Belief 3 - Reading 10 of 31, The Reconstruction Convention

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Belief 3 - Reading 10 of 31

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"THE NORTHERN WHIG"

Harper's Weekly, May 13, 1865, pages 290-291 (Editorial)

In quoting an admirable article from the Belfast Northern Whig, describing Mr. Lincoln with singular felicity, we ascribed it to Professor Cairnes. But a letter from an Irishman who know informs us that it is written by Mr. Hill, the editor of the paper. We gladly make the correction, as our correspondent suggests, "for the sake of justice, and to prove, too, that we have other good friends besides those already known on the other side."

Indeed, we have had no clearer eyed or more stalwart champion than Mr. Hill in The Northern Whig. Upon the receipt of the news of the fall of Richmond he wrote an admirable article, from which we extract the following striking passages:

"The public writers and speakers who, during the last three years and a half, have occupied themselves in demonstrating that the North could never conquer the South are now busied with a very different and not altogether consistent problem. They establish, to t heir own momentary satisfaction, that the South, of whose ultimate ‘subjugation’ they scarcely venture to hint a doubt, can never be held and administered as part of a free republic. If will be, they urge, the Poland or Hungary—on the continent they are so unkind as to say the Ireland—of America. If the authors of these doleful presages had ever been right in any single point arising out of the rebellion—if they had not blundered from first to last upon the military problem—we should entertain greater confidence than it is possible for us now to feel in their political vaticinations. On every element of the great theme they have gone wildly astray. They understood neither the material strength nor the moral character of the Northern and Southern populations, nor the social organizations which are divided from each other by Mason and Dixon’s line. This ignorance—including a total indifference to the facts of American history and biography—vitiates their political prognostications as completely as it has reversed her military prophecies.

* * * * * * *

A Homestead act for the South would bring to Virginia the prosperity of New York, and enable Florida and Alabama to count wealth and men with Ohio and Illinois. To effect this end there will be no need of confiscation. In the unreclaimed or abandoned soil of the Slave States there are farms for millions of freemen. By small grants of land to the landless whites, who are, or were, the strength of the rebellionand the hope of those who count on future disaffection and troubles, they may probably be converted into peaceful and industrious citizens, thus helping to confirm the new order on the basis of the old one, in the overthrow of which they have been blind instruments.

"The bugbear of a tropical climate needs not weigh much with us in thus forecasting the future. No part of the United States is within the tropics; and Texas, the State which most nearly approaches them, is the seat of German settlers, employed in that form of industry—the cultivation of cotton—in which we are asked to believe that no European can engage and live. In this instance, and in almost every other, the facts which are alleged to disprove the possibility of the reconstruction of the Union on the basis of homogeneous society, North and South, have no existence out of the imaginations of those whose wishes shape their thoughts.

Harper's Weekly, May 13, 1865, pages 290-291 (Editorial)

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