How, then, shall we 'give the reason of the South a
chance to assert itself'? By withdrawing our support from our friends,
and the friends of America, and of man, in the South, and turning them
over, like sheep to the wolves, to their unreasoning and vindictive
enemies; or by standing by them in the weakness of their first essay to
depend on reason and justice in the place of force or fraud; by
developing, in fine, the reason of the South, which has been for a
century overridden and suppressed by the incubus of an organized
despotism, from which there is now, for the first time, the chance of a
redemption, if these _friends_ of Southern reason do not commit a
blunder in their understanding of the case?
'_Whenever_,' says the _Times_ writer, '_there is sound reason to
believe that a sound loyal majority of the State want it
(reconstruction), let them have it--and that, too, without imposing any
conditions concerning slavery_.' That is to say, abandon the
Proclamation of Emancipation, betray the colored man, who, trusting to
our faith, is now enrolling himself in our armies; betray the timid
friends of freedom, who, by our encouragement, have dared to proclaim
their love of liberty, and subject themselves to inevitable banishment
or extermination, unless the programme of a new free South be executed
triumphantly and to the letter; furnish to the most malignant
slaveholding faction an equal chance at the very least, on a hollow
pretence of loyalty, to recover the ascendant and annihilate the new
party of emancipation and a regenerated South; and all this to save the
Southern malignants from being subjected to an unpleasant sense of
'subordination;' to prevent imbittering their sentiments; as if it were
possible to add bitterness to gall, or venom to the virus of the
rattlesnake.
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