Shall Demagogues rule our Country?

The Democrat is puzzled.  It thinks it very strange if the Democratic party be dead, as some of its leaders have asserted, that republicans should kick its carcass.  It is true the old Democratic party is occasionally held up as a warning; that the civil war is instanced as the fruits of its policy in upholding slavery; and its most favored leader, now in retirement at Wheatland, pointed at as the man under whose administration the war was fomented; still it is not at that defunct political organization the blows of the republican party are aimed, but at the effort that is being made to resurrect it.  In the present distracted condition of the country the people of the North should be one in sentiment, one for the Union under all circumstances and not paralyze their strength by divisions among themselves.

If the Democratic party be dead, argues our neighbor, what the necessity of keeping up the Republican organization?  We answer, because it chimes with the popular sentiment of the North and the fact of its ceasing to exist would be taken as prima facie evidence that its principles were no longer entertained by the people, and the consequence would be, the immediate revival of the Democratic party on the broad basis of slavery as its foundation.  But as they are pro-slavery in principle, they hope with the aid received from the slaveholders of the South, after peace shall have been declared, to have a powerful political organization.  Hence, the leniency toward rebel slaveholders, which they constantly preach, their opposition to every enactment that favors the confiscation of rebel property, and their desire for compromise.  While they know that their party must be organized upon a slavery basis, they are not blind to the fact that it cannot receive much strength from the North, but must look for its element of power to the South.

It was the political demagogues of the South that seized upon the favorable moment to plunge our country into civil war.  Had the judgment of the people been consulted, there would have been no war.  So it is now with the same class of “rule or ruin” men, who, wishing for power, and regardless of the means of obtaining it, would combine the elements of treason into a political party, that they may be foisted into office.  If they succeed in their nefarious intentions our government will be founded upon Sicilian soil, liable at any moment to be disrupted by the internal fires of civil dissension.

Never in the history of our country has there been a time more favorable to the founding of our Republic upon a rock, against which the storms of party strife may beat without avail, then than the present.  If now the great question of human slavery – which contains within it the seeds of dissolution, and with which incorporated in it no nation can long exist on earth – be settled – the very God of Heaven will smile upon us, and we shall become the most prosperous and powerful people on the face of the globe.  But if we throw aside our present advantages, disregard our present opportunities, and permit ourselves to be ruled by a parcel of demagogues, who will fasten this incubus upon us, we will have gained nothing by civil war, and still continue to live under a Government possessing the same element of discord that came so near effecting our ruin.

– Published in The Davenport Daily Gazette, Davenport, Iowa, Thursday Morning, May 22, 1862, p. 2