These men in the North who oppose this peace of 1877 know that it has destroyed their vocation.
The States that they sought to destroy have survived their evil machinations, and now they hiss their fierce anathemas into the ears of an offended country.
They are chiefly of that class whose treachery to their own convictions betrayed them at a late day into the Abolition party.
They joined that party in the hope of gaining power and place, after they had bestowed upon it the labor of years in denunciation of its purposes.
They were chiefly Democrats of the States-Rights school, who were converted by the troubles which had lost that party its ascendancy in the Government into consolidationists and coercionists.
They readily became warriors of the home-guard; minute-men in making military arrests; judge-advocates, to prosecute citizens within the States where civil law still was supreme, and to execute upon them sentences of banishment and death. They were the faithful jailors of women, and even of children, who fell under the suspicion of exercising liberty of thought.
While battles raged in other States, they gave to the country their best efforts to save their talents until the gathering in of the spoils of victory should require their services. When the war had ended they begun the great work of confiscation. Some mounted the bench; some rose at the bar; some prowled about the country as marshals, with retinues of spies and informers at their heels. They seized whatever was valuable. They met afterwards in court, and condemned without mercy, and divided without shame the spoils wrested from a powerless people. These resources failing, from exhaustion, they determined to seize the offices of the country, and, through the power to tax the people, to confiscate their little earnings accumulated since the war.
Then they became the Robespierres and Marats of the revolution of 1867—leading the hordes of plunderers, who, with halters, had strangled poor men suspected only of being rich: who with incendiary torches had fired the houses of sleeping families, and filled dungeons with brave men, because they had fought to sustain what they had formerly preached.
Reconstructionists, who, with avowed contempt of the Constitution, rudely trampled upon the rights and powers of the prostrate States, whose sovereignty they had in former years bowed themselves down to worship. Since Heaven has willed that their works shall perish, rather than those against whom they have wrought injustice and iniquity, they now assume another role. They are now Nationalists—artfully concealing behind a name the design that struggles in their hearts, and impatiently waiting for an opportunity for action, they would sweep out of
