were only its incidents; and the questions which agitated Congress all sounded in the great dispute, whether the war had merely accomplished its express and particular objects, or given the American people a change of polity, and dated a new era in their Constitutional history.

At the time these pages are committed to the press, a series of measures has already been accomplished or introduced by the Radical party in the Congress at Washington that would accomplish a revolution in the American system of government, the most thorough and violent of modern times. Propositions have been made so to amend the Constitution as to deprive the States of the power to define the qualifications of electors; propositions to regulate representation by the number of voters, and not of population; propositions to declare what obligations assumed by the States shall be binding on them, and what shall be the purposes of their taxation. What is known as the Civil Rights Bill (passed over the President's veto) has not only established negro equality, but has practically abolished, on one subject of jurisdiction at least, State laws and State courts. In short, the extreme Black Republican party at Washington has sought to disfranchise the whole Southern people, to force negro suffrage upon the South, to prevent the South from being represented in Congress so as to perpetuate the power of the Radicals, and afford them the means of governing the Southern States as conquered and subjugated territories.

The practical fault of all Despotism is that it takes too little into account the sentimentalism which opposes it, and attempts to deal with men as inanimate objects, to which the application of a certain amount of force for a desired end is decisive. It never considers feelings and prejudices. It does not understand that in the science of government there are elements to conciliate as well as forces to compel. The Northern radicals look to the dragoon with his sword, the marshal with his process of confiscation, and the negro thrust into a false position as the pacificators of the country and the appropriate sentinels of the South. They never reflect on the results of such measures upon the feelings of the Southern people; they do not estimate the loss in that estrangement which makes unprofitable companions; they do not imagine the resentments they will kindle; they do not calculate the effect of a constant irritation that at last wears into the hearts of a people, and makes them ready for all desperate enter prises.

If on this subject the Northern people are best addressed in the language of their interests, they may be reminded that the policy of the Radicals is to detain and embarrass the South, not only in the restoration of her political rights, but in her return to that material prosperity, in which the North has a partnership interest, and the Government itself its most important financial stake. The Southern people must be relieved from the