Belief 3 - Reading 18 of 31, The Reconstruction Convention

Use the links above to navigate this simulation.

Belief 3 - Reading 18 of 31

Navigate within this Belief: Reading 17 << >> Reading 19

Additional Beliefs: Belief 1 Belief 2 Belief 3 Belief 4 Belief 5 Belief 6 Belief 7 Belief 8

GENERAL SHERMAN’S SPEECHES

Harper's Weekly, August 12, 1865, page 498 (Editorial)

General Sherman is making a great many speeches, and they are curiously characteristic. They are trenchant, impetuous, honest, and crude. The crafty managers who thought, when he made his convention with Johnston, that they had now found the man they had been looking for, must watch the daily telegrams with the most painful solicitude. For the General is plainly not a man to be manipulated. He speaks clearly his own views without the least regard to any conceivable party exigency. He has all the traditional honesty and directness of a soldier. In New York he disdained the embraces of the Common Council, to which political aspirants are usually obliged to submit. In Ohio he said that General Cox was a good soldier, and he hoped he would be elected Governor. Yet there were persons who thought that the hero of Atlanta would actually receive a nomination from the party that supported Vallandigham two years ago! In Indianapolis—without the least regard for "the compromises," or the divine rights of States to make beasts of men, so long a cherished "principle" of "the party"—he said that his sea-faring ancestors helped to import slaves, and he felt it to be his duty to atone for the ancestral sins. Alas for the managers! A man with profound moral convictions is not a safe candidate for "the party."

General Sherman, indeed, opposes negro suffrage and indiscriminate intercourse with whites. He says that his experience in Mexico and South American led to this conclusion. Did his experience in those countries also persuade him that white suffrage was any more to be trusted? He believes, also, that the whites must have the governing power. But the American doctrine of Liberty asserts equality of opportunity for men. It has nothing to do with the color of faces or the equality of races. A professional politician appealing to the grog-shops and party-spirit may harangue about "white men," and welcome. But the conceit that men are not to have equal rights because of their color is a foolish figment that will not long be entertained in so masculine a brain and honest a heart as General Sherman’s. His good sense rallied again in saying that military law was the natural law of self-preservation; but when the necessity was passed he hoped the civil law would resume its sway.

There is a boyish impulsiveness and frankness in all that General Sherman says and does which are very winning. His instincts are generous, but his conclusions are often immature and hasty. Amazed as we were by the convention which he made with Johnston, we can not praise too highly the manly tone of his letter of the 25^th of April to the Secretary of War, in which he said, with noble simplicity, "I admit my folly in embracing in a military convention any civil matter;" and added, with touching pride, "I had flattered myself that by four years of patient and unremitting and successful labor I deserved no reminder such as is contained in the last paragraph of your letter to General Grant."

General Sherman’s speeches have doubtless imperiled his chances—which he probably despises—with the politicians, but they have not harmed him in the estimation of honest men.

Harper's Weekly, August 12, 1865, page 498 (Editorial)

This site is brought to you by…