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The Ku-Klux
question has become very serious. Before the war a citizen of the United
States who believed in the Declaration of Independence, and said so, was
outlawed, harried, and liable to be murdered in half the country. It was
safer for a free-tongued American, who held to the rightful equality of
all men, to travel in Central Africa than in South Carolina under the flag
of the United States. Now that the war is ended, no conspicuous Union man,
and no colored citizen who takes an active and positive position in
sympathy with the Union, is safe from assault or murder in a large part of
the old Slave States. If he complains, he is told that the local courts
are open to him. If he replies that the mob holds the courts, and that he
has the same protection that the Abolitionist in the interior of
Mississippi had against the slavery assassins fifteen years ago, he is
told that he has the ballot, and he must right himself at the polls. If he
replies that the mob, which is supreme, prevents his voting, he is told
that that is his misfortune, but that the United States authority can only
interfere in a State upon the requisition of the governor. If he says that
the governor is the Ku-Klux, he is told that it is a pity; but that the
principle of the government requires that every State must protect its
citizens. And he is asked, in turn, if the United States should interfere
at its pleasure in every State by a mere resolution of Congress, how would
it be with him if his friends should lose power, and the friends of the
Ku-Klux come in? To which he would, of course, reply that it would
certainly be now worse for him—and it would not. But how would it be
elsewhere and hereafter?
The question is undeniably a very
grave and difficult one. The States rights answer, however, is very short
and simple. The Southern States, it says, from an unnatural fostering of
slavery and the inevitable consequences of war, have lapsed into
quasi-barbarism, and they must work themselves clear. They must learn by
experience. They must civilize themselves. This answer would be more
satisfactory if the barbarians were not voters in a common Union, and
adherents of a great party which contests its government. In view of that
fact the practical question immediately is, whether that situation of
things could be changed by legislation. And if it could, if the protection
of those whom the Ku-Klux keeps from the polls by terror would prevent the
national government falling into the hands of the Ku-Klux party, ought
they not to be protected and the government saved?
Granting, as every sensible man
must, that the process of reconstruction has been altogether too swift,
and that the States in rebellion should, under the peculiar circumstances,
have been much longer directly held by the national authority, shall
nothing be done to avoid the ill effects of the haste, even to the control
of the government by its open enemies? For every man knows what spirit
would animate a Democratic national administration. Every body remembers
that the last Democratic Convention was swayed by rebel chiefs rejoicing
in their rebellion, and that a great portion of the party see with
satisfaction now the very barbarism of which we speak. If our political
system really be one which forbids the government to protect its own
citizens when voting for its officers, and which requires the country to
look on passively while mobs controlling various State authorities harry
those voters, it will certainly be necessary to reconsider some of our
raptures over the infinite superiority of the American to all other
possible systems of government. But if the United States authority will
amply protect its citizens at the national polls, and secure the equal
liberty which it guarantees, it will, perhaps, solve the problem. For then
its military force would be large enough in every disaffected State,
without superseding the local authority, to give heart to good citizens. |
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