A Puritan come to Judgment.
--As long ago as the days of the
English Commonwealth, the Puritans resolved that the earth belonged to the saints, and that they were the saints.
The descendants of the
Plymouth Rock adventurers acted upon this resolution in the spirit in which it was conceived.
Their early history is a record of crime, such as was apparently sufficient to have called down the vengeance of Heaven, and they left their principles behind them.
A certain
Alvin P. Hovey, who, it seems, is a General in the
Yankee service, writes a letter to a Democratic meeting in
Illinois, which the Philadelphia
Inquirer calls "noble and patriotic," in which he first says that the "army of the Southwest is determined upon the subjugation of rebeldom in the highest and strongest sense of the term," and then proceeds to tell them what he understands to be the highest and "strongest sense" aforesaid. "The Constitution as it was," he thinks, cannot be restored until the rebels prove "their devoted love for the
Government" (which is now plundering and murdering them) "and devoted loyalty, " (to Yankeedom, of course.) Were it otherwise — were the
Constitution restored — the judges would be compelled to allow the writ of
habeas corpus, the trial by jury, and liberty of speech and the press.
These are
Hovey's reasons for not restoring the
Constitution.
The rebels, he thinks, should not be tried in the district in which the offence was committed, because the juries would never hang them, and the main object in trying a rebel is to hang him, right or wrong.
Hovey then comes to the very milk of the coconut.
The estates of the rebels have all been forfeited, he says, by their crimes, and he evidently thinks the
Yankees have fallen heirs to them on account of their virtues.
All is to be confiscated — the personal property to pay the
Yankee war debt; the
real estate to be divided among the soldiers, who, we suppose, are good fellows, and never, committed any offence more atrocious than murder, which is allowable in a
saint, when it is necessary to get hold of the plunder.
Nay, they consider it rather a proof of rare virtue.
We have no doubt he speaks the truth when he says nine-tenths of
Grant's army are of his way of thinking.
There is nothing new in this letter.
We have long been aware that the
Yankees propose to dispossess the present inhabitants of the
South--to turn loose the negroes — and to settle the country with Yankees.
But the open declarations of such opinions, by an officer high in their service, is well worth the attention of all croakers and submissionists of every shade of opinion.
We wish them to see what is to be their fate, if the
Yankees conquer them, and
Hovey tells them.
